by David Jason
Well, I was pleased he thought so, but it was very much the way of things on that show. We all looked after each other. Which stands to reason: we were one big (and overfed) family.
* * *
DARLING BUDS WAS my mother’s favourite show – her favourite of all the things she lived to see me do before, at the grand old age of ninety, she fell asleep on her sofa. My sister June rang me. ‘I can’t wake Mum.’ I drove from the house in Buckinghamshire and there she was, asleep and not to be woken.
She had outlived my father by fully twenty years – Dad with his arthritis, sleeping in the bed downstairs at Lodge Lane. I helped him get ready for bed one night – helped him with his pyjamas, his plastic bottle. The indignity that the elderly know. Pneumonia took him in the end. I remember visiting and holding his hand and trying to talk to him but he was already shutting down. How hard it is and how unfair it seems, letting go of someone you know so well. And now Mum too.
She had moved into a basement council flat and continued to rent it, despite the offer of other places elsewhere. She liked it there. She didn’t see why she should move. Signs of my success didn’t much impress her, in the main. When I bought the first house I owned in Buckinghamshire, she said, ‘But I don’t see why you need all this space.’ My two-seater sports cars – the MG Midget, and then the TR7 – she referred to as ‘David’s mean cars’, meaning they didn’t have enough seats to take her and my Auntie Ede to wherever they wanted to go. Nevertheless, she came to a recording of Only Fools, and she quite liked that. But what she really loved was Darling Buds. She related to it much more closely. It was funny, though, the way she talked to me about Pop Larkin – entirely as if he were another person. I was never entirely sure she knew it was me.
* * *
MEANWHILE, I HAD finally landed the dream role of Batman – satisfying at last the burning aspiration to play a superhero which had been planted in me by the Dan Dare comic strips of my childhood. Well, kind of. Robin was Nick Lyndhurst – one of the rare occasions on which Batman has been cast shorter than his crime-busting partner. Still, that was Only Fools and Horses for you – never inclined to do things conventionally.
That episode, from the seventh series, in 1991, is still one that people go back to and talk about. The sight of Del Boy and Rodney running through the streets in full costume, the least likely world-savers you have ever seen, struck a loud bell with viewers which just carried on ringing. When we first read that script, we all loved it, but I had some strong feelings about the way the costumes had to go. Realistically, in the spirit of hired party costumes, Del and Rodney’s Batman and Robin outfits would probably have been a bit tired, a bit tatty and quite ill-fitting. My feeling was that, in order to get the full comedy out of the moment where they save the woman from the robbers, they should look like Batman and Robin – or as close as possible – and that the costumes should be exact replicas of the originals and made to fit us. That’s the way we ended up taking it and I was glad, because when we finally got that shot of them running through the smoke, it just lent itself even more to the ridiculous. If I go back to Bristol, the one they all remember is Batman and Robin. That’s the one they always come up and say, ‘I was there.’ It really seemed to chime.
That was also the series in which Raquel gave birth to Damien, shouting words that came straight from the lips of John Sullivan’s wife, Sharon, when she was in labour. ‘Don’t you ever come near me again, Trotter,’ was, I believe, one of Sharon’s, give or take the Trotter. Neither Tessa nor I had experience of childbirth at that time, and because we wanted to make the scene realistic, we took advice from midwives at the West Middlesex Hospital, where the scene was being filmed.
None of us realised that the seventh series would be the show’s last. You rarely knew, at the end of a series, whether there would be another, because commissioning normally happened subsequently. So you just had to hang on and hope and see what the stars and John Sullivan came up with.
Certainly nobody had said they wanted to leave. Indeed, in the absence of a fully fledged run, each year, from 1991 through to 1993, we reconvened for a Christmas Special. The 1991 story, ‘Miami Twice’, saw us decamping to Florida. Which is quite a long way from Peckham. And this time, we really did go. (Spain, in an earlier episode, had actually been Dorset in the freezing cold with the lights turned up bright.) We filmed at the famous Biltmore Hotel, a giant wedding cake of a building, and were thrilled to be told that the room in which we were recording was the favoured suite of Al Capone – who was a kind of Trotter in his way, albeit a bit more violent. The hotel was being refurbished while we were there and certain parts of the building were off-limits, including a staircase up to a bell tower. The restriction was too tempting for Nick and me, who, like school-kids, immediately shot up there to take photographs of ourselves.
