Only Fools and Stories: From Del Boy to Granville, Pop Larkin to Frost

by David Jason

  There was one morning when we became ragingly keen on the idea of going into the wardrobe store, bright and early, and turning every item of Lennard Pearce’s costume inside out. Hours of fun. Well, a few minutes of fun, anyway – though not for dear old Lennard, God rest his soul, who took this assault on his clothing very personally and had a significant meltdown about it, during which it became clear that he believed this pointless and intrusive disturbance to his working day to be the work of juvenile hooligans. He may have had a point. Nick and I certainly promised Lennard that we would do all that was in our power to identify those juvenile hooligans as quickly as we could and ensure that some measure of punishment befitting their delinquency was meted out to them.

  The thing is, as I’m sure you will be aware, filming television programmes is an occupation in which bursts of furious activity are broken by long, long periods in which nothing happens at all, and sometimes even less than nothing. It’s a bit like war in that sense, I suppose – except that you get your own trailer. Or, at least, you get a trailer to share with Nick Lyndhurst. Actually ‘trailer’ might be rather a fancy word for the temporary shelter that was our refuge during Only Fools location shoots. ‘Grubby caravan’ might better convey the lower-than-Hollywood standard of the accommodation provided for us during those long days. Almost terminally aged by having been dragged around the country on film shoots for a couple of decades, and with its internal walls and ceiling joyfully yellowed by many years of heroically sustained cigarette smoking by idling actors, this highly undesirable wagon boasted a dirt-coloured carpet, a couch ruined by we dreaded to think what, and space which prohibited the swinging of cats. Not that we ever tried to swing a cat in there, although, during a rain delay, had we been bored enough and had a suitable cat been available, I wouldn’t have put it past us. Left to loll about in this wagon for extended periods while lights were rearranged, or cameras positioned, or sets adjusted, or during the thousand other delays to which filming is prey, Nick and I would very quickly find ourselves in the kind of mood in which messing about with Lennard Pearce’s costumes just to get a rise out of him could seem like the only appropriate course of action.

  Boredom would also explain the time in 1986 that Nick and I got into the most almighty row, a truly monumental shouting match – the one and only time, I can honestly report, that this happened in the entire course of Only Fools. It started in the caravan, where, for important reasons which I will duly disclose, words were exchanged between us at great volume and where, I’m afraid to say, one or two loose items that happened to be to hand were flung angrily at the walls, thumping against it and inevitably startling members of the cast and the crew walking around outside. The row continued with Nick throwing open the caravan door and exiting in a hurry, visibly upset and shouting, ‘That’s it. I’ve had it. I’m not working with him any more.’ Whereupon he stormed away to the canteen, with me standing in the caravan’s doorway, shouting after him, ‘Yeah, that’s right. Run off and cry to the crew, why don’t you?’

  The argument was as surprising for its violence as for the way it blew up out of nowhere, and these must have been genuinely shocking scenes for those obliged to witness them. Certainly a hush now descended on the set, with people exchanging anxious and embarrassed looks. The most anxious and embarrassed of them all was probably Mandie Fletcher, who had just graduated from being the show’s assistant director to being its director, and whose first day in the bigger job this was. Hard to reckon with how panicked and generally sick this bust-up must have made her. She had only been in charge a couple of minutes and two of the stars of the show had already fallen out with each other, seemingly terminally – every director’s nightmare. For the next hour, Nick and I sat separately in our fury, refusing to talk to each other and refusing to discuss the matter with anyone else, including Mandie, to whom I merely communicated that I was no longer prepared to share a trailer with Nick and that our working relationship was over as far as I was concerned.

  The day carried on, as best it could. The bits of filming on the schedule – none of which, conveniently, involved Nick and myself – were getting done, but there was no sign of any break in the silent impasse between the two of us and the general atmosphere continued to fester. Eventually, around teatime, not sure what else she could really do, Mandie phoned John Sullivan at home and said, ‘John, we’ve got a real problem here. David and Nick aren’t talking to each other, and they’re not talking to anyone else, either. It looks bad.’ Recognising that this presented a potential disaster for the future of his show, John immediately agreed to get in his car and drive out to the location to play the role of Henry Kissinger, and see what he could do to bring about a workable peace between our two warring factions.

  Fortunately for John, a second call reached him just before he left. Nick and I had just cracked. The whole thing had been a wind-up – a staged spat, meticulously planned by the pair of us during a quiet moment in the caravan at the beginning of the day. The best bit, as we happily explained, through eyes damp with laughter and merriment at how clever we were, was being able to see everybody’s frozen reactions out of the caravan window while we were in there bellowing at each other and chucking the ashtray against the wall. Oh, how Nick and I chortled and clutched at our aching ribs. For some reason, the rest of the crew, however, including Mandie, seemed not to find the big reveal at the end of this gag quite as funny as Nick and I did. Obviously they were in some measure relieved and glad to see the tension dispersed. But at the same time, their reaction appeared to be not so much amused as … well, unamused, I suppose, is the word that I’m looking for here. Possibly even angry. I guess it’s true that you can allow these things to go on too long, and in this case Nick and I may have misjudged it by – oooh, maybe an hour or two. Or possibly three. Ah, well. It had passed some time, which was the main thing.

