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

by David Jason

  Thus attired, we arrive at the Porchester Hall, which turns out to be an art deco building on a street corner in Bayswater. Porchester Hall is, of course, just a typing error away from being the Dorchester Hotel, where they stage the BAFTAs. But it’s a considerable distance across the typewriter from the O2 Arena, which is where the National Television Awards are staged. Peering uneasily out of the car window, I suddenly have a dim memory of doing some filming somewhere around here, back in nineteen hundred and frozen to death. What the filming was for, though, I can’t recall. Was it, possibly, that advertisement for Tetley tea bags where I had to jump into a giant teacup and get bombarded by enormous polystyrene sugar lumps, nearly having my head sliced off my shoulders in the process? Ah, happy days.

  What I can see now, though, is a thick crush of people on the pavement, a traffic jam in the vicinity of the front doors. Some of the people in the crush are clearly dressed for the party and trying to get into the venue; other people in the crush are clearly watching the people who are dressed for the party trying to get into the venue, and there seems to be no obvious separation between the two. My anxiety levels rise a little.

  We can’t get the car near the entrance, on account of the other cars busily discharging their human cargo, and we can’t really get out of the car where we are, on account of the crush of people on the pavement. So the driver carries on, travels round the block and makes another pass at it, like a plane trying to perform a tricky landing on a remote airfield in thick fog. This time he manages to find some clean air and a break in the weather and drops in behind another couple of cars, and after some nudging and noodling, we get ourselves up against the kerb, with only the width of the pavement separating us from the entrance and the sanctuary of the venue.

  Nevertheless, the width of that pavement still contains an entire forest of waiting people. The word is out, clearly, on Nick’s and my attendance, because lots of these people seem to have photographs of the pair of us dressed as Batman and Robin, and, even before we open the doors, they are already pushing these pictures up against the closed windows of the car for autographs.

  Actually, on closer inspection, some of these people appear to be holding whole portfolios of photographs covering every era of the show, suggesting that they are either a) Only Fools fans of an especially avid kind, or b) canny entrepreneurs with thriving online businesses selling signed memorabilia, which, it has to be said, you get a lot of these days. Well, good luck to them, either way, I guess. Whatever their backgrounds and purposes, though, I feel I have, alas, no option at this particular moment but to ease open the car door as far as it will go, haul myself upright as far as I will go, put my head down as low as it will go, and press my way through the lot of them. The fear flowing through my somewhat over-sensitised mind informs me that otherwise, if I stop to sign even one of these brandished pictures, I’ll be swamped, trodden flat and subsequently scraped off the pavement by a road cleaner the following Tuesday.

  So, using the skills I acquired in twenty quietly impressive years as a club rugby player, I lower my shoulder, crouch slightly to adjust my centre of gravity, and power my way forward through the scrum, lithely fending off pictures of myself in a Batman costume as I go. Actually, I have never played rugby in my life. But it seems to work anyway. Gill, just in front of me, who has also never played rugby, adopts much the same tactics and the two of us arrive, breathless but otherwise intact, inside the door.

  It’s a great relief – although, almost immediately, as we stand there gathering ourselves, we are both simultaneously gripped by the eerie feeling you get when it creeps over you that you might have forgotten something, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is. What could it be? Did we leave something behind?

  Ah, yes! Our daughter!

  Sophie, obliged to fight a solo rearguard action, has got bogged down somewhere behind us and is still out there in the rugby match on the pavement. So now I have to go back out through the door, reverse-push my way through the scrum (many of the members of which look slightly surprised to be playing me at rugby again so soon), grab a hold of Sophie, turn round, plough back towards the door again and pull her inside.

  So far the evening is shaping up splendidly. You will have heard the expression ‘making an entrance’. I think what I just pulled off, on arrival at the fabled Porchester Hall, is what is known as ‘making an entrance of yourself’.

