by David Jason
Anyway, I mention these biographical details – John’s, Ray’s, mine - simply by way of illustrating how, at the core of Only Fools and Horses and responsible for developing the character of Del, you had these three people with a natural proximity to working-class London. This was where we had come from, what we were, and, to the extent that the show and Del Boy managed to be convincing, I’m sure it was in no small measure as a consequence of that.
Not that I was the first choice to play him, I should swiftly add. It’s no secret by now that a couple of other actors were ahead of me in the queue for Del Boy and what turned out to be the part of my lifetime could very easily have turned out to be the part of somebody else’s lifetime. But that, of course, is very much the nature of the casting business – a game of swings, roundabouts and lottery tickets. And I speak as the man who, following a successful audition at the BBC in the 1960s, held the highly covetable role of Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army … for precisely two and a half hours. The corporation had badly wanted to cast Clive Dunn in the role, but were told they couldn’t have him. So they got me in, heard me read, and gave me the job – only to discover, within an hour of me leaving the building, that they could have Clive Dunn after all. I was at home, very smugly fixing myself a sandwich and meditating on the stardom and glory that lay ahead of me, when the phone call came from my agent. ‘Er, David … about that Dad’s Army part …’ So, what could have been the part of my lifetime turned out to be merely the part of my lunchtime. I’ve had some lousy sandwiches in my time, but the one I made that day ranked among the most dead that I have ever tasted.
But what can you do? You adjust, you dig deep, you find your inner steel, you move on. Of course, the fact that, over the ensuing decades, Dad’s Army proved to be such a massive flop that nobody ever talked about it certainly acted as a helpful and convenient balm. [Author lowers head and sinks teeth into leg of desk. After a short while, he unclenches jaw, extracts teeth from desk leg, sits upright again and continues.]
Anyway, as I said: swings and roundabouts and lottery tickets. Once John had gone away and worked those early ideas up into a script, Ray and John initially pitched the leading part to Enn Reitel, the Scottish actor and voice-over expert, who later went on to be a big contributor to Spitting Image, the landmark 1980s satirical puppet show. But I think Enn had already signed up for something else. So then they approached Jim Broadbent – but Jim had a theatrical project on the go in the West End, and he, too, turned the job down. Jim, in fact, would later show up in series three of Only Fools, playing the wheedling detective Roy Slater. Jim and I were on set together a lot during the filming of those episodes, and we got along famously, but we didn’t talk about the fact that he had turned down the part of Del Boy, because I think both of us were a little bit too embarrassed to go there, and anyway, it’s not really the done thing. Old theatre adage: what happens in the audition room stays in the audition room. Unless it makes for a really funny anecdote, in which case out it comes. However, Jim once generously described his decision to walk away from Del and open the door to me as his ‘greatest contribution to British culture’. That’s a wonderfully kind thing to say. Certainly if he knew any ruefulness about that decision, Jim recovered from it in time to become one of the most respected British actors of his generation; and he wasn’t so crippled with disappointment that he didn’t manage to land a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe for his role in Iris, that terrific film about Iris Murdoch. All in all, I think we can fairly resoundingly conclude that not being Del Boy didn’t exactly hold Jim Broadbent back.
You might remember that first episode Jim was in. It was called ‘May the Force Be With You’. Roy Slater, a childhood enemy of Del’s who has since become the meanest copper on the force, turns up at the Nag’s Head on the trail of a stolen microwave oven and, more importantly, its thief. The microwave, in fact, is up in the Trotters’ flat, Del having taken it off the thief’s hands for a nice price. Indeed, when we first see this cutting-edge and potentially life-transforming culinary device, Grandad is bent over its controls, trying to tune it in time for The Dukes of Hazzard. Meanwhile, at the pub, Rodney, who is too young to know the dark history between Del and Roy, invites Slater back to the flat for what he imagines will be a happy and touching school reunion over a beer. Jim’s Slater is a brilliant piece of work. It’s hard to know what’s more chilling: the constant threat in his tone or his gape-mouthed, entirely mirthless laugh. Slater observes the microwave, arrests Del, Rodney and Grandad for receiving stolen goods and then, down at the police station, leans on them to grass up the thief. This leads to an extended interrogation scene between me and Jim which is one of my favourite sequences from Only Fools and one of the bits of acting in the show of which I’m most proud. It’s a parody, of course, of the typical detective drama procedural scene – the smoky, sweaty station room, the cheap desk and chairs, the anglepoise lamp – but there’s quite a lot of straight dramatic heat in it as well, which is what I really love about it. It’s also one of those quite rare examples of a comedy having the courage to sit tight in one place for an extended period of time. Jim and I properly go at it across the desk – an instance of that enormously energising tennis-like thing that sometimes happens when two actors go head-to-head in a scene and the lines start fizzing backwards and forwards and each of them makes the other up his game. It’s a terrific thing to be involved in when it happens.
