by David Jason
I was also doing a lot of voice-over work for television and radio commercials at the time, running in and out of little recording studios in Soho, as busy as a little bee. There was a lot of snobbery surrounding that kind of work, it probably goes without saying. A lot of proper actors wouldn’t sully themselves. I always remember bumping into Michael Hordern (who was a proper actor, and no question) in a voice-over studio one afternoon.
‘Michael! What are you doing here?’
‘The same as you, dear boy,’ Hordern replied, without hesitation. ‘Being a vocal whore.’ (To experience the full, Shakespearean richness of this response, you need to pronounce ‘whore’ as Michael did, with two syllables: ‘whuuu-eerrr.’)
Well, a version of light prostitution it might have been, but I jumped at it. In those days, before I had really broken through as a television actor, I was just happy to be working – and, in any case, I loved the challenge that doing those different voices provided. In fact, it was while recording an advert that I was given a technical acting tip that has stayed with me for all of my professional life, on into Only Fools and beyond. I was in a studio with Bill Mitchell, who was one of the true legends of the voice-over business – a deep, gravel-voiced Canadian, known as The Bear, on the grounds that if an enormous grizzly had come out of the woods to do ads for Carlsberg, this is what he would have sounded like. Bill, who was greatly in demand, habitually wore black from head to toe, with a pair of dark glasses completing the look, and he spent a lot of time lubricating his unique and extremely valuable vocal cords in the John Snow pub on Broadwick Street in Soho. I’ve long forgotten what the ad was that we worked on together, but it involved some dialogue for the pair of us and, after a couple of run-throughs, Bill pointed out that the conversation would happen a lot faster between us if I took my breath while he was speaking, rather than waiting until he had finished, which was my natural instinct. If I drew breath while he spoke, I would be ready to come right in at the end of his line, and we would end up with this seamless exchange with no surplus air in it at all, which was dead useful in the tight time constraints of a commercial, and also extremely natural-sounding. It was such a simple, tiny note that Bill gave me, but I have always remembered it when doing dialogue, and it has served me well.
My old appointments diaries from those times are inked all over with details of studio sessions for commercials – sometimes as many as four in a day. It got to the point where I had a pager – a piece of bleeding-edge communications technology at the time, though now, in the age of the smartphone, it seems like the equivalent of a tin can and piece of string. The grey plastic unit, clipped proudly to my belt, would bleep and I would get a message to call Linda at the agency, who would want to dispatch me to Angel Sound or the Tape Gallery or Molinaire, or wherever, to do a voice for Esso, or Castella cigars, or McEwan’s beer or Fisherman’s Friend throat pastilles. I was on call, like a doctor. ‘The voice-over artist will see you now.’
I watched that area of the advertising industry explode. In the beginning, the studios were spartan places, cramped and underequipped, frequently in damp basements from which you would emerge into the daylight after a two-hour session with your own personal layer of mildew. By the eighties, as the money flowed in and competition flourished, studios were suddenly popping up with black leather furniture in the foyer, glass bowls of sweets on the reception desk. Minions would be dispatched to bring back salt-beef sandwiches for lunch – unheard-of luxuries.
Even then, you had to roll with the punches a bit, it’s true. Your idea of the perfect voice for a throat pastille (for example) and the producer’s idea of the perfect voice for that throat pastille wouldn’t always tally. You would do your bit and leave the studio with the cries of ‘Thanks! That was great!’ ringing in your ears. Then the ad would come out, and you weren’t on it – dropped, without ceremony. It was good training, though, and it made me pretty confident with accents that weren’t my own – confident that I could summon them up fairly quickly and get them locked down.
