by David Jason
With episode two of the series came, unusually, controversy – or certainly controversy as it was perceived in the media. This was the one where Del acquires fifty faulty dolls – only to discover that they are not, as he assumed, harmless children’s toys, but in fact the kind of blow-up dolls they sell for male recreational purposes in Soho. (Which is, incidentally, exactly where they came from, the result of a swoop on a sex shop – not by me, I hasten to add, but by the show’s props buyer.) For the first time ever, the show found itself accused of overstepping the mark. One or two viewers complained to the BBC that having to explain to their young children what the joke was about these dolls had taxed their imaginations. In our defence, the dolls were clothed. But let’s all move on, shall we?
By the end of that series, Rodney was married to Cassandra – an extraordinary moment. The passage through life undertaken by his character brought into focus the time that had flown by while the pair of us had been together. I’d known this guy when he was just a lad, and now here he was, getting wed. When the Simply Red song ‘Holding Back the Years’ was played into that episode, I’m not ashamed to say that I cried some tears for real.
That year at the BAFTAs, I won the award for Best Comedy Performance. This, to my astonishment, was getting to be a bit of a habit. I proudly set it down on my mantelpiece, alongside the one for Best Actor.
* * *
IN 1990, I turned fifty and Myfanwy threw me a surprise party at the house in Wendover. I was due back in the evening and she knew the jig would be well and truly up if I turned into the road and saw loads of cars parked up. So all the guests were under instruction, not just to arrive early, but also to park in neighbouring drives and roads. It was quite a logistical operation.
So home I come, and I walk into the completely dark house and the lights go on and – ‘Surprise!’ – there’s Myfanwy, and my brother Arthur and his wife Joy, and my lovely sister June, and Ronnie and Joy Barker, and John and Jenny Junkin, and John and Sharon Sullivan, and David and Ellie Renwick, and Micky and Angie McCaul, and countless friends of mine from London and friends of Myfanwy’s from Wales – who had all been crouching behind the sofas and hiding in the curtains.
The birthday cake was on an Only Fools and Horses theme, and Myfanwy was quite cross about it because the Wendover baker from whom she’d commissioned the piece had improvised a little and had chosen to commemorate in icing the scene where Del and Rodney end up with a batch of inflatable dolls. Myfanwy thought this was in poor taste on this special occasion, and she may have had a point. At the same time, the man was an artist with the marzipan and you should never hold an artist back from realising his vision.
John Junkin made a speech, and so did Ronnie B., and it was a lovely, high-spirited evening, and the nicest of surprises.
Well, when I say surprise … Did I twig? Of course I did. When did Myfanwy ever turn all the lights off in our house?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dinner in the bath. Batman’s revenge. And the saddest of endings.
If I HADN’T had dinner at Langan’s with David Reynolds from Yorkshire Television, I wouldn’t have got a part in A Bit of a Do on ITV. And if I hadn’t got a part in A Bit of a Do, I might not have ended up appearing in The Darling Buds of May. And if I hadn’t got a part in The Darling Buds of May, I might not have ended up appearing in A Touch of Frost.
Mind you, by the same token, if I hadn’t had dinner at Langan’s with David Reynolds, I wouldn’t have got quite so drunk. Memory has drawn a slightly headachey veil over the exact quantity of wine consumed at that fateful meeting, on that destiny-defining afternoon, but suffice it to say it was a multi-bottler.
This dinner took place as the eighties were drawing to an end, when I was as busy as I needed to be, really, with Only Fools and Horses. Nevertheless, I was pleased to talk to David, who sounded me out about appearing in a comedy series he was trying to get under way, written by the very talented novelist and screenwriter David Nobbs, most famous for creating the character of Reggie Perrin. Even then, as occupied as I was, there was always the drive within me – the basic actorly thing. Be someone different. Be someone else. And take the work while it’s there to be taken.