In the course of that scene, Del has to go through an entire wrestling match with his conscience, weighing the morally repugnant thought of turning informant against the dire personal consequences of not doing so (Del and Rodney will be sent to the nick, and Grandad will be left alone to fend for himself on the estate). Rodney and Grandad return to the interrogation room just in time to see Del signing off on the paperwork and about to become, unthinkably to them, a copper’s nark, while Slater meanly enjoys the sight of ‘the great Del Boy, the man who can talk his way out of a room with no doors, reduced to this: grassing’. (Permit me to explain, from my advantageous position on the edges of the criminal fraternity, some of the arcane terminology here. A ‘grass’, being one who ‘grasses up’ another, thereby functioning as a surrogate policeman, appears to be an abbreviation of the phrase ‘snake in the grass’, though there is also a theory that it derives from cockney rhyming slang: ‘grasshopper’, meaning ‘copper’. The term ‘nark’, meanwhile, allegedly derives from a nineteenth-century Romany word for nose – hence ‘copper’s nark’, or copper’s nose, as in one who sniffs around on behalf of a policeman. Glad to be of enlightenment in this critical area.)
Anyway, at that point, accused of grassing, Del has to turn round from the desk and give Rodney and Grandad the agonised look of a trapped and defeated man. Quite a bit of thought went into that look, I can tell you. After which, paperwork double-signed and checked and immunity from prosecution guaranteed, Del gets to reveal to Slater the man who stole the microwave with the resounding programme closer: ‘I did.’ It was such a lovely, tidy set-up and a classic piece of Sullivan in the way that it danced you through a whole range of emotions on the way. That was writing that could only bring the best out of you – writing you could feel yourself expanding into.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back at the auditions, after Enn and Jim had failed to enlist for Del Boy, muggins here was choice number three. Or possibly choice number four, if the rumours about Robin Nedwell are true. (Robin was Duncan Waring in the Doctor in the House series and its assorted sequels. I know John thought about Robin for Del, but whether he actually got around to offering it to him, I’m not sure.) Or possibly I was choice number five, if they offered it to Billy Allen, who later worked prominently on The Bill and EastEnders, and which is another story that gets told. Again, it seems that Billy was in John’s mind for a while, and then no longer in John’s mind, and was perhaps none the wiser about it either way.
Whatever, eventually there was me. Fifth (maybe) on the list! Flattering, no? That’s
just how it works, though, and you’ve no option, really, but to develop as thick a skin as you can about it. I mean, I’m sure that, if they hadn’t thought of those other four, I would have been the first person they called …
Actually, to tell the truth, if John, in particular, had been writing a list at the time, I’m not sure he would have had me on it at all. This was before I read for him, I should add. But when Ray casually threw my hat in the ring, saying ‘What about David Jason for Del?’, John’s reaction was to kick my hat straight back out again.
The reason Ray brought me into this discussion at all was down to Syd Lotterby. A BBC man since the late fifties, Syd was producing Open All Hours at this point, with me and Ronnie Barker. I loved working with Syd. He was a slim, gentle, enormously conscientious figure. He had this wonderful way, on the set, of keeping things moving by very politely calling out a question. ‘Lighting, I’m waiting for you, aren’t I?’ he might say, or, ‘Make-up, am I waiting for you?’ And they would say, ‘Yes, Syd – just need a couple of minutes here,’ or, ‘No, we’re all done and ready, Syd.’ He was nudging and cajoling the crew, in other words, but phrasing it as question, as if he needed to find out, which meant that nobody really felt nudged or cajoled.
