by David Jason
So, now I had my own place. And in that cottage, what starry behaviour would unfold? What acts of rock’n’roll-style debauchery would be witnessed? Well, dear reader, what can I say? I would get in at night, close the door and cook myself a meal. I might already have peeled the potatoes before leaving for the set in the morning, so they would be ready in the saucepan for when I got back. I might also have brought along a few runner beans and tomatoes from home and I would grill a pork chop or fry up a bit of chicken or something to go with them. Does Johnny Depp do this while on location? The honest truth is, I don’t know. He seems, from a distance, to do almost everything else. But I would recommend it to him, if he doesn’t. Making the meal was part of the winding-down process – a little space in which to sort my brain out. To the rest of the cast, who would have been staying in a hotel together and probably gathering for a drink in the bar and a meal out (certainly something my brother Arthur and Bruce Alexander liked to get up to), this must have looked a little stand-offish. It certainly wasn’t intended to appear that way. It was just something that I had realised I needed in order to get the work done – not least the script-learning. I always found learning lines to be a chore, and it wasn’t get any easier with the passing of time. In fact, I look back at the quantity of words that my younger self committed to memory for a play like, say, Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests and I’m aghast. There’s pages of the stuff and how it ever ended up between my ears I simply don’t know. I’m not saying the stars of the silent-movie era had it easy, but they definitely had fewer words to learn. Anyway, in my rented cottage, I would eat my meal, have a glass of wine, learn my lines and eventually retire to bed, a happy actor.
Things lead on to other things in unpredictable ways. We were filming a scene one day in 2004 where Frost turns up at a big house following a particularly nasty burglary in which the place has been utterly trashed. Amid the chaos, all the books have been pulled off the shelves of the library and scattered on the floor. We had done the shot where I entered the room and reacted to the mayhem, and now we were shooting a sequence where I picked around for evidence in the wreckage. There was a necessary break in the middle of all this while lights and cameras were being adjusted. I was in a slightly locked-in position at that moment, on a chair surrounded by mounds of junk, and I was asked, ‘Do you want to get out?’ But I thought it might make things easier from a continuity point of view if I sat where I was until we started up again. So I said, ‘No, I’ll stay put.’ So there I sat, waiting among the debris while the crew went about their business, not thinking about much, when I happened to glance down at my feet and notice the title on one of the books that were littered around me: Ghostboat. That rather intrigued me, so I reached down, carefully picked it up without disturbing the others around it, and turned to page one. It started with a present-day scene in the middle of the sea where the captain of a trawler is minding his own business when suddenly, right in front of him, a Second World War submarine breaks the surface. I thought, ‘Blimey, I’m interested in this.’ I realised that if I put this book back among the junk on the floor, I would never find it again. So I slipped the paperback into my jacket pocket and moved a couple of other books to cover the gap on the floor where it had been.
Now, let me make absolutely clear at this point that I am not in any way attempting, in the telling of this story, to condone the theft of props by actors during film-set shoots because that way, surely, only chaos lies. If cast members were to start permitting themselves, willy-nilly, to half-inch the scenery, then no programmes would ever get made. Or only very bare-looking programmes. However, the undeniable truth is, on this one-off (I swear) occasion, I walked off with that book at the end of the day and read on greedily into the night. I was completely gripped. It was by George E. Simpson and Neal R. Burger, who were writers I had never come across, and it was about this British submarine that had disappeared without trace in the Baltic, only to re-emerge forty years later in the middle of the Cold War, but with no crew on board. I loved that set-up, and the very next day I rang David Reynolds and said, ‘I think I’ve got something for us here.’