  On an earlier occasion, Nick himself was the victim of the wind-up – though this time the duration of the prank was just right, I would suggest, and the eventual denouement didn’t lead to widespread anger and irritation, but to general joy and happiness, which is perhaps how it’s meant to be. We were on location in April 1982, a couple of days into filming scenes for an episode in series two called ‘It Never Rains …’ That’s the one I mentioned earlier, that I had got all excited about, upon reading the script, because it featured extensive holiday scenes in Spain, and who wouldn’t fancy a few days working in the sunshine and sampling the local paella if the BBC was paying? Except, of course, the BBC, as usual, weren’t paying and we were sent to Studland Bay in Dorset instead. No disrespect to Studland Bay, obviously, which is a very nice place. And I’m sure you can get a perfectly respectable paella there, too, if you try hard enough. But if your work requires you to lie on a beach in April in no more than a pair of leopard-print budgie smugglers, Spain is likely to be the more accommodating location. Let me tell you, pretending that you’re hot and relaxed when in fact there’s a typical English coastal wind pounding away at your most intimate recesses calls on the very deepest reserves an actor can muster. They were beating down my goosebumps with a mallet that week. Thank heavens this was in the days before high-definition TV, or I would have looked like a roll of bubble wrap.

  Anyway, the mock-Spanish film shoot in Studland Bay coincided with Nick’s birthday – his twenty-first no less, on the occasion of which, obviously, he would be expecting a bit of fuss and ceremony. So, realising that this was a very special day in the life of my acting partner and dear friend, I decided that we should all completely ignore it. No cards, no presents – no mention of it. Everybody in the cast and crew was in on it and secretly briefed: don’t say anything to Nick about his birthday. If he mentioned it himself – which he did – the instruction was to move the conversation along briskly to some other matter entirely.

  Now, given that he had done his best to put the word out, you can imagine the tingling anticipation Nick must have been experiencing as he came down for breakfast in the hot
el that morning. He would have been expecting a card or two, at the very least; maybe presents – certainly a friendly ‘Happy birthday!’ from his friends and colleagues on the production. Not a dicky bird. Same thing at lunchtime, when we broke from filming. Nick was probably thinking, ‘This is where they’ll bring in a cake or something, surely.’ He must have been bracing himself for a burst of the birthday song and the arrival of some flickering candles. He may even have been quaveringly awaiting the moment where we suddenly ambushed him and gave him the bumps. Silence, though. Utter silence. Nothing whatsoever to that effect.

  By the time we got back to the hotel at the end of the day, Nick’s disappointment had clearly consumed him to the point where it was now openly visible in the hang of his shoulders and the downcast nature of his face and he was obviously – and justifiably – feeling thoroughly sorry for himself. Twenty-one – and nobody cared. As we separated to go to our rooms, I asked him if he wanted to join me in the hotel bar for a drink a little bit later. ‘Just a quick one, mind,’ I told him. ‘Want to be fresh in the morning. Show to make, and all that.’ Having no alternative, Nick agreed to see me there.

  That evening, at the appointed time of 8 p.m., we descended from our rooms into the lobby of what appeared to be an almost entirely abandoned hotel. ‘Where is everyone?’ Nick asked. ‘I think they’ve all gone off to Bournemouth,’ I said. ‘Bit of a night out.’ With perfect timing, a couple of members of the crew crossed the lobby at this point. Nick, with faint but detectable desperation, asked them if they fancied joining us. ‘Sorry, mate,’ came the reply. ‘We’re going out. We’ll see you later, maybe.’ I don’t know about crestfallen: Nick’s crest had completely disappeared. Indeed, it was as if he had never grown a crest in the first place. Bad enough to be away from home on his twenty-first birthday, removed from family and loved ones. But on top of that, his big day had been completely overlooked and he was going to be spending the last hours of it with one other bloke from work in a Dorset hotel that, far from being Party Central, was rapidly coming to resemble the Marie Celeste.

  We went into the bar, thereby becoming the only two people in it, apart from the barman. We sat on our stools for a while and toyed with our drinks – for which I had, of course, let Nick pay. As we drank, I mostly maintained a remote silence, the only noise in the room being the gentle wash of muzak from the bar’s speakers. After about fifteen properly inconsequential minutes, I drained my glass and said, ‘Well, I think I’m going to go up now.’ Nick’s face fell another five feet. ‘But before I do,’ I added, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s go down to the wardrobe store and nail Lennard Pearce’s shoes to the floor.’

  It speaks volumes about what passed for regular, quotidian behaviour on an Only Fools shoot that Nick would entertain this as a perfectly plausible proposal, not even worth blinking at, let alone questioning. To him, it would have seemed like a natural follow-up to the ‘turning Lennard’s costumes inside out’ prank. Also, in the context of what was now officially the worst birthday of his life, the idea of devoting a few moments to spoiling Lennard Pearce’s composure in the morning might even have had something of a redemptive glimmer about it. Maybe, Nick most likely thought, the night was not yet completely lost.