Syd, Ronnie and I were in rehearsals for Open All Hours in Acton – and that’s when, in the lift on the way up to the rehearsal room, Syd slipped me the brown envelope containing the script which would eventually form the first episode of Only Fools. (The surreptitious passing of brown envelopes from person to person is a routine feature of the television business. It’s not necessarily as shady as it sounds.) Ray Butt and Syd knew each other well because Ray had been Syd’s assistant on a number of projects, including on an earlier series of Open All Hours, and Ray had now sought Syd’s advice on this casting dilemma of his. Syd took a look at the pilot script and definitely thought he could see a role for me in this show – and so did I, when I took the script home to the flat in Newman Street and read it in one sitting overnight.
The thing is, what Syd saw and what I saw didn’t match. I remember him asking me the next day if I’d liked that script he’d given me, and me saying that I thought it was brilliant and that I would love a shot at the Del character. Syd’s face dropped slightly and he said, ‘Oh. Not the grandad, then?’ In his vision of Only Fools, Syd clearly saw me as the cranky patriarch in the armchair, the still centre around which so much of the show would come to revolve. Fair enough, I suppose: under Syd’s guardianship, I’d done Blanco in Porridge, who looked to be on his deathbed most of the time; and I’d been Dithers, the raggedy hundred-year-old gardener who looked after Lord Rustless’s estate on Hark at Barker. I suppose I was beginning to work up a bit of a reputation as a man who played decaying (indeed, already decayed) oldsters who were more than twice his age – your go-to man for a bit of gaga, if you like. Well, everybody needs a calling card, and if it’s working for you … But that wasn’t the way I saw that script of Only Fools. It was Del for me, no question.
Syd reported back to Ray Butt and told him what I had said – and once more, apparently, as a bitterly cold wind blew eerily through the gaps around the windows, the sound of tumbleweed was heard in the room. Ray couldn’t imagine me in the part of a cockney grifter at all – simply couldn’t picture it; and the conversation would have ended right there if Syd hadn’t pressed my case by dredging up a memory of a moment in our mutual past, a feat of recollection for which I will owe Syd for the rest of my life.
The memory dredged by Syd dated from 1974 and revolved around the setting of a hotel snooker room in the north of England. Syd, Ray and myself were all staying in this hotel while on a location shoot for a Roy Clarke-written show called It’s Only Me, Whoever I Am – the story of one meek man from Rochdale’s attempt to escape the clutches of his domineering mother. We had been commissioned to make a pilot and had high hopes of landing a series subsequently – or I certainly had high hopes of doing so, eager as I was for a big break into television at that point. (Reader, the show didn’t quite work out. Let us quietly draw the kindly curtain of forgetfulness and move on. Let us also observe that, a number of years later, Ronnie Corbett had a considerable success with a show, Sorry!, based on a very similar premise to the one mentioned above, about the meek man and the domineering mother. But let us harbour no unduly regretful feelings.)
Disappointment at the hands of It’s Only Me, Whoever I Am was a long way ahead of us at this point, though. One evening after another optimistic day of filming was concluded, me, Ray and Syd met downstairs in the hotel for light refreshment and a game of snooker. Now, right from the moment I had first set ear on it, I had been fascinated by Ray Butt’s accent. I sound a bit London, too, but nowhere near as London as Ray did. Ray had the full-strength, no-filter cockney thing going on. This man’s voice was all Bow Bells, all the time. In fact, after you’d met Ray, it was tempting to redefine the definition of cockney, from ‘born within earshot of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow’, to ‘born within earshot of Ray Butt’s voice’.