David was as enthused as I was. We talked it over and eventually decided that we could do it as an extended filmed drama, three hours divided into two ninety-minute parts – really push the boat out or, at any rate, dredge the submarine up. After that, David and I were about a year and a half putting the project together. We got Guy Burt to adapt it for the screen and Stuart Orme to direct it, and Ghostboat went out on ITV over two consecutive nights in April 2006. I played Jack Hardy, the sole surviving submarine crew member who had been picked up in the sea by a German boat but has no recollection of what happened to the sub or his fellow submariners and returns to the salvaged craft to help with the investigation. Quite apart from anything else, the part enabled me to outdo Frost by going beyond the moustache and growing a full seafaring beard. But overall the role was another shuffle in another direction for me, and one that I’m really proud of. We went to Malta to film the exteriors, which was no hardship. Still more excitingly, though, we filmed the interiors at Cinecittà in Rome, the great Italian film studio – birthplace to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and a bit of a step-up in general from the Leeds Studios on Kirkstall Road. They had a mocked-up submarine there, left over from an American movie, which we helped ourselves to. Those were some of the most exciting weeks of my working life, driving onto the Cinecittà lot at six in the morning, heading to make-up, working for twelve hours … it was completely thrilling, just like in the movies. At night I would head back to a little one-bedroom Italian apartment that had been rented for me at the top of an old thirties block, where I had access to the roof, with a chair and a small table and a low wall that I could put my feet up on, and I would sit there in the warm air with a glass of wine and the next day’s script and look out across the rooftops of Rome, all orange-lit, and I would think to myself, this is the dream, the absolute dream. Work doesn’t often supply an experience like that and when it does you have to grasp it and savour it.
The motto of this story: check carefully under your feet because you never know what you might be standing on.
It was also while working on Frost that I received a letter asking if I would consider going on display in wax. No, not a Crossroads revival: an invitation to model for Madame Tussauds. Now, that’s not a summons one treats lightly. When you think of the people who have been selected for that honour before you: Henry VIII, Freddie Mercury, Dr Crippen … The list is endless. So, I told them they could definitely count me in. It’s quite a process, though. They come and photograph you first of all, and then you head up to London to their studio, getting met at a side door behind the famous museum on Marylebone Road, and going up to a room which had strong echoes of the morgue in Frost, if I’m being honest: random arms and legs and stray bits of body all over the place. Not that there were stray bits of body all over the place in the Leeds morgue, obviously, but you know what I mean. In this slightly macabre workshop, they perform a bewildering number of measurements: height, waist, head, chest, inside leg, silly mid-off. Then they do skin tone and go after the colour of your eyes very carefully. I went back for a second session a few weeks later, when they were doing the hair. A woman was sitting there with my head on her desk – an arresting sight for me when I walked in the room – apparently pushing each strand in, one by one. I asked her if the whole business drove her mad, but she said she found it quite rewarding, and the head on the desk didn’t seem to be complaining.
Eventually I was ready to be unveiled. They put on a little ceremony at the museum and the covers came off, and there I was. It was like standing in front of a three-dimensional mirror – altogether spooky. My daughter, who was quite little at the time, certainly found it so. She was terrified and wouldn’t go anywhere near it. I got a slightly more positive reaction from my sister, June, when I took her in to see it a short while after. Madame Tussauds make it clear that you
are always welcome to go in and visit yourself, and they even allow you VIP after-hours access to yourself. So I was able to pop in quietly with June one evening, which was quite fun. The place is such an institution and both of us were tickled to think I had risen to the point where I was judged fit to rub waxy shoulders with Henry, Freddie, Dr Crippen and the lads. I believe I stayed on display in London for two or three years, after which they moved me to one of their other premises in Blackpool. At that stage, I lost touch with myself. Where am I now? I wonder. Answers on a candlestick. I’ve probably been melted down to help make Donald Trump.
As for Frost, he eventually retired from full-time work on the force in September 2008. I was sixty-eight by then, practising a good decade after the police would normally have asked for my badge, so once again the magic of theatre had won out over the rule book. I consider myself very fortunate to live in a world in which that can sometimes be the way. Even then, old Jack might have had a few more cases in him: not long ago there was talk of a revival in which the old boy, having retired to the Isle of Wight, was helping his daughter run a private detective agency. It never got developed in the end, but I would have been more than up for it. Crime-solving gets to be a habit. Once a copper, always a copper.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The truth about me and Golden Balls
MY PART IN the soaring career of David Beckham? It’s a small but – I like to think – significant one. I taught him everything he knows about falling over sideways.
