by David Jason
I couldn’t keep it up for long, though. After half a minute or so of glimpsing, between groans, the colour drain from Ray’s face, I jumped up and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Gotcha.’ I had rarely felt better, actually. Having suffered seasickness in my time and knowing full well how unfunny it is, your author had smartly dosed himself in advance with Kwells anti-nausea tablets, to which I wholeheartedly recommend you the next time you’re filming a Christmas special edition of a sitcom on the North Sea. Excellent work that day by the make-up department in the greening of my gills, by the way. It’s the little touches, the attention to detail, that make all the difference in the delivery of a convincing wind-up.
This was the early autumn of 1985 and we were in the middle of making ‘To Hull and Back’ – the first of the proper Only Fools Christmas specials, which followed series four. I mean ‘proper’ in the sense that was a full-blown ninety-minute story rather than a standard-length extra episode of the show packaged for the season, which had been the case of the earlier series. John Sullivan had come up with a corking feature-length tale in which Del agrees to act as a mule for a shipment of diamonds procured in Amsterdam by Boycie and his business partner Abdul Khan, played by Tony Anholt, who was familiar to viewers around this time from his role in the drama series Howards’ Way. To avoid the scrutiny of DC Slater (our old friend Jim Broadbent, back again), who is on to Boycie’s smuggling ruse and is having the airports watched, Del decides to travel to Amsterdam by water in a privately hired boat. He also decides to call on Uncle Albert’s nautical experience and appoint him as ship’s captain. Of course, the truth is Albert spent his navy career in a storeroom in Portsmouth and he can barely captain his own way out of a lavatory block, so the trip is doomed. On the morning I’m talking about we were off at the crack of dawn to film the now famous sequence where Del, by this point thoroughly lost at sea, calls up to a worker on a gas rig for directions.
The Inge, our commissioned vessel, wasn’t exactly a gin palace, or in any way the kind of item on which you might go swanking into the harbour at Monte Carlo. In fact, it looked as if it had been recently dredged up off the ocean floor. A blistered and creaking old tub in a fetchingly municipal shade of pale blue, it wasn’t built for comfort, and once in open water it was soon rocking about like something at a fairground. Me (suitably medicated), Nick (also medicated) and Buster (somehow oblivious) seemed OK. But the production crew were all over the place. As the six-hour voyage out to the gas rig wore on, and the Inge’s pitching and tossing showed no signs of abating, illness among the cameramen, sound operatives, make-up girls, etc., was rife and the packed lunches so thoughtfully provided for our voyage by the hotel in Hull – ham and egg sandwiches in cling film, cheese-and-onion crisps – began to look less and less like a good idea.
Particularly grievously affected was one of the dressers, a lovely but rather delicate man who also happened to wear a hairpiece. Now, as I probably don’t need to point out, it takes a well-attached hairpiece to withstand an attack of seasickness in gusting winds on the North Sea. Thus our journey found the poor bloke slumped over the side of the boat, emptying the contents of his stomach into the sea while simultaneously, with one carefully applied hand, holding his supplementary head-coverage in place. This vision of distress provoked a profound reaction from one of the electricians, a cockney, who, far from being moved to sympathise with a struggling fellow crew member, became loudly convinced that this was the funniest thing he had ever seen. The electrician stood on the deck, pointing at the heaving dresser and crying out to me through his tears of mirth, ‘Dave – he’s losing his Irish!’ (Cockney rhyming slang: Irish jig, wig. ‘Dave, he’s losing his syrup’ would also have qualified: syrup of figs, wig(s).)
For a while it looked bad for our chances of having enough able bodies to form a workable crew, but fortunately, by the time we reached the rig, we were just about fit enough to go. We were down below on the sea, with a camera shooting up; and Ray Butt was on the rig with the actor playing the rigger, and a cameraman, shooting back down at us in the boat. The moves were all coordinated via walkie-talkies. With both cameras rolling, I duly shouted my line (‘Which way to Holland?’), and the man on the rig duly delivered his shouted reply (‘Holland? [Points] It’s over there!’), and that was it. I think we had it down first take, but we did a few more, just because it had been a long way to go and it would have felt wrong not to, given the money that had been spent getting us out there in the first place.