  He was right: it wasn’t. The wardrobe store was actually a large, windowless room in the basement of the hotel, normally used as a gym but which had been requisitioned by the production team for the duration of our stay. I led the way, and down we went. At the door, I cast a surreptitious look behind me to check the scene was clear, then quietly opened it, nudged Nick inside, and switched on the light.

  Ta-da! With the costume racks pushed out to the walls and the floor cleared, the whole cast and crew were there, touting drinks, presents, cards, balloons and a whacking great birthday cake. Nick was delighted, of course, although he did greet the moment of revelation with the utterance traditionally heard on such occasions: ‘You bastards!’

  Did we take it too far? Was this a step too bastardly? I hope you don’t think so. From a more mature perspective, and as the father of a teenage daughter rapidly approaching those landmark birthday ages, I can see how this agonisingly protracted set-up might come over as a bit harsh – a touch cruel, even. But you have to place it within the fiercely competitive context of Nick’s and my practical jokes, and our determination to top each other royally in this important department. Had we been on location on the occasion of my fortieth, say, I’m sure Nick would have come up with something equally fiendish, if not more so. Anyhow, let’s not overlook the redemptive nature of the end-moment. A grand party duly ensued, and when the evening had worn on and numbers had thinned slightly owing to varying degrees of exhaustion and over-refreshment, the revels adjourned upstairs and continued in Nick’s room. The specially commissioned birthday cake hadn’t been touched at that juncture, so, with a view to performing a ceremonial cake-cutting in due course, it was carried upstairs with us. Whereupon, in necessarily crowded and slightly unsteady circumstances, John Sullivan accidentally sat on it.

  We fooled around a lot, then, me and Nick, but we also clung to each other for support when we needed it, and not least on those Sunday nights when we were filming the studio portions of the show, in front of the audience. Those were seriously tense times – a completely different level of anxiety from shooting on location, generating an altogether different surge of adrenaline. I had spent years playing to theatre crowds and knew how jittery that could make you in the moments before the curtain went up. But the combination of cameras and a roomful of expectant people was something else. You were always worried about whether you had your lines down, how it was going to play with the crowd. It used to really get to me and Nick. Nobody else in the cast seemed to catch it quite so badly. One of the mental images I hold most vividly from that whole period is of being backstage at those sessions, getting ready to go out and perform, both of us stricken every time, without fail, by nerves, pacing up and down and looking at each other and saying, ‘Why? Why do we do this?’ – but sharing it, and making it easier in the process, which is how things worked between us.

  Not long after Nick’s uneventful twenty-first, I was the victim of a cruel prank myself – though, for once, neither Nick nor any of the crew was behind it. We were filming on location and I came down from my hotel room for breakfast to find some kind of trade fair going on in the lobby. There was a bunch of stalls set up and people were selling their wares off trestle tables – mostly electrical items, it seemed. So I had a little browse and the one thing that caught my eye was an electric carving knife. The guy at the stall had a whole batch of them stacked up in cardboard boxes and he was good enough to give me a little demonstration of the machine in action, carving perfect slices off a lump of ham, quietly and effortlessly. The price for this clearly brilliant and enormously labour-saving device, though not cheap, didn’t seem exorbitant, so I bought one.

  Back home a few days later, with anticipation around the dining table at feverish levels, and bearing the proud demeanour of a man who is confident that he is about to bring carving the Sunday joint screaming into the late twentieth century, I got ready to wield my magical appliance for the first time. With the meat sitting ready, and the machine plugged in, I unsheathed the blade and depressed the ON/OFF switch, whereupon, all of a sudden … nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen for the next few minutes, while I repeatedly clicked the ON/OFF switch, checked the plug, examined the machine from both ends, shook it, rapped it on the table, consulted the instruction manual to ensure that the ON/OFF button genuinely was that button with ON and OFF written on it, as I had inferred, and so forth. Absolutely nothing. The standard, non-electric carving knife was humiliatingly retrieved from the kitchen.

  I was furious. What kind of chancer sells dodgy imported electrical goods off a stall to innocent and unassuming passers-by?

  What kind of chancer, indeed. Suckered. Done up like a kipper. Del Boy had been properly Del Boyed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT
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  Trains and boats and press photographers

  I WAS ON board a ninety-foot boat on the North Sea, moored off the Yorkshire coast near Spurn Point, and it wasn’t looking pretty. I lay on a bed in the aft cabin, clutching my stomach and groaning quietly. Ray Butt stood over me in consternation. ‘I’ve never had seasickness like this before, Ray,’ I muttered, between deep breaths. ‘You’re going to have to leave me behind.’

  This was not news Ray needed to hear. As if the stakes weren’t already high enough. Ray had had to go on his knees to the BBC to get the budget for this shoot. Shooting on the high seas doesn’t come cheap. There was the cost of our vessel, a safety boat, a helicopter on stand-by to fly a skeleton crew onto a British Gas rig, tight timings to meet – and here, at the very start of the day, with the sun barely up, his leading man was already groaning on a bunk bed and wanting to get off.