The storyline included cameo roles for Richard Branson and Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. The cast and crew were all booked to fly out on Virgin Atlantic and Richard Branson found out and, being the great publicist, asked for a part in the show. He was very charming but would it be unreasonable of me to say that I’ve seen better actors? His big moment came in a queue at the airport where he pushes in, prompting Del to say, ‘Hey, ’scuse me, what’s your game, pal, eh? Blimey. Anyone would think he owns the plane.’ I assumed, after that, that a happy lifetime of free rides and regular upgrades lay ahead of me. Alas, I was wrong. Show business can be a very cruel industry.
Barry Gibb, meanwhile, had a bigger part, and even a line. Del and Rodney are shown on a tour boat, going past his house – a massive place with a big lawn that goes down to the water. As they pass, Barry is out there on the lawn with a hosepipe. Del, of course, can’t resist shouting to him, ‘All right, Bazza!’ Cut to Barry Gibb, mumbling, ‘Oh God. There’s always one.’ Barry was wonderfully self-effacing. He invited Nick and me into his house, introduced us to his wife, gave us tea, showed us over the place – which was, of course, a palace. He was a great fan of Only Fools and Horses and used to get tapes of it sent over to America.
When we reconvened for those annual Christmas Specials, it was as if we hadn’t stopped. You just fell straight back into the way of things. I would put on Del Boy again and find that he fitted like a pair of wonderful old carpet slippers.
* * *
AS THE DARLING Buds of May was drawing to a close, I was taken out for lunch by Richard Bates and Philip Burley from Excelsior Productions. I went along suspecting that they might have another project in mind for me and I was excited to hear what it might be. In fact, when the conversation eventually turned to business, Richard said, ‘What do you want to do?’
I was a bit confused and said, ‘Do about what?’
Richard said, ‘I mean, what do you want to do next – on television?’
I was still a bit confused. I said, ‘What do I want to do?’
He said, ‘Yes. Is there anything that you’ve always had a yearning to do and never had the chance?’
I was gobsmacked. It was the first time in one of these meetings that I’d ever heard that question, or anything like it. The form had always been: ‘We’re going to produce x, would you like to play y?’ To find myself in the position where someone was asking me what I wanted to do – effectively sitting opposite me with a blank sheet of paper in front of them and an expectant expression … well, this was a shock and it was a pretty stunning indication to me of the giddy heights to which I had somehow ascended.
So, straight away, I said, ‘I’ve always had this secret hankering to put on a zebra-patterned leotard and do a Summertime Special, singing duets with Cilla Black from the top of the BT Tower.’
All right. No, I didn’t. The truth, of course, is that I hadn’t come along with a prepared answer. But something did come straight to mind, in fact. I said, ‘The thing I like watching is detective shows. I’d love to play a detective.’
It was true. I was a sucker for sitting down in front of Poirot, Inspector Morse, Inspector Wexford,
Dalgliesh, Prime Suspect – any of those police procedural dramas. I loved all that.
They said, ‘OK. Why?’ I said, ‘People like to unravel a mystery, don’t they? That’s what I like to do, when I’m watching – try and beat the detective to it.’ Richard and Philip said they would go away and try to find some detective stories and we would see where it all went from there.
My assumption was that they were going to ask some writers to come up with a script or a treatment, but in fact, not long after this, I received a package in the post containing five books – all works of crime fiction, all by different authors, all in slightly different areas. There was a note from Richard saying, ‘See if you like any of these.’ I was off on holiday to Florida, so that was my holiday reading sorted for me. I packed them and ended up reading them over the next fortnight, one by one, sitting beside the pool.
