by David Jason
And then it was showtime, and we were called and taken up the road and in through the stage door and shown quietly into the wings. As we heard the little introductory film being played on tape to the audience, the nerves between the three of us would have powered a wind turbine. Still, the film got a laugh, and we went out there, and the laughs continued to come and the nerves magically evaporated, as they will when an audience is immediately responsive.
We reached the point in the sketch where Rodney suddenly notices the presence of royalty in the royal box and, in a frozen panic, tries to draw my attention to it. I head over to that side of the stage, peer up blindly through the lights at where the Queen Mother is sitting, and deliver the line, ‘Is that you, Chunky?’ At this, to my astonishment, the Queen Mother graciously waved a hand in my direction. I nearly dried. Del Boy has been waved at by the Queen Mother. I knew she was going to be up there, but I didn’t expect her to wave.
Afterwards, we changed quickly out of our costumes and into dinner jackets and lined up, as is traditional, to be presented to the royal party. The Queen Mother passed along the line and when she got to me, she said, ‘Thank you.’ I was, of course, deeply touched. But then I noticed her saying ‘Thank you’ in exactly the same tone of voice to everyone else in the line, too.
We couldn’t hang around, though. We had to get straight into a car and head back to Dorset to carry on filming. We had a bottle of whisky and some water to settle the adrenalin which was still coursing through us. (Buster never drank. He sat in the front. All the more for me and Nick in the back.)
Also on the bill that night: Ronnie Corbett, Nana Mouskouri, Ken Dodd and my old colleague Bob Monkhouse – not that I got to speak to him in the rush. Still, that night I’m sure we both felt like we were a long way from Weston-super-Mare.
This was a lovely interlude, but it did nothing for the scheduled shooting of ‘A Royal Flush’, which was already well behind. I then didn’t help matters by losing my voice and needing three days off – as I recall, the only time on Only Fools when I ever had to call in sick. As soon as I recovered, Nick went down with the flu. The schedule was now a wreck and we were officially in panic mode. There was no time to edit the film sections so that they could be played to the audience at the studio recording; the live audience recording had to be cancelled entirely. This meant the show ended up with no laughter track. There was also no time for music to be fitted to the soundtrack. We were shaving it so finely that, at one point, contingency plans were made to broadcast the final scene in the flat live on Christmas Day. This would have been somewhat nerve-racking. We may have been coming fresh off the back of an appearance at the Theatre Royal, but performing live to nearly 19 million people was not something of which any of us had much previous experience. It also would have played merry havoc with all our Christmases: by my reckoning, you want to be watching television on Christmas Day, not appearing live on it.
As the chaos raged and then tension rose, the answer to all questions on the set seemed to be ‘F*** knows.’ When are we shooting the studio scenes? ‘F*** knows.’ When are the script revisions going to be ready? ‘F*** knows.’ Frequently a hand gesture accompanied the answer – one’s thumb and one’s forefinger slid over one’s nose. Eventually the gesture completely replaced the verbal answer. ‘When’s the camera rehearsal?’ Hand-to-nose gesture.
Somehow, though, a broadcastable programme came together, albeit with editing continuing into the early hours of Christmas morning – Ray Butt working like one of Santa’s elves on amphetamine in order to get the show finished on time. If the resulting episode was a bit patchy, one should hardly be surprised. We were just relieved there was a show at all. Afterwards, John Challis had commemorative T-shirts made for everyone, featuring a big image of a thumb and forefinger clenched around a nose.
* * *
IN 1987, IN the months between filming Only Fools and Horses, I was approached about the possibility of playing a part in a television adaptation of Porterhouse Blue, the comic novel by Tom Sharpe. Malcolm Bradbury had converted the book into a four-part series for Channel 4 and the producers wanted me to audition for the role of Scullion, the head porter of a Cambridge college. ‘Do you know the book?’ my agent asked. I didn’t, but I went out and bought it, and I read it and thought it was really great. I was a little puzzled, though, about the connection that the director had made between me, famous for playing Derek Trotter, and Scullion, this arch-manipulator who was all about respect for your superiors and respect for king and country, while quietly co-opting power for himself. The only conclusion I could come to was that both these characters were archetypal working-class men, and Porterhouse Blue was, in its way, like Only Fools, a piece about class, albeit in a different era and a vastly different place.
