by David Jason
‘From that day, I swore that I would never run away from anything in my life. I mean, you know, if a wild lion were to come in here now, my old April would be pouting like a good ’un, but I’d stand me ground.’
This rather pulled me up. ‘John,’ I said. ‘April? My old April? I don’t understand. What’s April got to do with it?’
John said, ‘That’s modern rhyming slang. It means “arse”. In other words, “my old arse would be pouting like a good ’un”. You know – in fear.’
I said, ‘Come again? How the hell do you get from “April” to “arse”?’
John said, ‘April in Paris – arris. Aristotle – bottle. Bottle and glass – arse.’
There was a considerable silence while the brains around the table all engaged with the complex parts of this equation. Not since I badly failed maths at school had I known a knotty sum quite like it. Eventually I said, ‘John, that isn’t going to work. Nobody’s going to understand that.’
John said, ‘It’ll fly – trust me.’
So we get to the live show, in front of the studio audience, and I’ve still got my doubts, but I’m trusting in Sullivan, a policy which, let’s face it, hasn’t tended to let me down thus far. We duly reach the moment:
‘If a wild lion were to come in here now, my old April would be pouting like a good ’un, but I’d stand me ground.’
I then pause to allow space for the laughter. Silence. Absolute silence. The line goes for nothing. All Nick and I can do is gather ourselves and move swiftly on, and hope that the post-production people can patch up the mess.
Afterwards, I said to John, ‘My old April actually was pouting like a good ’un out there. Your so-called April got sweet nothing.’
That was a rare lapse on John’s part, though – and perhaps the inflatable dolls were another one. What possessed him? I think John just saw it as one more part of the rich tapestry of human life – the rich latex tapestry of life, in this case. Let me be clear, the decision to involve the show in a drama about sex toys was not taken lightly. The pros and cons were batted back and forth during a series of painstaking discussions, which, as so often in comedy production, would probably need to be filed under ‘Is this any way for serious grown people to be spending their time?’ The question was, if we were resolved upon the use of inflatable dolls in the show, should we make our own, more innocent ones, whose purpose was more obscure, without real hair or gripping hands, to say nothing of the gripping other bits? This approach seemed to have due caution on its side. On the other hand, if the dolls came across as innocent, how would you sustain the comedy of embarrassment around disposing of them? It was clear that we needed to have, if not the real thing, then the nearest thing to the real thing. So the eventual plan was to acquire some actual inflatable dolls and then, in the privacy of a BBC props workshop, slightly amend them with the sensitivities of the wider audience in mind.
Now, this was 1989, before the days of accessible and discreet online shopping – a development which has revolutionised the purchase of all manner of goods, from sex toys to copies of my first volume of autobiography, which, in case I haven’t already done so, the publishers have asked me to mention is still available, both on- and offline. Accordingly, having little alternative, representatives of the props department were duly dispatched to Soho to source, compare and then bulk-buy appropriate dolls for our purposes. Oh, to have been a fly on the sex-shop wall during that particular shopping mission. Back they came with their mucky plunderings and work began on the necessary alterations. The dolls’ vital areas were glued over with flesh-coloured patches, not so much in order to spare their modesty as to create some modesty where there wasn’t any in the first place. The thoughtfully created open mouths proved a little more difficult to work with. We had to live with that ultimately unalterable trait and hope that innocent viewers would merely interpret it as an expression of permanently delighted surprise.
As for the faulty valves which John’s script called for, well, I hope you will believe me when I say that I am well outside my areas of expertise here, but apparently there is no such thing as a self-inflating sex doll. Or, at least, there wasn’t when the props department looked into it, at the end of the eighties. That could have changed, of course; technology does evolve at a startling speed. After all, we didn’t even have the Internet or decent coffee at that point, and now look at us. What I can say for sure is that, in 1989, the props people had no choice but to take a dozen or so of the standard, manually inflated dolls and doctor them so that they could be attached to a gas cylinder, concealed from the camera’s gaze, and go up like a bouncy castle when required to do so.
A couple of the dolls were brought into the rehearsal room, precipitating much mirth of a schoolboy nature among us. The banter that went on around these temporary additions to the cast was, I’m afraid, unprintable in a book of this kind. Let us simply say that it did its protagonists very little in the way of credit, and quietly draw a veil across it.
Next stop for the doctored dolls was Bristol, where the episode’s external scenes were to be filmed, including the impromptu inflation in the back of the Reliant Regal and the climactic explosion scene (not necessarily what you think; watch the episode back if you’re in any doubt here). At one point, the crew were using the hotel lift to transfer a number of these dolls from the room in which they had been inflating them to the space that had been commandeered as a stockroom. Of course, an elderly couple had to call the lift during that journey, only for the doors to part and reveal a man, a woman and an assortment of fully enlarged sex dolls. Somehow one imagines the explanation they were offered – ‘It’s OK – we’re just doing some filming’ – didn’t automatically set their minds at rest.
Anyway, the show went out and there were complaints. I don’t know exactly how many complaints, but it doesn’t take a lot of people to phone the BBC switchboard to kick off a controversy and soon the papers were onto it. There was no doubt the story was being whooped up a bit, but it seemed prudent to go into damage-limitation mode. Nick and I went on daytime television – sort of to apologise and sort of to defend the show at the same time. A woman came at us with a question about how we thought she should explain the dolls to her children, which I don’t think either of us could convincingly answer. Apart from stressing the lengths to which we had gone to make the dolls less sexually obvious, there wasn’t really any satisfactory argument you could mount – if that’s the verb I’m looking for. That daytime telly appearance was one of the most awkward experiences of my life.
In due course, the storm, such as it was, died down and the controversy went away. Or did it, in fact? In 2013, an Only Fools fan in Sussex, named Richard Foster, got into trouble with the police for driving his yellow Reliant Regal van with a sex doll in the back, visible through the windscreen. It was, he claimed, an innocent enough tribute to the ‘Danger UXD’ episode, but the police weren’t so sure. Mr Foster was threatened with a penalty charge unless he removed the offending item from sight. A police spokesman was quoted saying, ‘The officer felt [the doll’s] obvious attributes were not appropriate for family viewing.’ Nearly a quarter of a century later, the debate was still rumbling on, clearly.
While we’re on the subject of scandals stirred up by Only Fools, this would be a good moment to recall the time the Trotters were accused of being a pernicious immoral force. Not by anyone who actually watched the show, of course. People who watched the show understood the Trotters to be no such thing. Politicians in search of a headline, on the other hand … Well, sometimes when you stand up and talk loudly about something you don’t really know much about, you’re quite likely to end up embarrassing yourself, and that’s what happened in 1997 when Chris Woodhead, then the government’s Chief Inspector of Schools, decided to take a pop at the Trotters for being a corrupting influence on the nation’s youth, no less. ‘If Del Boy and Rodney are the only role models available to the young then we have a problem,’ Mr Woodhead said sternly, during
a lecture in London, arguing that the programme encouraged the idea that education was irrelevant to success in life.
Hmm. ‘But what about Rodney’s GCEs in maths and art?’ one was tempted to ask. You could hardly accuse the show of failing to promote the value of those particular two qualifications. Indeed, Del never failed to fall back on them while reminding Rodney that he was ‘the brains of the operation’. But, in all seriousness, Woodhead seemed to have formed the impression that the Trotters were reprobates and criminals through and through, which was, of course, far from being the truth. Del might turn a blind eye to the source of a bit of ‘hooky gear’ every now and again; and he might flog Trigger a wig he didn’t need, ‘just in case’. But he was no thief. He wasn’t wittingly on the wrong side of the law and, as I’ve mentioned before, he wouldn’t have been such a strongly sympathetic character if he had been. Then you have to think of the things that the show was so obviously in favour of: love, support, self-improvement, a solid family life and, above all, the enduring truth that the most important things are the things that happen at home. Yes, there were things that Del and Rodney were poor at, but that didn’t necessarily make them a poor example – neither for impressionable children nor for anybody else. Anyway, who said they were meant to be role models in the first place, rather than characters to be laughed at in a television show?
It was rather like the time at the 1992 Republican Party Convention when George Bush Sr laid into the cartoon Simpson family, saying that he wished American families were closer to the Waltons than to the Simpsons. The implication was that, where the Walton family was wholesome and admirable, the Simpson family was merely corrupt and corrupting – though as aggrieved fans of the show, and its writers, were quick to point out, the Simpsons embody and promote family values extremely avidly, much like the Trotters. They just happen to do their embodying and promoting in a show that is funny and ridiculous – much like the Trotters.
Ah well. Politicians and comedy never were an especially happy mix.
Incidentally, when we had finished shooting the inflatable dolls episode, the props department faced (just as Del and Rodney had done) the task of disposing of a small army of supplementary rubber cast members. As we were leaving at the end of the day, Nick and I were asked if either of us wanted to take one home as a memento. The question was put to us perfectly matter-of-factly, as if this stock of unwanted sex toys were just a plate of uneaten sandwiches – kind of ‘you might as well take them, because they’ll only go to waste otherwise’.
Nick and I exchanged a look. We would have had to rack our brains to recall even a single other occasion on a BBC shoot where we had been offered something for free. No question, either, that it would have been an item to remember the episode by. However, none of this outweighed the fact that the gift in question was, at the end of the day, a sex doll, and the idea of walking into the kitchen at home with one of those and saying ‘Look what I’ve brought back’ was hard to feel entirely comfortable about. Both of us politely declined the kind offer and left.
With regard to the rumour that, somewhere along the way, two or three of these dolls had gone missing, I will not be drawn to make a comment. I did not count them all out, and therefore I was not in a position to count them all back. Nothing would surprise me, though. People have their needs, after all. And as long as those dolls found a stable and loving home, that’s the main thing.
* * *
I WONDER WHAT Anthony Hopkins would have made of all this. He was nearly in Only Fools, you know. And no, before you ask, he wasn’t on the seemingly ever-expanding list of people who were considered for the part of Del before I was. But he did nearly make an appearance.
What happened was this. Part way through the 1980s I met Anthony Hopkins and his wife in a restaurant. He hadn’t yet played Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, but he had played everything you care to mention in British theatre, and he had starred in The Elephant Man and had played opposite Mel Gibson in The Bounty and was unquestionably a mega-star: a powerful actor and a huge name. It should have been me who was fawning all over him, yet, as so often with Only Fools, embarrassingly, the tables were immediately switched and, while I was still drawing breath, he promptly came out to me as a Trotters fan. ‘I love that show,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to be in it.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Always,’ he said.
Well, this was a bit of a scoop.
Casting a surreptitious look over each shoulder, I leaned in a little closer and spoke quietly into the legendary actor’s highly respected lughole. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I have influence. Strings I can pull. Levers I can activate. Not for any old geezer, it goes without saying. But in your case, Ant? Leave it with, my son. Leave it with.’
Actually, I don’t think I did say that. I was too busy swallowing my surprise. But I duly told John Sullivan about what had happened and he was practically melting with excitement. ‘Anthony Hopkins? Are you kidding?’ Just to have him in the show would have been at once monumental and hilarious. John immediately sped off and started work on writing him a part. I think John pretty quickly realised that he couldn’t simply make him a character – couldn’t have him pitch up as a gangland boss or somebody’s long-lost relative, or something. You can’t just parachute a Hollywood star into the middle of a television sitcom, unexplained. His stardom would have eclipsed the show and the whole thing would have become unbalanced and fallen over. But if he could come on as himself, that might work; if something could bring Anthony Hopkins, the film star, into the world of the Trotters, or take the Trotters into the world of Anthony Hopkins, it could absolutely fly. So John began to play around with ideas for which the Trotters and Anthony Hopkins could end up brushing past each other and meanwhile excited members of the Only Fools production team started to talk to Anthony Hopkins’s people about availability. Alas for us – though probably not for him – something came up for him in Hollywood and removed him from our grasp. After that hot flush of enthusiasm, the idea dwindled away. You catch these things at the flood, it seems, or you don’t catch them at all. Ah well. Maybe it would have lost the show some credibility if it had been seen to be bending itself out of shape in order to incorporate a Hollywood big gun. We never found out.
We did get Joan Sims, though – and British comedy film stars surely don’t come much bigger. The queen of all those Carry On movies played Reenie Turpin, Trigger’s aunt, in ‘The Frog’s Legacy’ episode, which was the 1987 Christmas special. The idea was that Reenie had been a great friend of Del and Rodney’s mother, enabling her to raise some questions regarding Rodney’s paternity, which, in one of those massive, long-term narrative arcs that John Sullivan was so good at, the show would later resolve. Joan was great. She was infinitely more experienced than anybody else on the set, but she brought no air of superiority with her and had no desire to get her part enlarged to suit her standing. She knew exactly where the centre was, did what the script asked and was real. She also related to us that the Carry On team were paid reasonably well, but nowhere near as well as you might have imagined and certainly not to a degree that was commensurate with the vast and still ongoing success of the series. Joan wasn’t bitter about it, by any means – and all credit to her for that. But she did think it was a touch unfair. Their deals gave them no part of any of the TV airings, apparently – and presumably the repeats of Carry On films must by now have generated enough to purchase and finance a medium-sized country. Fairness surely suggests the cast should have had some of that treasure.
That’s not the way we rolled on Only Fools. Had the queen of Carry On joined us in ‘Danger UXD’ she would at least have been offered the compensation of an inflatable doll to take home. You were in the wrong episode, Joan. Or maybe not.
CHAPTER TEN
Oi, Bazza!
ONE SIMPLE WAY to measure the increase in the show’s leverage at the BBC: in 1982, during the second series, we were obliged to pretend that the Dorset coast was Mala
ga in order to save money. In 1991, by contrast, at the end of series seven, we were all off to Miami to film the second part of a double-episode Christmas special in and around the Everglades. Wind back nine years, and the part of the Everglades would probably have been played by Thetford Forest while the Miami skyline would have been represented by some carefully framed shots of office blocks in Croydon. Now, though, it was Florida here we come. We considered ourselves blessed indeed.
When I say we were all off to Miami, I should immediately qualify that and say that some of us were. The plot took Del and Rodney to the States, Del having bought Rodney and Cassandra a holiday to help heal one of their frequent lovers’ tiffs. However, when it turned out that Cassandra was too busy at work, Del had taken up the ticket himself. (The holiday, you may remember, was bought with Rodney’s pension money. It would also emerge that Del was fully cognisant of Cassandra’s work diary at the point at which he made the booking. Fairly standard Del behaviour, then, all things considered.) The plot also involved a trip for John Challis and Sue Holderness, because Boycie and Marlene were meant to be on holiday in Florida, quite coincidentally, at the same time as Del and Rodney – and, of course, would be only too delighted to have gone three thousand miles west only to run into their friends from Peckham. Gareth Gwenlan and Tony Dow were naturally in the travelling party, as producer and director respectively, and many of our usual crew members. To the rest of the cast – to Buster, to Tessa Peake-Jones and Gwyneth Strong, to Ken MacDonald and Roger Lloyd Pack – we could only wish a fond farewell and issue a promise to bring them back a novelty fridge magnet, or something, if we remembered, which, on reflection, I don’t think we did.