One I initially responded to was about a Victorian detective – a Sherlock Holmes-type character in London. I thought that was ‘olde worlde’ and a bit different. I could see myself doing that. However, the idea was swept from my mind when I read one of the other books. It was contemporary, and clever and dark, and revolved around all manner of unpleasantness, including the murder of a drug addict, and a robbery at a strip club. It wasn’t very Pop Larkin, in other words. The detective at the centre of the story was this shabby, rather bitter, caustic but very commanding character. The book was called A Touch of Frost and it was written by an author called R. D. Wingfield.
That was it for me. I phoned Richard there and then, from Florida, because I couldn’t wait to tell him. I said, ‘If you can get permission for A Touch of Frost, I’ll do it.’
Back in England, some short while later, Yorkshire Television held a lunch for the principal members of the cast of Darling Buds to celebrate the completion of the series. It was a very jolly affair, but as everyone was leaving and I was about to sail out the door, David Reynolds asked me if I could stay behind for a couple of minutes. When the room cleared, I was left with David, Vernon Lawrence and a couple of other Yorkshire TV executives whom I didn’t know. Someone closed the door, and Vernon then said, without preamble, ‘What makes you think you can play a TV detective?’ Excelsior must have been on to them all about this Frost idea. I suddenly felt like I was in an interrogation room, under suspicion. Maybe they were about to do a ‘good TV exec/bad TV exec’ number on me. Anyway, I launched into a spontaneous paragraph about how popular the genre was and how I could see the chance to explore a slightly darker edge in the character of Frost, while throwing in a bit of stuff about the superiority of the English approach to TV detective shows (audience attempts to solve crime in tandem with the detective) to the American approach (audience is shown the crime and the criminal at the start of the story, and then follows the detective’s trail to the guilty party). I acquitted myself fairly well, I thought. At any rate, they released me without further questioning.
Excelsior Productions did get permission to adapt A Touch of Frost, and Yorkshire Television did agree to get involved in it, and I did land the part. Landed it, and kept it for fifteen series and forty-two episodes, screened over a period of eighteen years between 1992 and 2010. Which is a long time to spend in the skin of a shabby detective. But, boy, I did love playing that part.
We had to clean him up a bit. In the books, Detective Inspector Jack Frost was a chain-smoker, and I had recently given up cigarettes. I’d never been heavy – just four or five a day, normally in the evening with a drink. But I didn’t want to start smoking for the part and find myself drifting back into the habit again. By this time, smoking on television was starting to be a bit taboo in any case. Also, incidentally, from a purely practical point of view, smoking is a nightmare for continuity – you’ve got to watch the length of the ash all the time, otherwise it looks like someone has sucked down three-quarters of a cigarette in the time it takes someone else to come through the door. The less smoking you’ve got going on in a scene, the easier life is for everybody.
So we made Frost someone who had been a heavy smoker but who had recently quit – and actually, this ended up giving us more bits of business than if we had left him to smoke. It enabled us to give him chewing gum to occupy himself with, and it meant we could make him irritable and very grumpy about anyone else smoking anywhere near him. I remember in particular a scene in the Incident Room when one of his assistants lit up a fag to enjoy with his coffee, and Frost nipped the cigarette out of his mouth and doused it in the bloke’s coffee in a fit of jealous pique. Frost’s status as a reformed smoker opened up lots of little moments like that.
We didn’t clean up his eating habits, though. This was another show with a tough food regime – maybe not quite as bad as the one in Darling Buds, but still hard on the stomach. Frost was not a healthy eater: bacon sandwiches, chips, fry-ups. People would say to me, ‘You’re always eating in Frost.’ True enough. And not just that: I was always eating badly.
There was one manifest problem about me playing a detective: my height. At five foot six, Frost would most likely have fallen foul of the police height requirement and never have made it into the force in the first place. No easy way for me to get round that, really, but you’ll notice I stood as tall as I could when I played Frost, and gave him a very correct, shoulders-back bearing, so that my height would be less of an issue. I also added a moustache. It was a bit ageing, but I rather liked it. I could imagine Frost growing a moustache as a younger man to give himself a few extra years and a bit more maturity. Obviously my moustache came off between series so I could play other parts. I generally needed four weeks to grow it back and had to remember to stop shaving at the right point ahead of shooting. There were a couple of occasions when I missed the mark slightly and had to help it along with a bit of colouring-in, but, one way or another, it was always ready for day one of filming.