  Anyway, all three of us are in now, and taking a moment to catch our breath – although my immediate impression is that the lobby of the venue isn’t noticeably less crowded than the pavement outside. I can’t see any faces I recognise at this point – no obvious sign of Julie Andrews or Joan Collins or Hugh Grant or any of the other promised luminaries. Maybe they’ve been smuggled in through the back door. But the place is rammed to bursting with people attired in lounge suits and in sparkly frocks, and the lobby is alight with a deafening roar of excited conversation and an equally deafening roar of clashing perfumes and aftershaves. There are many daringly backless dresses, and a number of daringly frontless dresses, too, as well as a couple of dresses which, being both backless, frontless and, to all intents and purposes, sideless, seem to be held aloft by nothing more than spit and positive thinking. Impressive. Many of the men, I notice, are accessorising their black-tie outfits with belts with formidable buckles – big silver ornaments, the size of babies’ heads. Is that a thing now? In terms of boundary-pushing sartorial bravery, my chequered bow tie suddenly feels like a somewhat timid gesture.

  Anyway, we hover inside the door for a short while, and bewilderment is beginning to settle upon me quite thickly when somebody official-looking fastens onto us, kindly informs me that I’ll need to sign in, and points me in the direction of a queue leading to a desk. We then duly stand in this queue until it’s our turn to be in front of the young woman seated behind the desk among boxes and sheets of paper and envelopes.

  She looks up at me with a smile and says, ‘Your name?’

  ‘It’s Jason,’ I say.

  ‘And your surname?’ she says.

  ‘No, that is the surname,’ I say. ‘Jason. David Jason.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. Her eyes are travelling down the lists in front of her. ‘And are you a guest or an award nominee?’

  Do you suppose it’s like this for Nicole Kidman at the Oscars? I very much hope so, but I have my doubts.

  ‘I think I’m supposed to be receiving an award,’ I say.

  The woman at the desk consults the sheets of names in front of her, running her finger down the page before whipping over to the sheet below, and a few moments pass. I begin to wonder whether I’ve got the wrong night, which would be a touch awkward. Or the wrong awards ceremony, which would be even more awkward. Maybe it’s not my Lifetime they want to honour tonight, but somebody else’s Lifetime. Maybe there’s been an unfortunate game of Chinese whispers somewhere along the line of communication and they’re expecting another David altogether – David Tennant, maybe. Or David Schwimmer from Friends. Or David Beckham. Sir David Frost, of course, would have been an easy mistake to make, if you think about it for a moment, except that he’s been dead for four years at this point. Still, news doesn’t always travel fast, and, however else you want to look at it, four years after they passed would certainly be a tactful time to give someone a Lifetime Achievement Award …

  But no. The receptionist now seems to have found a reference to me in the paperwork. ‘Ah, yes,’ she says. She then draws a line in blue biro across the page and dips her hand into the box beside her.

  ‘Would you mind putting this on?’

  She holds out a bright yellow wristband made of reinforced paper. Printed on it in black ink is the legend ‘National Film Awards 2017 – VIP’. I’m tempted to say, ‘But it’s yellow – it’s going to clash fearfully with my outfit.’ Decorum prevails, however, and I say nothing and strap the sticky band round my wrist.

  So, wearing a chequered bow tie and, now, a yellow reinforced paper l
abel that formally declares me to be a Very Important Person, I depart the queue with Gill and Sophie, who are similarly tagged, and am pointed in the direction of a broad and tall flight of carpeted steps up which people are herding in large numbers in the direction of the main hall.

  As we make our slow progress up the stairs, I cast my eyes around again. Still no sign of Julie, Joan, Hugh, etc. Maybe they’re planning a fashionably late arrival. Or perhaps they couldn’t wait and were first through the door. Either way, I’m not seeing many faces I know. Or any, actually. But that’s OK. Everyone seems very cheerful and my anxieties are beginning to settle. It’s going to be all right, isn’t it? We’ve survived the scrum at the entrance, and we’re clearly well on the way to the safety of our table. Moreover, blessing of blessings, at least there wasn’t one of those red-carpet-style, grin-like-a-berk, photo-opportunity things.