A Bit of a Do enabled me to be Ted Simcock – who wasn’t an especially pleasant person to find yourself in the shoes of. He was self-centred, arrogant, chauvinistic and absolutely convinced that women were falling over themselves to get to him. But his unpleasantness was the point, as far as I was concerned. The characters I tended to be known for playing – Del Boy merely the most prominent among them – had their foibles but were meant to be essentially forgivable and lovable. They were great seekers of the audience’s sympathy. Playing Ted Simcock was a chance to show another side.
It was also a chance to work with some more great actors – Gwen Taylor, who was to play my wife Rita; Nicola Pagett, who played the sexually promiscuous Liz Rodenhurst; Paul Chapman, who was Liz’s hopelessly square husband. Again, this kind of company can only up your game. Nicola was one of that period’s great sirens and the plot required her to seduce Ted Simcock by stripping down to a basque and stockings – a scene during which I must have been the envy of a large proportion of the male population. A Bit of a Do ran to two series, went down well with critics and viewers, and put me on Yorkshire Television’s radar – to the extent that, in the event of a part coming up in … I don’t know … let’s say a family drama series set in rural Kent in the 1950s and destined to become a national, award-winning smash hit, then I would be well placed to be considered for it.
And what do you know? At the beginning of the 1990s, David Reynolds asked me what I was doing next. I told him I wasn’t sure, but, like Mr Micawber, I was hoping for something to turn up. He said, ‘Please don’t commit to anything for another week. I can’t tell you why – but please don’t.’ Eventually he got back to me and said Yorkshire Television had finally managed to secure the rights to The Darling Buds of May, an H. E. Bates novel from 1957, and they would like to offer me the part of a character called Pop Larkin.
Of course, I don’t suppose any of us had even the faintest inkling at that stage of exactly how mind-bogglingly successful this project would be. I certainly didn’t. I had to confess that I didn’t know the book at all. But I went away and brushed up on it. I thought it was charming – a bucolic piece about a ramshackle, convention-snubbing farming family who woo the tax inspector into moving in with them in order to deflect him from inspecting their rather dodgy tax situation. But was it a television series, though? Afterwards, I had a conversation with my agent, and I said, ‘I don’t really know what this book is about. It’s lovely, and everything, with the country setting, and all that – but nothing really happens. It doesn’t go anywhere.’
I could see, though, that the characters were unusually strong – Pop Larkin, the head of the family, especially – and it was the prospect of playing Pop that made me think it might be fun to have a crack at it. I did have one condition, though: they had to shoot it on film, as Porterhouse Blue had been. I didn’t want it to be a studio production. If they did it on film, I knew the series would at least look good and have some quality about it, even if nothing happened.
I said to my agent, ‘It’ll either be enormously successful or it’ll fall flat on its face.’ And I was right: it was enormously successful. (Though see how I cunningly hedged my bets there?)
My first question for David was: ‘Who do you have in mind for Ma Larkin?’ The relationship between Pop and Ma Larkin was at the centre of the drama and, whoever ended up playing Ma, we were obviously going to have to work together closely. David Reynolds said, ‘An actress called Pam Ferris.’ I didn’t know Pam, so I rang my agent and asked about her. My agent said, ‘She’s great – and also a really nice, easy-going person.’ That was good enough for me. Rather than meet for the first time at the read-through and rehearsals, David took us out for lunch, to break the ice between us. He was a great host as usual, though I think both Pam and I
passed on the wine that time, it being lunchtime. We talked about what we’d done and a little bit about the series and our feelings about what those two characters were like: loving, cheeky, generous, trusting. She was down-to-earth, which I immediately liked about her, and we relaxed in each other’s company very quickly.
Just as well, I suppose. There was a scene fairly early on in the series where the pair of us were required to be eating our supper in the bath together – and, what’s more, to be doing it as if eating ham and quaffing beer amid the suds were the most natural thing in the world. I toyed with the idea of turning up on the set in a frog mask and flippers but couldn’t quite bring myself to go through with it. In the event, we both wore swimming costumes and the water was coloured up to protect still further our mutual modesties.