On the fate-shaping night in question, as we moved around the snooker table, I’d been doing impressions of Ray – rather accurate ones, if I may say so myself. Syd now reminded Ray of that night, producing this memory as proof that I was someone who could turn on the deep cockney if required. So strange how these things all hook together. I must be one of a very small number of actors who have auditioned for a part in a major television series by taking the piss out of its director during a game of snooker, without either of them realising and three or four years before the part had even been written.
Anyway, that memory, stirred up in Ray by Syd, was enough to get me summoned for a reading of the initial Only Fools script with Ray and John one afternoon in one of the BBC’s famously featureless offices at Television Centre, over a cup of the BBC’s famously disgusting coffee. At this point, frankly, I still had a lot to do to persuade both of them – but especially John. John’s problem wasn’t that he saw me as a natural grandfather, as Syd had, nor that he saw me as an unnatural cockney, as Ray initially had; it was that he saw me as a natural loser. Not in real life, you understand; in terms of the characters that I played. John had seen me in Open All Hours where Granville, the beleaguered shop assistant, is trapped in his job, a victim of circumstance, and more than a little bit sad at the edges. Life’s vicissitudes haven’t defeated Granville, but they have certainly softened him. In addition to that, I think John had seen me in The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs, the (ahem) not entirely successful comedy series I had made for ITV in 1974 – and Edgar Briggs, too, was an unassuming and inward type of character whose victories were achieved despite rather than because of himself. By contrast, John envisaged Del Boy as an out-and-out winner – not in the sense of being materially successful, because obviously Del was the opposite of that a lot of the time; but a winner in his attitude, in the way he took the knocks, rode the bumps and bounced back, a man of insuperable energy and considerable ingenuity, with optimism always renewed and a new scheme always ready to be hatched. Hence the definitive Only Fools proclamation and the programme’s central takeaway message: ‘This time next year, we’ll be millionaires.’
Could I be that kind of person? Could I convincingly play Del? It was down to me in the reading. That was my first proper meeting with John, and I always say that I had a difficulty at first equating the figure in front of me with the script I had read. When I got to know him better and we relaxed in each other’s company, it was easier to see the connection. But while the writing was so lively and outward, John seemed so quiet and withdrawn. It’s an obvious category error to make with writers, though. You assume that the person who can be this funny with words on paper must be alight in the way a comedian is alight. When they prove to be more muted than that, it catches you off guard. The same goes, by the way, for Roy Clarke, the writer of Open All Hours. The funniest person on the page isn’t necessarily intent on being the funniest person in the room.
At the audition
, I read some bits and pieces from that initial script – ‘Big Brother’, the one that became the opening episode of the series, where Del acquires a batch of combination-lock briefcases off Trigger for a bargain price (but the combinations for the locks are, somewhat typically, locked inside them) and where Rodney, in a strop, leaves for Hong Kong, but is soon back, having forgotten his passport. I thought I read OK and Ray and John seemed happy enough, but you never really know in those circumstances. People aren’t necessarily going to hit you with the truth of their feelings, there and then. You close the door and leave them to their thoughts and just hope that the phone rings in a couple of days’ time.
Guess what? In a couple of days, the phone rang. It wasn’t a job offer, though. It was a request to go back in to the BBC and read again, this time in the company of a couple of actors who John and Ray were considering for the parts of Rodney and Grandad. So that’s how I found myself for the first time in a situation that would become enormously familiar to me over the next few years: sitting in a room with Nick Lyndhurst and Lennard Pearce, reading a script by John Sullivan and trying not to laugh while doing so.
Nick and Lennard and I were as good as total strangers at this point, professionally speaking. Nick and Lennard had never met before. I had acted with Lennard in a repertory production of The Rivals at Bromley Theatre – but that was twenty-five years earlier and neither of us remembered anything about it until it was brought to our attention much later. As for Nick, as a kid-reporter on an ITV children’s show in 1976, he had interviewed me on air when I was starring as Shorty Mepstead in Lucky Feller (another TV sitcom to whose mast your author nailed his youthful hopes, only to see them torn down after one series-long voyage). As with Lennard, I had no recollection of that prior meeting.