I went to see the director, Robert Knights, in his office, which conveniently was not far from my flat in Newman Street. Robert was a very nice man who called everybody ‘sir’, in a rather old-fashioned way – as indeed did Scullion, so maybe that’s where Robert got the idea from. We got on well and I was asked back for a second interview, this time with the producer and the casting director, as well as Robert. They asked me if I would mind dressing the character the way that I saw him. I said, ‘No, not at all.’ So I was taken downstairs to a room where there was a mound of clothes piled up on a table and I was left to get on with it. Scullion is very well described in Tom Sharpe’s book, so this wasn’t a tough challenge. I rummaged around and pulled out a dark suit, a bowler hat, a pipe and a stick-on moustache. Then I went back upstairs, knocked on the door again, dressed as Scullion, and did a bit of acting for them to try and convince them I could pass for a Cambridge University porter. And that was it. I took the clothes off downstairs, put them back on the table and went home.
As with all these things, I really hoped I’d get it. But it was so far removed from Only Fools and Horses, and so different altogether from anything I had previously done on television, that I genuinely didn’t fancy my chances. I was taken aback when my agent rang and said, ‘They want you.’
Porterhouse Blue was shot on film and was a beautiful production, with very little expense spared. In television the money has always gravitated towards drama, but this was something else. The exteriors were shot in Cambridge and there were some massive set-ups: the pageantry surrounding the ceremony in which a new master of the college was installed; a scene in the great hall, with hundreds of students as extras. I loved being part of those huge set-pieces. It enabled me to give some rein to my film-actor fantasies. It was certainly very different from the slightly grab-it-and-run Only Fools and Horses shoots.
The great Ian Richardson played the Master of Porterhouse College. Ian was a sensational actor to work with and brilliant company during downtime. There was one night shoot, when we were all sitting around, freezing cold, with our coats on, in the room that was allotted to us as a green room. The conversation turned to theatre stories and suddenly Ian was up on his feet and demonstrating how to do a properly theatrical exit in a Shakespeare play – revealing just how important you can make the simple act of walking off the stage at the end of a speech. The art (lest you wish to try this at home) is to do a kind of double exit: you go, you pause, you slightly come back, you go again. It was so funny the way he did it. Play it right, he insisted, and you could virtually guarantee a round, no matter what had happened in your exit speech.
Equally impressive to me was Charles Gray, a big man, an RSC actor – though most people probably know him as Blofeld in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever. Charles would come into make-up and I would say, ‘Good morning, Charles, how are you today?’ And he would reply, in his huge, rich, thespy voice: ‘Ah, dear boy. I went out for dinner last night with some friends and we drank nearly a bottle of brandy.’ And you would know he wasn’t fibbing because the faint aroma of Hennessy 57 was in the air as he spoke. Or maybe it was just a strong aftershave. And yet he would be DLP – dead line perfect. He never needed the script any
where near him. I used to feel inadequate when I rehearsed scenes with him. There would be me, with my bits of script which I had known perfectly well at home the night before but which had somehow become a little elusive in the morning, and there was Charles, effortlessly nailing it.
Some of the scenes were done on location at Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire – in particular a moment where there had to be a large explosion in the college quad. We were all very excited while this was being set up, believing that it was going to be some good sport, and everybody retreated upstairs to look down on the quadrangle from above. Unfortunately, the safety-conscious spoilsports rigging up the explosion gave us the severe instruction not to look out of the windows. ‘Stay back from the glass, just in case,’ we were told. ‘You can look out until you hear the countdown commence.’ There was a lot of tutting at the needless fussiness of this from the assembled thespians, but we grudgingly obeyed the letter of the law and, as we heard the countdown start, obediently stepped back towards the middle of the room.