Indeed, the only time I can remember tripping up in that area was in something called The Bullion Boys. This was a feature-length drama that the BBC made in 1992, with Tim Pigott-Smith also among the cast. It was the story of how Britain’s gold reserves were smuggled out of London in a top-secret mission at the start of the Second World War in order to protect them from the thieving mitts of the Germans in the event of the anticipated Nazi invasion. The Bullion Boys is a little-mentioned piece these days when conversations turn to the greatest war movies of all time, though I hope you won’t mind me pointing out that it won an International Emmy for Outstanding Drama that year, so somebody must have enjoyed it. I hear a full-scale movie remake of it is in the works, too. Have they asked me to reprise my role? Funnily enough, no. Anyway, my character was a Geordie docker, and Geordie is a tough accent to nail – unless you’re actually a Geordie, of course, although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that even Geordies have trouble doing a Geordie accent, because that’s how tricky an accent it is. There were a number of occasions where the director would shout ‘Action!’ and I would set off strongly and get into my stride, only to feel my tongue starting to slip and to hear the vowels drifting away from me, and then it would be ‘Cut!’ and retake time.
There would be no such problems with Del’s voice. As a working-class Londoner myself, I had a head start. I needed to vamp it up a bit though, increasing the cockney content, tightening the top lip, forcing it out through the nose more than I naturally would and using the back of the throat. I wanted him to operate at volume, too – not just when out in the market, but in the flat and the pub as well. He needed to be bright and noisy, crisp and loud, ebullient. The basic, irrepressible, optimistic energy that was the key to his character had to emerge in the voice. So, although I had the native foundations to build on, there were still aspects to add and fold into the mix. Even now, people expect me to sound like Del, and are sometimes slightly disappointed when I don’t. In 2014, I was in a bookshop at a signing event for my autobiography, when a pair of women came to the table and we had a little chat while I was scribbling in their books. Then they said thank you and turned away, and just before they got out of earshot I heard one of them say to the other, ‘Blimey, he don’t half talk posh, don’t he?’ I was sorry to have let them down, of course. I had clearly failed to be Del enough for their liking – and not for the first time in my public life, I should say, nor the last, I’m sure. That said, I think ‘posh’ might have been stretching it a bit. Even post-knighthood, there’s more Peckham than Mayfair in my speaking voice – or, to be accurate, more Lodge Lane, Finchley. I do, however, have a number of highly convincing posh voices in my repertoire if I’m ever called upon to produce one. Maybe I should adopt one of those permanently and remove the matter from doubt.
So, Del’s clothes and jewels were sorted, and his hair and the mannerisms and, most important of all, the voice: I was all set to go. It fell together very swiftly and very naturally, which was a good omen. Indeed, I quickly got to the point with Del where it was as though I had a switch and I could flick him on and off. I’d watched Ronnie Barker do that countless times and had always been impressed by it. I’d seen him snap into Fletcher in Porridge and into Arkwright in Open All Hours almost like clicking his fingers. And then – snap! – he’d be out again when the scene ended. He barely needed a moment’s pause and the voice and the facial expressions would be right there. Of course, you can only do it when you’re absolutely sure you know who that person is, when they’re coming from a place inside you. With Del, I knew.
CHAPTER FIVE
Eating disorders and other bits of business
WE REHEARSED ONLY Fools in the BBC’s Television Rehearsal Rooms, or TRR, to give it the favoured acronym. Perfectly placed to enjoy the dust and traffic of North Acton’s lovely Victoria Road, and known to one and all as the Acton Hilton, TRR was a seven-storey, blank-faced, brown-and-grey concrete chunk, embodying all the warmth, char
m and approachability for which late-sixties, low-budget, British municipal architecture was celebrated the world over. I absolutely loved the place.