I didn’t want the show to be too formulaic. We decided that Frost wouldn’t have just the one sidekick, in the traditional set-up for this kind of show, but that he would change assistants between cases: we made him a detective to whom sergeants got seconded, to learn the trade. There were a couple of regular characters – Superintendent Norman Mullet (played by Bruce Alexander), the bureaucratic superior that Frost clashes with, and Detective Sergeant George Toolan (played by John Lyons), Frost’s loyal, lower-ranked colleague – but a steady supply of assistants presented us with the opportunity to keep the show fresh and to give Frost new characters to bounce off, people who would come in and challenge his slightly set view of the world. One of my favourite moments in this area was with Maureen Lawson (played by Sally Dexter) on a stake-out, the pair of us sitting in the car, eating fish and chips. Frost says, ‘I expect you’ll be looking forward to getting back to your boyfriend. When are you next seeing him?’ Maureen very calmly replies, ‘It’s not a him, actually, it’s a her.’ Frost was old-fashioned and he needed a moment to take this on board – his chip just fractionally pausing on its way from packet to lips.
The show meant spending a lot of time away from home, at the studios up in Leeds or on location around Wetherby, Harrogate, Dewsbury and all stations local – even on Ilkley Moor without my hat. Yorkshire Television couldn’t have been more determined to make it easy for me, though. I asked if it were possible to rent a cottage rather than pay for a hotel. I could cook and look after myself, after all. I wasn’t after anything grand with a swimming pool and electronic gates, just somewhere simple that I could go back to at the end of the day, away from everything, and clear my head. Or as we would say now, to chill out.
They found me an old farmer’s cottage in a place called Kirby Overblow off the road from Leeds to Harrogate. It didn’t have central heating, so, on cold nights, I would get in and light myself a fire. Conversely, on warm evenings, I could sit out in the garden and that was always a pleasure – to come back from filming and have a large one and watch the evening go by. People used to ask, ‘Don’t you get lonely?’ I didn’t. Not at this stage of my life. I
enjoyed the quiet time.
They also gave me my own driver – the magnificent Lawrence Turner. Either late on Sunday afternoon or first thing on Monday, Loz would collect me from Buckinghamshire in his spotless Lexus and take me on the three-hour drive up to Yorkshire. We’d put the world to rights for a while, then I would work on my scripts. And then we would stop halfway and have a bacon and egg roll and a cup of tea – a very Frost-like meal. Loz was on call any time I needed him.
We used to call it ‘the circus’. You’d arrive at the location and all the lorries would be there and the sets and the make-up and catering. You would film for maybe three days, and then the circus would pack up and be gone, leaving just some patches of flattened grass behind it. Whenever I’m out and about and I see a film unit at work, I still feel that glow of excitement I used to get, driving onto the set to work.
And because this was a serious drama, encompassing serious matters and ugly crimes, on those sets there was an entirely different atmosphere from the kind I was used to – an atmosphere of sober, careful, almost academic concentration with none of the pranking and larking about that typically went on during the filming of sitcoms and costume dramas.
Yeah, right. I don’t think any television show I’ve done, with the possible exception of Only Fools, prompted quite so much mucking about on the part of the people involved in it as Frost did. Certainly no show I’ve ever done prompted quite such elaborate mucking about. John Lyons was a great character who has become a good friend, but I have to tell you, the winding-up of Johnny Lyons that took place over the course of A Touch of Frost would make a pair of ninety-minute television specials all on its own.
It commenced when Johnny and another member of the cast went out one night and had a few jars. When they got back to their rooms at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, Johnny went to the window and looked out and realised that he could see his drinking companion opposite, standing at his own window and also looking out. So Johnny – a sensible man in his fifties at this point, it should be pointed out – dropped his trousers and mooned him.