At which point – ka-boom! In came all the windows. Glass showered onto the floor at our astonished feet. The riggers had accidentally been too generous with the explosive and it blew the glass out right across the house and cost the production a fortune in compensation to the owners. No animals were harmed in the making of Porterhouse Blue, and no actors either. But it was close.
This was the same quad in which we filmed the famous sequence in which Lionel Zipser, the graduate student, attempts to clear his room of an embarrassing quantity of condoms. His solution is to inflate them, using the gas pipe in his room, and then float them up the chimney under cover of night. His notion is that they will fly harmlessly away, but, of course, they descend to form a carpet of inflated prophylactics across the college’s august and neat quadrangle.
It was my duty as Scullion to rescue the college’s honour by spearing these condoms on the lawn with a sharp stick. In order to set up this scene, the production acquired boxes and boxes of condoms – a generous gift from the manufacturer, I believe. Two production assistants then spent the best part of a day standing at two giant gas cylinders, filling condoms, some with helium (the ones that were to fly from the chimney) and some with oxygen (the ones that had to lie on the ground). As they filled and knotted these condoms, they would lob them into an adjacent room for storage. I came past several times during the day, and was able to observe this room gradually filling with inflated condoms, until it was entirely wedged with pink rubber. It was exactly what I loved about filming: the peculiar sights you would see and walk past and find people taking absolutely for granted, as if they were the most normal thing in the world.
We filmed the condoms flying out of the chimney, which went fine. But when we came to the scene where I had to stab them as they lay on the grass, the wind was up and all our carefully laid condoms kept blowing off to one corner of the quad. Eventually, someone had to go round and pin each one down to the grass through its knot so I could jab them.
My performance as Scullion was nominated for a BAFTA award in the Best Actor category. I had been to the ceremony twice before, as a nominee for Only Fools in the Best Light Entertainment Performance category, and I hadn’t won on either occasion. I thought about not going this time, to avoid the disappointment. Those black-tie show-business occasions don’t make me very comfortable, to be honest. Plus I was up against Kenneth Branagh, for heaven’s sake, who was nominated for Fortunes of War – a role in which, so far as I’m aware, he jabbed precisely no inflated condoms with a sharp stick. It was a bit like going willingly to your own execution, I felt. But somebody pointed out that this was Best Actor, and at the BAFTAs, and even to be shortlisted in that category was an honour so I should at least have the decency to show up and smile gamely.
So I put on my black tie and I went to the dinner in the chandelier-hung ballroom of the Grosvenor Hotel, and I sat at the table and worked on my ‘stout and generous loser’ expression, ready for the moment when the envelope was opened and the name was called.
Blow me down, though: ‘And the winner is … David Jason for Porterhouse Blue.’
I’ve got to tell you, that felt incredible. When I got up from the table, my knees were shaking – but, even so, they felt like the bee’s knees. For the rest of the evening, people were coming up and congratulating me – including Kenneth Branagh. I felt like I had arrived – like I was finally someone who counted. What was that thing Frank Sinatra said, as he stood at the window, high up in a luxury hotel suite, and looked across New York to the borough of his birth? ‘You know, it’s a lot further from Hoboken to here than it looks.’ I felt a bit that way about the distance between Finchley and the Grosvenor Hotel. It was nice to be a winner. I had always been very insecure about my abilities as an actor, but that night, sitting among my peers, I allowed myself to feel very proud of what I’d done.
* * *
IN 1989, ahead of series six, I went to see John Sullivan. I was getting annoyed on John’s behalf. I said, ‘You’re giving us these great scripts which often come in long, and in order to get them down to thirty minutes, we’re cutting out more funny material than most sitcoms have in their whole episode.’
I was still particularly sore about an edit to an episode in series five, ‘Tea for Three’, in which Rodney buys Del a hang-gliding session, only for Del to lose control, take off and disappear off into the air for twelve hours. Del returns to the flat in a wheelchair with a neck brace. At that point I had this long, long, beautifully constructed speech, full of suppressed rage, about all the places that Del had been to and the things that he had seen on his marathon hang-gliding journey. I thought that speech was a comic masterpiece. But because the show had overrun, half of those lines got cut.