Why wouldn’t I? It was the venue for some of the best days of my working life. The BBC had opened up in there in 1970 and from then on practically every drama, comedy and light entertainment show that the corporation had given a green light to had passed through this grimly functional building on its way to production. It was where I went with Ronnie Barker and Syd Lotterby to rehearse Open All Hours, and it was where I went with the Only Fools team, mapping out moves, shaping scenes, gradually transforming those tales from the script to the screen. I would arrive on the dot at ten in the morning, striding purposefully across the forecourt and through the doors and getting myself checked in at reception, for all the world as if I were someone with a proper job to go to. Then I would head up in the unglamorously strip-lit lift, walk along the blank corridor and push through the functional numbered door into a large, barely furnished, slightly echoey room with yellow walls. There would then follow a three-hour session of preliminary comedy-making, after which, to fortify yourself ahead of the afternoon session, you would head downstairs to the TRR canteen and queue up for lunch, shuffling your tray along the silver rail, past the tureens of slop under the hot lights, the sausages, the chips, the eggs sliding around on their silver hotplate – eggs which were fried but were now also, courtesy of the hotplate and the lights, baked, and therefore roughly the texture and consistency of a rubber insole. Delicious. My plate would be stacked high. As Ronnie Barker always said, ‘You can’t be funny on an empty stomach.’ Jam roly-poly and custard seemed to be the eternal dessert option, though I never went there. Nothing is that funny.
It wasn’t just at lunchtime, though: quite a lot of food got consumed in the actual show. Quite recently, while I was working on Still Open All Hours, a director said to me, ‘I watch Only Fools sometimes, and I’m always amazed that you can eat a whole meal in a scene.’ But that’s what people do, isn’t it? They talk and they eat at the same time. You need to tuck in properly, too: none of this slicing off the tiniest piece of meat so that you can keep your mouth clear for your lines, which you will always see actors doing. None of this sipping politely at obviously empty cups, either. Del would never be so dainty; he would happily stuff his mouth. And then you would reap the benefits in terms of additional unscripted comic business. A pickled onion, for instance, could give you loads of work for your facial muscles, coping with the strength and the bitterness of it. Or you could chase it around your plate with a knife and fork for a while, struggling to pin it down and cut it.
You might, in the rehearsal room, decide to shift a piece of dialogue from the lounge to the kitchen, just to introduce some movement. (The parts of the lounge and the kitchen, by the way, would at this point be being played by a couple of stackable chairs and a table.) And then you’d say, ‘I know: while we’re talking, you make a bacon sandwich, for yourself; and then, when you’ve finished it, and set it down on a plate and are ready to tuck into it, I’ll take it.’ So you’ve got this additional thing going on under the script, that doesn’t need any extra words, but which adds colour and reinforces character. There were a couple of times where we had Rodney or Grandad arrive in the lounge with a meal of some sort on a tray and Del would merrily tuck into it as if it was his own – again, without remark. In rehearsals, one of us would say, ‘What time of day is this all supposed to be happening?’ We would work out that it was plausibly lunchtime. So Uncle Albert could load up a plate and carry it through, only for Del to snaffle it.
These were the kinds of things that would be knocked backwards and forwards at those happy rehearsal sessions in the Acton Hilton, and, looking back now, I can see how much of my input into that process rose directly out of my years in the theatre. Every show I’ve been in, I’ve considered it my duty to find things that I can add or invent to get a bigger laugh, and the presence of food in the vicinity has rarely let me down. I remember being in a production of Charley’s Aunt, somewhere in the 1970s, where I was required to dress up as a dowager old lady and where a scene at the tea table was the perfect opportunity to insert some additional business. I asked for a bowl of unchopped lettuce leaves to be on the table every night, so I could use a fork to steer these huge pieces of floppy greenery into my mouth, making sure to cover most of my face at some point, as if the lettuce was a flannel, and then folding the flaps very carefully into my mouth. Meanwhile the other cast members were trying to concentrate on their lines, which isn’t altogether easy when sitting opposite you is a man in a dress who is complicatedly chewing his way through sheets of vegetation.