Everyone assumed that Ray had secured himself a cushy number by electing to be part of the skeleton crew on the gas rig. This was a man who generally knew how to look after his best interests, after all. Ray’s standard, and very smart, approach to the rigours of on-location night-shooting was to stuff the pockets of his big, furry-hooded director’s parka with a healthy serving of miniatures from the hotel minibar, to the point where you would sometimes find him clanking around the set like a milk float. On this occasion, rather than travel with us on the six-hour trawl from Spurn Point, having seen us all on board, he had gone back ashore, hopped on a British Gas helicopter that was doing a routine crew run, and flown direct to the rig. This would ensure, very conveniently, that he missed the six-hour return trip, too. However, he got his comeuppance. After the shoot, Ray had to sit around on a gas rig with the cameraman, twiddling his thumbs and bored out of his box, waiting for the British Gas helicopter to turn up, and the Inge actually beat him home. Also the production crew, who were never slow to spot a potential party opportunity in the schedule, had thoughtfully loaded the Inge with booze for the return journey. By the time the boat berthed back in Hull, those who couldn’t stand up on account of seasickness had been joined by those who couldn’t stand up on account of alcohol consumption.
‘To Hull and Back’ was filmed entirely outside London – another first. We had already started using Bristol for exterior shots, because it was cheaper and simpler to film there than in the capital. But we had always done the interior studio stuff back in London. Here, though, the sets for the flat and for the Nag’s Head were driven up from Television Centre and replicated in a Hull warehouse and there were no studio sequences with an audience anywhere in the show, which made it feel more like a feature film than a television production. I think we were all rather thrilled about that. Also thrilling, but at the same time disconcerting, were the first signs we saw of the extent to which the show was now becoming a public item – and us with it. I’m not saying it was Beatlemania for us, up there in Hull. People weren’t screaming and flinging themselves on top of us and trying to collect hanks of our hair and strips of our clothing whenever they saw us. More’s the pity, perhaps. Yet it seemed that the temperature around the production had suddenly risen. We were creating a gathering wherever we went, and there were people outside the hotel and in the lobby, apparently just standing around and waiting to catch a glimpse of us. The press were more visibly present, too. They weren’t going after us personally, but they were certainly going after the show. Photographers were trying to get pictures of the action on location and you realised that what the Only Fools team was getting up to was somehow now a viable news story – a potential exclusive. For those of us who had travelled through life more or less incognito up to this point, it felt very strange.
By the time we made ‘The Jolly Boys Outing’, the one about the fateful seaside day out and the exploding coach, which was shot on the seafront and the streets of Margate in 1989, the public attention we were getting had reached such a level that the production was routinely hiring security guys to keep an eye on the crowds and prevent people getting in the way of the filming. It was becoming increasingly difficult to go anywhere without being noticed and attracting a knot of fans – which was nice, of course, but also a bit intimidating sometimes, and occasionally, when you were trying to get on with something, it could be a bit of a hindrance. The security guys were a useful buffer.
One day, during a break in shooting, John Challis realised he
needed some cigarettes and asked one of the guys standing on the edge of the cordon if he would mind accompanying him to the shop, just in case he got swamped by bystanders. Off they went up the road. John slipped into the newsagent’s, bought his cigarettes and then, as the pair of them headed back to the shoot, he engaged his minder in conversation, asking him how long he’d been doing this kind of work.
‘What do you mean?’ said John’s minder.
‘You know – doing security for people,’ said John.
‘Oh, no,’ the bloke said. ‘I manage a supermarket. I was just on my lunch break. Can I have your autograph, Boycie?’