It was early 2014. Only Fools had been off the air for eleven years; John Sullivan had departed this earth three years ago, taking with him the chances of any further plot developments in this particular area. Or so I had assumed. Yet the call had come through: would I do a short sketch for Sport Relief? John’s sons, Jim and Dan, had written a new script, which included some previously unused material written by their father. What they had come up with was a ten-minute skit intended to star me as Derek Trotter, Nick Lyndhurst as Rodney, and the former captain of the England football team as the former captain of the England football team. They had given the sketch the name ‘Beckham in Peckham’.
Generally speaking, I was inclined to shy away from things proposing to revive Only Fools. My thinking was that it was over, sad as that may be, and so the best thing to do was to walk on and keep walking. But in this case, I was of a mind to say yes, even before I had read the script. The involvement of John’s sons seemed to me to hand the project the official stamp of authority that it needed. Also, you don’t say no if you can possibly help it to Richard Curtis’s Comic Relief charity operation, of which Sport Relief was an offshoot. This wouldn’t be the first time I had pitched in as Del Boy on behalf of that extraordinary fund-raising machine. John Sullivan had scripted a special sketch for the 1997 Red Nose Day telethon, with Del, Rodney and Uncle Albert around the breakfast table and with Del announcing a plan to sign up Damien, his son, for a modelling agency. Del was also in one of the very earliest Red Nose Day shows, in the late eighties, part of a roster of live action in which various stunts and bits of action were going off in different locations around the country. The scheme that time was to back a van into a square in the centre of Manchester and then have Del grab a pile of junk out of the back of it (mostly old VHS videos, as I recall) and try and flog these items to some predictably startled passers-by. So off I went to Manchester, ready to do my bit. The Red Nose Day productions are very slick nowadays but back then they were a little more random, as live television shows taking place in multiple locations tend to be. I knew I wasn’t too high up the pecking order because we had a skeleton crew – the bare minimum of technicians – and no director had been appointed to the site. Instead, there was just an assistant in a pair of headphones who was liaising with the main production staff in London. Still, you want to do your bit, however small.
We reached the appointed moment in the evening, I got the signal from the assistant and I was away. ‘Now, gather round, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve got such a deal for you today – such a deal I’ve got. I’m not here to be laughed at, charfed at or generally mucked around. I’m here to sell my wares. They’re guaranteed to cure hard-core, soft-core and pimples on the tongue …’
This nonsense was patter I had thrown together way back in my youth, while messing about around London with my mate Bob Bevil, later my partner in the electrical business. When we weren’t singing stupid songs in made-up Italian, or riding around on my motorbike and honking the horn and waving wildly in order to fool complete strangers into waving back at us as if we were someone they knew (hours of fun, kids), we’d be throwing market trader banter at each other, just for the sheer silliness of it. There was one time when Bob and I had a job in the East End, working near Petticoat Lane, and we happened on this bloke selling dresses on the street, who had his patter down tight. ‘Listen, girls, step up – this is the bargain of the year here. You’ve all heard of Christian Dior? Well, I’m Moishe Dior …’ We imitated him forever afterwards and all those years later, while filming the marketplace scenes for Only Fools, I would use this patter, when the cameras were running, to kick a scene off, just to get everyone, the cast and the extras, loosened up before we got into the written dialogue.
So, out this stuff now pours for the benefit of the passing public of Manchester and for the watching Red Nose Day millions. ‘You’d pay for these, wouldn’t you, lady, down at Littlewoods? Well, I’m Bigwoods, me. No! Put your money away! I don’t want your five pounds. I don’t want your four pounds, neither. I don’t even want your three pounds, darling. One pound fifty, that’s what I’m selling ’em for here. Or five for a fiver! You won’t find cheaper. I’m practically robbing myself, girl …’
An intrigued crowd was beginning to gather and I was just getting into my stride and about to turn it up a notch when I heard the assistant shout, ‘Thank you, David. We’re out.’