Or there was the time I was playing Norman in The Norman Conquests, the Alan Ayckbourn trilogy from 1973, where Norman makes an appearance at breakfast the morning after he has disgraced himself while drunk, meaning that nobody else at the table is talking to him and he ends up conducting a conversation with himself. All that the stage direction required me to do, against the backdrop of this awkward silence, was go over to the sideboard, pick up a box of corn flakes and pour some of the contents into a bowl, but even as we were rehearsing it, it came into my mind that I could work this moment for something extra. The noise that the flakes made in the box sounded a bit like marching soldiers to me, especially if you tipped the contents rhythmically from end to end. Bizarre as it may sound, I spent a considerable amount of time with the props maker, trying different things in order to get the corn flakes box to render its best and most amusing impression of marching feet. If you want to try this at home, the key is to remove the flakes from the inner bag, so that they’re properly rattling around loose inside the box. Tip two: add some Shreddies to the corn flakes for extra bulk and heft, and therefore greater sonic depth. Other cereals are available – but they don’t work as well. If you think I’m making this up, I’m not. It’s what we did. ‘Atten-shun!’ Norman would shout by the sideboard. ‘Left, right! Left, right!’ And I would work the cunningly adapted corn flakes box: ‘Shkronch, shkronch. Shkronch, shkronch.’ You may be of the opinion that this was no sensible way for a grown man to spend his limited portion of time on this earth and, more importantly, his limited portion of mental energy. You would possibly have a point. But I will tell you something: it didn’t just get a laugh, it got a round of applause, every night.
Charley’s Aunt and The Norman Conquests were at least strong pieces. But the truth is, in the early days, when I was slogging around on the touring circuit and doing seaside summer seasons at pier theatres and picking up anything that would come my way just in order to remain employed, I wasn’t always working with, shall we say, top-drawer material. In a couple of cases (no names, no pack drill), if you had left it to the play on its own to get you your laughs, you would have been waiting a long time. So, even more urgently in those instances, there grew inside me this urge to go looking for extra stuff to bulk up the comedy. If, for example, the production had been thoughtful enough to furnish the stage with a tiger-skin rug, well, why would you not, at some point during the play, come to accidentally-on-purpose find your foot trapped in the mouth of that tiger-skin rug? And if that seemed to go over well with the audience, then why would your later interactions with that tiger-skin rug not become even more elaborate, until you were involved in a full-scale wrestling match with the aforementioned tiger behind the sofa? That was the way my brain became accustomed to work in those days. The resulting freelance efforts on behalf of the production’s entertainment value may not always have endeared me to some of my fellow cast members – particularly the ones waiting to come on while I fought with the carpeting, or worked the simple ringing of a dinner bell for a few moments of extra farcical value and, with a bit of luck, a round of applause. But my interests were the overall comedy of the production, first and foremost, and instinctive self-preservation second.
It got to where I was quite neurotic about it. ‘What’s my input here?’ That was the question I would always be aski
ng myself. ‘I’ve got to justify my involvement, haven’t I? Else what am I doing in this play?’ It was a form of underconfidence, of self-doubt, which was the thing that had nagged me all my life as an actor: the thought that I had come from nowhere, untrained, and that therefore I wasn’t the proper deal, that I constantly had it all to prove. Working on Only Fools in that Acton rehearsal room, though, I realised that I was beginning to feel and behave differently. Because the script was so good, it gave me confidence to express myself using it. I was working with genuine quality and I didn’t have to be constantly pushing outside the lines in the way that I had done many times before. The foundations were solid, the bricks and the mortar were properly laid, and because John had designed the structure so firmly, you didn’t need or want to be working outside it. That’s not to say that I stopped looking for things that I could add, for any extra bits that I could bring to the party – for a china dog that might work as a wig block, for instance, or for a bacon sandwich that might be rustled up and nicked. But I did so in the context of a script that was going to support me whatever, so I could relax a bit about it. That, as inadvertently as it might have been, was the show’s great present to me as an actor and I was extremely grateful for it.
Don’t bother looking for the Television Rehearsal Rooms now, by the way. The BBC flogged the building to Carphone Warehouse in 2009, cunningly timing the deal to coincide with the bottom of a recession for property prices. Carphone Warehouse in turn flogged the place to the London University of the Arts, and the London University of the Arts bulldozed it and put up a far prettier student accommodation block in its place. So the Acton Hilton is now, I guess, a seat of learning. Then again, from my point of view, it always was.