The presence of the paparazzi was a problem that the programme needed to take particular precautions against. A snap of your big set-piece moment, or your long-planned visual gag, printed in a newspaper before the show was broadcast, could be a horrible spoiler, ruining the surprise for the viewers and thereby nuking the joke. When Tony Dow was directing (he took over from Ray Butt in 1988 after Ray was given his own department to run at ITV), he would get particularly agitated about it. There was more than one occasion on location when photographers were spotted lurking furtively nearby, and Tony had to be physically restrained from going over and lumping them. In the case of the Batman and Robin sequence from ‘Heroes and Villains’, in 1996, the secrecy surrounding the set reached virtually FBI levels of density. Those pages of the script were circulated only to people who genuinely needed to know about them, on a ‘for your eyes only’ basis. If we had had the whereabouts to transpose them into an uncrackable code, I’m sure we would have done. The filming was conducted on a closed street in Bristol with security posted at both ends, and was done very late at night to minimise the likelihood of prying eyes, and more particularly prying lenses.
As it happened, our biggest problem that night wasn’t unwanted press intrusion; it was an outbreak of disgraceful corpsing on the part of the leading players, who ought to have known better. Nick and I, dressed for the publican Harry Malcolm’s party as Batman and Robin (though, of course, that party turns out to be a wake, Harry Malcolm having died in the week, unbeknown to Del and Rodney), were doing the conversation sequence in the broken-down van – a set-up, by the way, inspired by a passing comment of a friend of John’s who was going to a vicars and tarts party with his wife, having decided that his wife should go as the vicar and he should go as the tart, and was worrying about breaking down in Stockwell on the way there. By this point in the shoot, it was about two in the morning and everybody in the crew was more than ready to finish up and go to bed. Unfortunately, every time we went for a take, Nick would start talking in that ridiculous costume and he would look so stupid that I would start to go. That, in turn, would set Nick off and the pair of us would be reduced to a giggling mess, within the space of about half a line. Tony Dow was not best pleased. But that’s crime fighting.
It all finished happily, of course. The Batman and Robin segment is one of the Only Fools sequences that people still constantly hark back to – the particular genius of it being, in my opinion, the mist that Tony Dow decided to spread across the street for the pair of us to emerge through, as we abandon the van and run to the party, inadvertently interrupting the mugging of Councillor Murray, whose attackers turn and flee in fear and confusion at the sight of the caped crusaders. It was one of those moments where it all comes together: the set-up, the location, the costumes, the characters and the tiny extra details, all gelling in one very funny moment. It was Nick, by the way, who remembered how Batman and Robin used to bunch a fist and punch the palms of their hands before going into action, a gesture which we were rather childishly pleased to be able to incorporate into our impression. One leaked photo, though, could have ruined it.
CHAPTER NINE
Only Fools and sex toys
DID WE GO too far with the blow-up dolls? Clearly there were a few people who thought so. It was the sole time Only Fools found itself accused of overstepping the mark for a family show. In Del’s defence, he didn’t know what kind of dolls they were when he agreed to take them off Denzil’s hands. He just thought they were dolls. He didn’t know they were … you know … dolls.
Still, there’s no getting away from it: the ‘Danger UXD’ episode in series six stirred a public controversy regarding taste and morality which was unique in the history of the show. (That title, by the way, possibly hasn’t aged well. You need to know that there was a seventies television drama called Danger UXB about the work of the force sent to deal with the unexploded bombs, or UXBs, that were left lying around in London after the Blitz. Hence, in our case, UXB became UXD, for unexploded doll. Thank you for your attention.) John Sullivan had apparently been to a party where somebody, for a lark, had filled the room with inflated dolls and this amusing approach to interior decor had planted in his head the idea for a plotline. Partly these dolls looked funny en masse; but also, how was the host of this party going to get rid of these dolls discreetly? So he cooked up a story involving a batch of self-inflating dolls – but with faulty valves, making them prone to going up at the wrong moment and in unfortunate places, such as in the back of the Trotters’ Reliant Regal and behind the bar of the Nag’s Head. Just to add to the chaos, it also becomes apparent that these dolls are filling up with highly flammable propane, meaning that they are essentially bombs waiting to go off. Slapstick opportunities galore here. Albeit slightly adult slapstick.
Only Fools had always been a clean show, ever mindful that there were children in the room. Certainly nobody swears. In ‘Miami Twice’, Boycie had a line, when he caught a whiff of Del after the latter emerged from an unfortunate dunking in a swamp (of which more later): ‘Blimey, Del, you smell like a vegetarian’s fart.’ That was probably about as close to the wire as Only Fools ever got – and that was in 1991, in a period when the rules around acceptable language on television were rapidly relaxing, and in the slightly looser circumstances of a Christmas special. I’m not sure the show would have risked even that line in a regular series in the 1980s.