That moment broke the ice, along with another, during a scene that brought us together in bed. We had to lie next to each other, chatting about the future of our daughter Mariette. It was Pam who had virtually all of the dialogue in this particular scene – a long and fairly complex speech. Before the shoot, I asked the stage manager, Anton Darby, whether he could get me a cucumber. I then smuggled it into bed with us and, when the director called ‘Action!’ and Pam began her lines, I gently laid the cucumber against her under the sheets. I expected her immediately to spring up and say, ‘What the hell is that?’ But I hadn’t reckoned with the astonishing professionalism of Pam Ferris. She carried on, utterly undisturbed through thirty seconds of dialogue – perfectly delivered. Only at the conclusion of her lines, when ‘Cut!’ had been called, did she turn to me where I lay, corpsing madly on the pillow beside her, and shout, ‘What in God’s name are you up to?’ and tore back the covers.
Altogether the cast felt like a family off the set as well as on it. We genuinely liked each other and I think an extra degree of warmth came through because of that. Philip Franks played Cedric ‘Charley’ Charlton, the tax inspector who pays a visit and doesn’t leave. Philip was so perfectly cast. He had spent most of his career in the theatre and he was a great team player as a result of that. And then there was Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was the show’s big discovery, as the Larkins’ eldest, Mariette. They had interviewed simply hundreds of girls before they found Catherine. She was, it goes without saying, extremely beautiful, and you knew the camera was going to love her. She was also as lovely a person as she looked. She was twenty-two at this point and had been in musical theatre but was clearly determined to move into other kinds of acting. This series was the big step in that progression for her, but she was inexperienced in television, and she seemed very nervous at first. I remember telling her something it had taken me a while to cotton on to – about keeping your eyes still when you’re doing dialogue in close-up. Normally, in the real world, your eyes range a bit around the face of the person you’re talking to, but in a close-up of someone’s face, that natural eye movement gets exaggerated and can look a bit odd, as if your eyes are shooting around in their sockets. If you fix your focus on one place on your interlocuter’s face, it holds your eyes steady in the shot. Of course, Hollywood happened for Catherine soon after this, and obviously it was exclusively down to me. Thanks to my careful tuition at this critical moment in her budding career, she was ready for her close-up. Seriously, though, she got her part as Mariette dead on, with just the right mix of innocence and coquettishness. Hollywood stardom couldn’t have happened to anyone nicer.
At the first read-through, it emerged that the production had also found some extremely talented children: the twins, Christina and Katherine Giles, and Stephanie Ralph, who played Victoria, the Larkins’ youngest daughter. Kids, of course, have minds like sponges. They knew their own lines, and everybody else’s as well. There was one time in the second series when I had what seemed to me to be a fairly involved speech, out in the stable. At the camera rehearsal, I got stuck and was lifting my script up to my eyes to remind myself where I was, when up piped Stephanie to give me the line. Prompted by a kid: a low blow. Frankly, I was happy a bit later in the series when the Larkins’ next baby came along. A baby couldn’t upstage you or tell you your lines.
The role made a few unusual demands on me. I had to drive a big old 1950s truck, an old army vehicle, painted up, which was an experience largely unrelated to what we generally think of as driving these days. It had a crash gearbox, with a lever that virtually tore your shoulder out of its socket, and steering which provided a comprehensive upper-body workout. I had to handle a few horses too, and at one point, the director said to me, ‘Do you know how to milk a cow?’ To which I was able to say, ‘Well, yes – as a matter of fact, I do.’ Years earlier, when I was going out with Melanie Parr and spending weekends at her parents’ farm just outside East Grinstead, her mother Mary had taught me. If someone ever asks you if you would be interested in milking a cow, say yes. You never know when it might come in handy in your professional life.
But perhaps the biggest demand of all made by Darling Buds was the food. I piled on pounds doing that show. So much of it revolved around eating, and not just in the bath – great hunks of bread and ham, lumps of cheese, pickled onions, roast dinners, chocolate, all downed with a contented smile to show the Larkin family’s generous spirit and carefree love of life. And then there were the fried breakfasts – cooked fresh on the set by Anton Darby, who had a little stove positioned to one side. The set constantly hummed with the smell of frying bacon and the crew would be walking around with drool hanging out of their mouths. One day, the shooting schedule meant that I actually sat down to breakfast five times. And breakfast meant a plate piled almost to the lampshade with bacon and eggs. I know breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but on that occasion it was the most important five meals of the day. By the end of filming, I felt that if I even so much as saw another bacon rasher I would begin to snort myself. I asked if I could skip the fry-ups from that point on. They said, ‘Fine. We’ll give you kippers instead.’ Brilliant. Out of the frying pan, into the saucepan. When the kippers ran out, it was over to whole smoked haddock.
I realised what all this delightful consumption was doing to me the night I went to put on my dinner jacket for the BAFTAs and realised that I couldn’t get it to button up around me. Right there, in the house, was a photograph of me taken a year earlier, wearing the jacket perfectly comfortably. Now I looked like Hardy wearing something belonging to Laurel. A few months of dieting ensued until I returned to my former, sylph-like self.
The location shooting was done in and around Bethersden in Kent – in glorious summer weather, fortunately. We used a fabulous Grade II listed house called Buss Farm which had an outhouse and an old Tudor barn attached to it. The interiors, though, were done in the studio in Yorkshire and the real genius of the show, it seemed to me, lay in making the footage from the two different sources blend. There was one scene in particular in which the family were outside in the evening light – a scene in which I had to say to Charley, ‘Listen to that – it’s a nightingale. You don’t get that in London. It makes your heart lift.’ And then everyone goes inside, into the kitchen. Peter Jackson, the lighting director, whose background was in film, lit that evening scene in Yorkshire to match what we’d already got in Kent, and you simply couldn’t see the join because it was done so brilliantly. The series was a high-quality piece of work altogether. We owed a lot to his brilliance, and to that of the whole team put together by David Reynolds.
I discovered something about the impact that Darling Buds was having, and about the sheer breadth of its appeal, when I was invited one weekend to be a guest of honour at Wycombe Air Park at a summer show for underprivileged children. This was at the point where Only Fools and Horses seemed to be about as popular as it was possible for a television show to get. I went along, fully expecting that when I got in front of these kids, I’d be hearing lots of shouts of ‘Oi, Del Boy!’ and other things Trotter-related. In fact, the minute I stepped out of the car, I was greeted by a wall of cries of ‘It’s Pop Larkin!’ a
nd ‘Perfick!’ and ‘Hey, Pop Larkin – where’s Mariette?’
But that’s what the show did. The idyll it depicted spoke very directly to people – and to people of all ages. It was an example of a kind of television show that was already, even then, falling out of favour and which has continued to decline – a programme that families watched together. And what they saw, coming back at them from the screen, was this wonderful loving family, with kids they adored, sitting round at Sunday dinners, piling into the back of a truck and singing … People watched it and thought, ‘Wouldn’t we all love a little bit of that, if it were possible?’ And that was the link, really, because the message of Darling Buds was the message of Only Fools too: that the most important thing is what happens at home and with the family.
A couple of years ago, Catherine Zeta-Jones got in touch and said she was coming to London to do some filming, and she would love to see me and Gill for a meal. She and her husband, Michael Douglas, were renting a house in Richmond and we fixed up to have lunch there one Sunday.
It was the first time I had seen her since she got married, and she greeted us at the door of this rather magnificent property and said, ‘Come and meet my husband – I think he’s in the pool.’ It was a beautiful, sunny day and we went through the house to the garden. Michael was in the water, playing with his sons. Catherine said, ‘Michael, come and meet David.’ Accordingly, my first sight of this great Hollywood star was as he came towards me, hand extended, just out of the pool, dripping wet, with Bermuda shorts on. All very relaxed.
After lunch, we had coffee and I sat down with Michael, and, between doing the thing that fathers do of calling out to the kids to be careful about running near the pool and instructing them to play nicely, he said, ‘I’d just like to thank you for what you did.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, Catherine told me that when you did the show together, you really were very generous with her and looked after her a lot.’