‘We’re out?’
‘Yes, they’ve gone to Newcastle.’
‘Oh.’ I tried not to look hurt. ‘Well, are they coming back?’
‘No, that’s it. Thanks, David.’
I’d been on screen for about a minute. I must have had at least six minutes of that stuff, ready to roll. But that’s market trading for you, I guess. And live television. I quietly helped pack the goods back into the van and went home.
‘Beckham in Peckham’ was a more stable proposition and accordingly it was with a glad and willing heart that I reported one morning to Wimbledon Film Studios, a nice little unit in which I’ve had cause to work a number of times over the years, and which has an indoor soundstage but also an outdoor backlot with a street set on it – a little slice of Hollywood in south-west London. Or certainly a little slice of Peckham, very plausibly.
Nick was already there when I arrived. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while, so this was a bit of a reunion for us and we embraced each other accordingly. Our paths had gone in different directions since the show ended, which was always likely. You move on to the next thing. I had reached out to him a couple of times, suggesting get-togethers, but nothing had come back and it hadn’t happened. I didn’t push it, either. For one thing, I knew he was busy with work. For another thing, I am always anxious that, for Nick, I represent, to a certain extent, the downside of his career in acting. Think about it: I’m the bloke who took the terms ‘plonker’ and ‘wally’ – not to mention the terms ‘twonk’, ‘div’, ‘pranny’ and ‘dipstick’ – and wedged them into the English language, almost exclusively by shouting them at Nick Lyndhurst on national television. Obviously, I, as Derek Trotter, was shouting them at Nick, as Rodney Trotter, while reading off a script in the limited and fictional context of a comedy series, but that’s by the by. As an unwelcome consequence of these exchanges, Nick has lived with people shouting ‘plonker’ and ‘wally’ at him in the street ever since – and meaning it in the nicest possible way, of course. But you can see how having strangers greet you on sight in this manner would quickly lose its novelty value and be
gin to grate.
My version of this, by contrast, is people coming up and saying, ‘Hey, Del Boy – where’s Rodney?’ That, too, I have to admit, has lost a certain amount of its novelty value down the years, but it’s undoubtedly less alarming to hear, out of the blue, than a crisp ‘You plonker!’
Anyway, it was great to see him. It’s that brotherly relationship again: you can exist apart from each other for a spell, but when you do come together, you’re still brothers. Nick had been playing Shakespeare in the West End; he’d had the part of Trinculo in The Tempest. Very impressive. Of course, when he left the theatre at the end of the evening, people would be round the stage door with pictures from Only Fools for him to sign. John Challis went through the same thing. He took a role at one point on a London stage, in a dark and serious play by Ira Levin called Veronica’s Room. Levin is most famous for having written Rosemary’s Baby, and Veronica’s Room is a melodrama which is all about murder and insanity and the treacherous nature of people’s memories and very much not about second-hand car salesmen in south London. Further emphasising the distance, John’s role required him to adopt an American accent. Completely in character, he walked out onto the stage and spoke his first line, only to hear a woman whisper loudly in the front row: ‘That’s him, that’s Boycie!’ It was hard to give the show the slip, no matter what you did. It followed us all wherever we went – and it was going to do so, we realised, for the rest of our lives. I think all of us had to go through a process of reconciling ourselves to that, and Nick, who was by a long way the youngest among us, may have had it the hardest.
To say that the atmosphere in that Wimbledon studio was abuzz in anticipation of the arrival of David Beckham would be a gross understatement. You could have powered a pair of arc lights off the excitement and general jitteriness in advance of his appearance that morning, not least among those of a female persuasion. In this context, I might observe that the suspiciously swollen gathering of essential assistants that day included my wife, Gill, and also Nick’s wife, Lucy, both of whom had worked in the business and who, after all this time, wouldn’t always need or want to be by our sides at a film shoot, but who had nevertheless, quite by coincidence and entirely independently of one another, chosen to accompany their partners to this one. I wonder why that was.