Now, I’m not prudish about swearing, by any means. Indeed, I have been known to crack open Roget’s Profanity Thesaurus myself and turn straight to the pages under ‘F’ when the situation has arisen. For instance, the time I ran over my own foot with a Flymo, I believe I automatically unleashed a torrent of the kind of language that would have bothered the late Mary Whitehouse enormously had she been tuned in, which fortunately she wasn’t. But, with due respect to the memory of Mrs Whitehouse, who I’m sure meant well, there’s no point being overly censorious about these things. Those words are part of the language too, as far as I’m concerned, and as long as it’s between consenting adults, you might as well use them to express yourself when you need to. And as I lay on the grass beside my Flymo that afternoon with one of my shoes in shreds, I definitely felt I needed to – and took, I think, some small measure of comfort from so doing.
Incidentally, during my convalescence in East Grinsted hospital after that horticultural mishap, Ronnie Barker, typically, sent me – or, at any rate, Dithers the gardener – a letter of commiseration, written on headed notepaper in orange ink and purporting to be from Lord Rustless of Chrome Hall. ‘My Dear Dithers,’ it began, ‘what’s all this I hear about you cutting off your toes, you damn fool? I never did like that lawnmower, and neither did Bates, ever since the time you came up behind her a bit sharpish when she had her head down that rabbit-hole, and you hit her amidships up the back rockery. Do take more care, old fruit.’ For the record, I should point out, contrary to Lord Rustless’s inference, that no toes were actually severed during the mowing of my lawn, but the big one on my left foot, which bore the brunt of this mechanical assault, was never the same afterwards.
So, it’s a firm ‘yes’ to swearing from me, in the right circumstances. It’s just that I don’t think a comedy show on television is the right circumstances. Again, this is not prudishness on my part. In my view, swearing in comedy conforms to the law of diminishing returns: and I speak as
someone who recently sat in his living room watching an Amy Poehler movie with his teenage daughter. Swearing has its initial impact, that big buzz of transgression for both the audience and the performer, but then you’ve got nowhere to go with it, I reckon, except down. Also, as far as mainstream television comedies are concerned, you have to remember that there is still, even now, a significant portion of the audience that are going to be offended by swearing – and not just mildly disapproving of it, but actually upset by it. They’re entitled to feel that way and I’ve never worked out how you could decide that those people, and their offence, wasn’t worth anything to you. That strikes me as a bit arrogant. One thing I do know is that I never received a single letter from anyone complaining that they didn’t enjoy an episode of Only Fools, or Frost, or The Darling Buds of May, or whatever, because it didn’t have any swearing in it.
With Only Fools, a commitment to cleanliness in the language department worked to the show’s advantage. The restriction on swearing forced John Sullivan into feats of linguistic ingenuity for which the programme is now loved and remembered. Words like ‘twonk’, ‘plonker’, ‘nerk’ and ‘dipstick’ were the show’s hallmark, its incidental catchphrases and calling cards. Then there was Del’s catalogue of misappropriated French exclamations: ‘mange tout’, ‘menage à trois’, ‘boeuf à la mode’, ‘bonnet de douche’. Again, you had to wonder: if John had been able to access the full panoply of the English language in all its historic saltiness, would he have gone there? If he had felt free to flick through the profanity thesaurus, would we ever have seen Del respond to an explosive situation by shouting, ‘Châteauneuf du Pape’?
John also had cockney rhyming slang, of course, to colour things up and also to act as a screen against vulgarity – although there was one time when the screen was so thick that even I, a fellow Londoner, couldn’t see through it. We were sitting around a table, the cast and John, having a first read-through of an episode called ‘The Losing Streak’, from the second series, in 1982. We had reached a rather moving sequence where Del tells Rodney about the night their father walked out on them, taking everything with him, including the money from Rodney’s piggy bank and Del’s birthday cake – sobering details which Rodney was too young to know at the time. At that point, I got to the following line:
