by David Jason
Mind you, exciting though it was to fly abroad, this didn’t look like it was going to be much of a holiday. Scanning the itinerary eagerly for the bits where it said ‘Time at Leisure’, I noticed that filming was only scheduled to last for three days, at the end of which, with our body clocks barely adjusted to US time, we’d be flying straight back home again. There was no ‘Time at Leisure’ built into the itinerary at all.
Imagine our disappointment, then, when, upon arrival, the production immediately ran into difficulties with the local union laws, difficulties which took a number of days to resolve, thereby expanding the trip so that it ended up lasting a week and a half, much of it necessarily downtime. Nick and I were so upset we had to go to the hotel pool and lie in the sun for hours just to recover. And when that didn’t quite work, we had to adjourn to a Miami bar and drink margaritas while watching the sun go down. Those were tough times. But, again, our close professional relationship kicked in, we clung to one another for support and somehow made it through.
Those union difficulties related to the fact that we had turned up with an all-BBC crew and the tight US regulations insisted that we employ a certain percentage of American unionised labour. Gareth was in negotiation for hours on end and the situation was only resolved when he agreed to take on some additional, American drivers, who then mostly spent the time on location standing around and not doing anything, apart from being additional and American. But thus are the wheels of international industry greased and at least we could now get on with making our television programme.
I think I can say without fear of contradiction that this was the first time that I had ever acted alongside an alligator. They say you should never work with children or animals, and they may be right. But you should certainly never work with animals that have sharp teeth and snapping jaws – and the same undoubtedly goes for children.
The alligator chosen for the part in ‘Miami Twice’ – after bitterly competitive auditions, I’m sure – went by the rather unimaginative stage name of Al the Gator. Al was roughly the length of Ipswich and, in common with many alligators in my experience, had a demeanour that said ‘Don’t mess with me’ – which I suppose could also be said about Ipswich. His role was to take a run at me and Nick, who were perched on a log, ready to sprint off in terror. No tricks, mirrors, screens or smoke were used in the assembling of this shot: when you see Nick and me sitting on our log, with Al just behind us, looking mean and moody and, above all, unmessable with, that’s actually how it was. What you don’t see is the ranger with a loaded rifle, who was standing by at all times – which was faintly reassuring, although you had to hope, in the absence of any rendered proof, that he was a good shot. You also don’t see the bucket of alligator-friendly titbits that were there to act as bait for Al and to get him moving in the right direction.
With each take, Sean, Al’s impressively muscled handler, would release him, Al would scuttle straight for the food, being filmed all the while, and then, when he was occupied eating, Sean would jump on him and render him captive again. Sometimes this would work like a dream. At other times, Al, who I think had some issues with concentration, wouldn’t budge and Sean would be required to give him a prompt with his stick. On one occasion, Al set off quickly, as planned, but not in the direction of the food. Instead he decided to run straight at the camera crew who, naturally, scattered to all corners of Florida, screaming. Sue Holderness happened to be videoing the action at this point, and would have had some possibly award-winning footage of panicked film crew fleeing an attack by a ten-foot reptile if she hadn’t panicked herself and ended up making a short movie of her own feet running across the grass. No future for Sue alongside David Attenborough in the BBC’s Natural History department, one sensed.
As well as the tangle with Al, the script also called for me to plunge into a swamp. How I wasn’t on an absolute fistful of danger money for this episode completely baffles me. Of course, John, writing away off the top of his head back in England, had probably assumed that this scene would be mocked up in the Thames somewhere around Henley, where the threat of actual alligators is generally low. But no. Del’s plunge into the alligator-infested waters of an Everglades swamp took place in the actual alligator-infested waters of an actual Everglades swamp.
It was actually me who did the plunging, too. I’ve always done my own stunts whenever I could – partly because I had among my role models, from the very beginning, the great men of physical comedy, such as Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy, practitioners of a brand of comic acting which is rarely seen these days but which will never cease to be funny as far as I’m concerned. Any chance to emulate those people, in the slightest of ways, I jumped at – often literally.
But the other reason I would do my own stunts was simply because I thought it looked so much better. When a stuntman steps in and takes over, you can generally see the join and that spoils it for me. The problem is, there’s a strong imperative felt by directors to keep the leading actors out of trouble – and not necessarily for purely sentimental reasons, either. The director knows that if his lead gets crocked then the whole programme goes up the spout. I learned this early, during a series I did for ITV in 1974 called The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs, about a humble pen-pusher at the British Secret Intelligence Service who, despite his general inadequacy in the face of life, somehow becomes the hero of the hour, time and again. There was a sequence which required me, as Briggs, to roll out of the way of a moving car. When we were setting it up, I was urging the director to let the car get closer to me before I rolled. Buster Keaton, for heaven’s sake, bust his neck falling off a moving train; surely I could be permitted this one slightly risky tumble in the vicinity of some passing hubcaps? The director, with one eye very firmly on his shooting schedule, insisted that the car was coming quite close enough, thank you, and he’d make it look good in the edit. So, I survived to film another day. But when I eventually saw that sequence back, I was bitterly disappointed because the moment didn’t look anywhere near as dangerous as I wanted it to look. It was another victory for health and safety and another blow to the memory of Buster Keaton.
On the same show, eerily prefiguring my time in Miami, I had to take a plunge into Regent’s Canal in London. The set-up was that I would go to leap aboard a barge from the canal path, miss and land up in the water. The feeling among the production team was that this was definitely work for a stuntman, but, again, I insisted on doing it myself – not for macho reasons (or not purely for macho reasons), but in the interests of the purity of the shot. Again, after much tutting and fretting, the director reluctantly agreed. The first concessionary requirement was that I get myself inoculated against the various diseases rumoured to be lurking in that suspiciously brown canal water, a body of liquid, it was made clear to me, into which barge owners were not averse to emptying the contents of their septic tanks. Accordingly, I was dispatched to the doctor’s to have myself chemically proofed by injection against diphtheria, cholera, tuberculosis, spots on the tongue and all stations to Edgware. I had never seen so many needles in one doctor’s plastic tray, and I returned to the set feeling like someone who had rolled on a hedgehog.
There was meant to be a coming together between two barges at the point at which I landed in the water. The two craft were meant to bump each other, end to end, well clear of my body in the water. When we did a dry run, though, the barges didn’t just meet, as intended; one of them rode up on top of the other and, in a horrible grinding of metal, they both twisted. Had I actually jumped into the water at that point, rather than stood assessing the scene from the bank, I would most likely have been flattened to the thickness of a newspaper between two vessels, and this book would quite simply never have got written. Thank heavens we did that dry run, then, rather than adopt the usual corner-cutting, time-saving approach of ‘shoot the rehearsal’ which was very much the policy on that show, and many others like it in my early years.
So, what this meant was that I approache
d the swamp-plunge moment in ‘Miami Twice’ as a man who was more than acquainted with the business of dropping into risky waters in search of a laugh. No injections were needed on this occasion because, of course, you can’t inoculate against the Everglades’ biggest threat, which is Al the Gator and his relatives. In I plunged, into those troublingly populated waters, for one take and one take only. I tried not to think too hard about the extent to which my thrashing about in the water could have been interpreted, by alligator families in the vicinity, as a dinner gong. My bravery and apparent sangfroid were much praised by the rest of the cast, but I can’t deny that, when I pulled myself back up the bank afterwards, it was with some relief that I observed myself to be in continuing possession of a full complement of limbs.
Considerably less risky was the scene with Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees. I have no idea who set the wheels in motion to make this appearance happen. I only know that John Sullivan was extremely excited about having a bona fide, multimillion-selling singing legend on the show, while big, bluff Tony Dow would rather have been eaten alive by Al the Gator than given anybody the impression that he was in any way star-struck. Or maybe he was just concentrating hard, because it was quite a complex shoot. Barry was on the shore, in his garden, which backs onto Miami bay, and Nick and I were aboard the tourist boat from which we had to spot him (and from which I had to unleash the very Del line, ‘Oi, Bazza!’), and the whole thing had to be coordinated with walkie-talkies. Shades of Spurn Point and the gas rig, during the filming of ‘To Hull and Back’, although of course the water in Miami was calmer and bluer, and the weather was warmer and the boat was more comfortable and there was a member of the Bee Gees on the shoreline … So, actually, not many shades of Spurn Point and the gas rig after all.
Budgetary concerns were still in evidence, though. The tourist boat that Nick and I were on wasn’t chartered by the production, which would have cost a lot of money, but was an actual Miami tourist boat, doing its routine rounds of the bay. Had we messed up, we would have had to wait until the boat had completed its tour and commenced its next one before we could try again. Barry, meanwhile, would have had to hang on in his garden, and maybe his patience would have run out because how long, ultimately, can you keep a Bee Gee waiting for someone to shout ‘Oi, Bazza!’ at him? Thankfully we nailed it first time, so I never found out.
When the filming was done, Barry had me and Nick round to his house for tea and biscuits. He was a lovely chap, and a massive fan of Only Fools, who, in the days before the Internet, used to have tapes of the latest episodes sent to him in the States so that he could keep up with it. I have a picture that I cherish, taken that afternoon, of me, Nick and Bazza Gibb, standing at the end of Bazza’s jetty, Bazza in a police patrol T-shirt and shredded jeans and me in a flowery shirt and a Dolphins baseball cap. Ah, Miami.
So, yes, ‘Miami Twice’ is my favourite of all the Only Fools episodes – and that’s not just the still vivid memory of the margaritas speaking. It’s also because I got to play two roles – Del, and Don Vincenzo Occhetti, the Mafia boss who happens to be a Del lookalike, creating the confusions around which the episode revolves. The latter part gave me scope to wear a terrific white suit and offer the world my best Al Pacino impression. Tremendous fun. And in the Florida sunshine, too. It’s staggering to reflect that we called this ‘work’.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A nation trembles
‘TIME ON OUR Hands’, the third part of the 1996 Only Fools Christmas trilogy, is the most watched programme in British television history. It’s one of four episodes of Only Fools in the all-time top 12, in fact, meaning that the show occupies a third of that list. The 2001 Christmas Special, ‘If They Could See Us Now’, gets to number 10 with an audience of 21.35 million. It’s the only programme from the twenty-first century that figures in the chart, which tells its own story about the way television audiences have dispersed in the years since then. The first two parts of the 1996 trilogy, ‘Heroes and Villains’ and ‘Modern Men’, had audiences of 21.31 million and 21.33 million respectively. But it’s the final episode that earns top place. When it went out on 29 December, it was viewed by 24.35 million people, all drawn to their screens by the prospect of seeing the Trotters flog an antique watch at auction – Del actually passing out with excitement and disbelief at this outcome – and thereby finally fulfil Del’s constant and undimmed prophecy, that one day they would be millionaires.
You didn’t find out the audience figures straight away. There was no such thing in those days as ‘overnights’ – practically immediate assessments of viewer numbers from digital data. I’m not even sure how audience figures were arrived at in 1996, to be perfectly honest with you. Maybe the old analogue system was still in operation, whereby a selected group of people carefully logged their viewing habits in a printed notebook, and then handed it back in to be examined and extrapolated from. Maybe they had upgraded to set-top boxes by then, which is the current system. Or maybe the BBC was sending out an army of people with clipboards and biros to peer through the nation’s curtains. It doesn’t really matter. All I know is that we had to wait about a week before the results were in. And the results said: 24.35 million people.
It was perfectly amazing to me. You couldn’t get your head around the number. You simply couldn’t imagine that quantity of people in any way that made sense or rendered it graspable. You couldn’t put them into a theatre in your mind and imagine playing to them. Your brain ended up reeling. There was, however, one aspect of the whole thing that brought it into focus for me. Before the show was broadcast, we were solemnly informed that the national electricity grid was braced for action. They were anticipating some serious interest in the show and, by extension, in their product. Accordingly, in addition to all those television sets being switched on, it was understood that when the programme ended, the number of people going into the kitchen to put on their kettles and make a cup of tea would cause a surge in demand for electricity that the grid would be required to take measures to insulate itself against.
This notion really got to me – perhaps inevitably, as a former electrician myself. It was exciting and ridiculous at the same time. Glorious sci-fi visions danced in my head: of troubled street lamps flickering across the nation as the credits rolled; of giant pylons spitting and crackling and swinging in the wind with their wires glowing hot; of blokes in lab coats in remote facilities, straining over levers, shouting, ‘I cannae hold her any longer, Captain!’ as 10 million households simultaneously reached for the PG Tips. And all because Del, Rodney and Uncle Albert had been mucking about in a flat. But sci-fi visions aside, this was the detail that hit home, that crystallised the magnitude of what we were involved in and how big this daft sitcom of ours had got. We had gone from fooling around in an obscure rehearsal room in North Acton to the point where we were officially a threat to the nation’s infrastructure.
Success of this magnitude wasn’t in my personal game plan – assuming there had actually been a personal game plan, which there hadn’t, not really. Did my head swim with it? Yes, a little bit, from time to time, and sometimes the feeling of swimming was enjoyable and sometimes it was less so – a little more like drowning. It was, for instance, fascinating and amusing at times to notice my growing media presence as the Only Fools effect kicked in. OK, there was still no interest from Vogue, but I did find myself on the cover of Radio Times – and that, in those days, seemed to be a signal of some kind of arrival. As for being on the cover of the Radio Times Christmas edition – well, that was agreed to be the Holy Grail, the sign beyond all others that you had been summoned to a place among the small-screen immortals. That happened for the first time in 1985, and very satisfying it was, too. (These days Radio Times tends to put a drawing on the cover at Christmas – largely because there’s too many people who get upset about being left off at that special time of year, and a drawing is the simplest way to avoid the offices getting stormed by miffed TV stars with agents in tow and vengeance in
their hearts. Smart move.) Setting those specific glories aside, though, there was one piece of press in particular which seemed to me to be indicative of a change in the air. It was a feature about me which appeared in a broadsheet newspaper – a long piece with a big photograph of me, not in costume but as myself. It was surprising enough, at that stage, to be deemed newsworthy by a broadsheet. But the thing that really struck me was the headline above the article: ‘IT’S A DEL OF A WAY TO MAKE A LIVING’. Something clicked when I looked at that. For the first time I was aware that I was being identified with the character, the boundary blurring in the public eye between me and Del.
That blurring continued when I was out and about. The success of the show meant I was now being recognised and approached in a way that was new to me. ‘There’s Del!’ people would say. ‘It is you, isn’t it? It’s Del!’ This was attention that I didn’t quite know how to react to or what to do with. Yes, it was Del, but at the same time, it … you know … wasn’t. Should I be me for these people, which might disappoint them, or were they expecting me to drop into character and be Del? Mostly it left me in a state of confusion and embarrassment. I took to wearing baseball caps and scarves in an effort to prevent the dilemma arising. I would have lunch out with friends and then, when I stood up to leave, before reaching the street, I would start binding myself in the scarf and pulling the cap down over my head. This baffled them at first. ‘What, has it turned cold or something?’ I had to learn to accept that, wherever I went, people would want a piece of me, which they had a perfect right to, but it took some getting used to. I started thinking a bit harder before I went out: ‘Do I actually need to go there?’ It was like it had snowed outside – but permanently, so that I was always asking myself, ‘Is your journey necessary?’