John agreed with me that the show could certainly work in longer episodes. We went to see Gareth Gwenlan, who was producing series six, and we set out our case for extending the show from half an hour to fifty minutes. Gareth said, ‘Well, a situation comedy is only thirty minutes. It won’t sustain more than that, really.’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s true of average writers. But we’re talking about John. And you must agree: we keep cutting gold.’ Gareth gave it some thought for a while, and then gave the green light to go to fifty minutes.
This, for me, was the point where Only Fools and Horses really came into its own as a comedy-drama, rather than as a sitcom. It wasn’t just that there was now time to get more of John’s great lines in; it was that there was now more space in which things could unfold. Without the additional length of episode, the show almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to develop the romances between Del and Raquel, played by Tessa Peake-Jones, and between Rodney and Cassandra, played by Gwyneth Strong. We were once again blessed in our cast members there. Tessa and Gwyneth were fine actresses: Tessa had been in Shakespeare and Jane Austen adaptations; Gwyneth had acted at the Royal Court when she was eleven and had grown up working on children’s television. Those two knew what they were doing and fitted straight into the team.
Series six was also the point at which the show relocated to Bristol. Peckham had never actually been Peckham, of course; it had been other bits of the capital. Nelson Mandela House, for example, was Harlech Tower in Acton. For series six, though, Peckham wasn’t even in London. The problem was that London was becoming an increasingly tough and expensive place in which to get licences to film. It was also getting more and more difficult for us to film on London streets without very quickly attracting a crowd. Sometimes we’d get interrupted by passersby and autograph hunters. Many were the times when I found myself standing on a pavement, waiting for the instruction to perform for a distant camera, only to find someone saying, ‘What are you doing here?’
So now Nelson Mandela House was Whitemead House in Ashton Gate and all the external action was on the streets of Bristol. All the rest was implied – using the age-old trick of positioning a couple of red buses in the background.
Del changed to reflect the mood of the times. H
e started to fancy himself a bit of a yuppy, a wannabe Thatcherite entrepreneur, with a raincoat, a suit from Austin Reed and a Filofax. ‘Yuppy Love’ was the episode in which Rodney first met Cassandra, the love of his life and, after a tempestuous courtship, the mother of his daughter. But, of course, that significant piece of plot development is not what people chiefly remember the episode for; rather it is for a small piece of business I did, not unadjacent to a pub bar flap.
It came together over one of John’s and my frequent chats over a glass or two. The way John originally thought of it, it was more a slip and a stumble than a complete tree-like fall. John had seen something like it actually happen at a wine bar in Balham – a bloke going to lean on the bar, just as the barman opens the flap. The bloke had to grab hold of the edge of the fixed part of the bar to hold himself up. What John had liked about the moment was the bloke’s body language immediately afterwards, flexing himself and trying to recover his cool. I said I thought the way to develop it was that Del ought to go all the way over – start to go sideways, and then just continue going, and all without looking in the direction of the fall. That was the key to it, for me – the fact that Del doesn’t twist his head to look where he’s falling. Even with the crash mat in place, out of the shot, to break the fall, that’s quite hard to do, because it runs completely contrary to your instincts, but it was a fall I’d done quite a number of times in farces in the theatre. My experience on the boards was coming in handy again.
Of course, the sweet comedy of the moment is not just about the fall, it’s about Trigger’s reaction – turning back from staring at the girls to find I’ve disappeared and then casting a startled look over to the door to see where I’ve gone. Altogether, though … well, what can I say? That little plummet through a gap turned out to be quite an item for me; indeed, some people never want to talk to me about anything else. Olivier had his Othello, Gielgud his Lear, Branagh has his Hamlet; I have my falling through a pub bar flap. And do you know what? I’m perfectly happy with that.