  At which point, I cast my eyes ahead of us and notice a platform area set aside at the top of the stairs. It’s the red-carpet-style, grin-like-a-berk, photo-opportunity thing.

  Well, there’s not a lot I can do about it now, is there? This crowded staircase is to all intents and purposes a conveyor belt at the end of which the Very Important Persons (the yellow-tagged ones) are getting siphoned off to pose for pictures in front of a hoarding covered with the names of the evening’s sponsors.

  I could rip off my yellow tag, of course, and hope to pass through incognito. But no: even if I wanted to give it a try, these wristbands stick fast and it’s going to take a pair of kitchen scissors to slice through it, which, foolishly, none of us thought to bring. Or maybe when we get to the top, I could make a break for it – wait my moment, get my head down and bolt, hopefully reaching the other side undetected before the searchlight from the guards’ watchtower catches me. Not that there’s a searchlight or a guards’ watchtower. But you know what I mean.

  Again, though – no. There’s a girl in a black suit with an earpiece and a clipboard who is busily coordinating this photo operation, diverting people as they reach the top of the stairs, and when we get alongside her she spots my tag before I can run, and moves in. She seems to want all three of us to line up in front of the hoarding for a family shot, but Sophie, brilliantly, does the runner that I had planned to do, and gets herself out of snapping range before anyone can stop her. Nice work. I can only look on admiringly. So that just leaves me and Gill to be ushered queasily in front of the phalanx of photographers. Yet, after a couple of shots, Gill, too, who is no more a fan of this situation than I am, goes rogue and slips away, and I’m left on my own – deserted by my own battalion. You find out who your comrades are at these times.

  So, after a spell of awkward smiling to order (‘This way, David’; ‘Over here, can you, David?’) which probably only lasts about twenty seconds, at most, but seems to me to go on for the best part of a week, the girl with the clipboard gently guides me away from the hoarding and further down the platform to where a small group of journalists is gathered behind a rope, clutching notebooks and voice recorders, and apparently keen to hear from me. I’m not sure I’ve got much to contribute to the rolling international news agenda at this particular juncture, and this wouldn’t be the most relaxed or natural set of circumstances at the best of times in which to attempt to have a conversation with a bunch of strangers, but I do my best.

  ‘Excited about tonight?’ Yes, I say: very excited. ‘What does it mean to you?’ Well, I say, obviously it means a lot – it’s very nice. ‘Will there be any more Only Fools and Horses?’ No, unfortunately not – because we lost John Sullivan, you see, so there’s no writer.

  These questions are OK. I’m coping here.

  Then somebody asks, ‘What do you think about Brexit?’

  Reader, I didn’t have to go to Afghanistan and hook up with the British Army’s Counter IED Task Force to be able to recognise a minefield when one is placed in front of me. And that question, in the context of a snatched interview with the papers at an awards ceremony, is a corking great minefield. Seriously, it wouldn’t matter which way I went with it, or how diplomatically I expressed myself. For instance, I could say: ‘Well, views differ, obviously, but perhaps there does need to be some kind of tighter control on immigration somewhere down the line.’

  Cue likely headline: ‘DEL BOY SAYS, “GET ’EM OUT.”’

  Or I could go completely the other way: ‘Well, the results of the UK’s referendum on EU membership are in and need to be respected, but I only hope we don’t regret walking away from an alliance which has brought sixty years of peace to a previously fractured continent.’

  Cue likely headline: ‘DEL BOY: ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.’

  As for making a joke – trying to brush the question aside with some little quip or other – forget it. Jokes, you quickly realise, don’t translate in these circumstances. They have a horrible habit of turning serious on you, in the cold light of print. It may be that Ronan Keating wrote the manual on impromptu press interviews, when he famously sang: ‘You say it best / When you say nothing at all.’

  Anyway, I keep it together. I don’t go there. Stepping carefully around this well-laid Brexit-shaped trap, I bumble out something along the lines of, ‘Ah, well, we’re not really here to talk about that, are we? We’re here for a party.’

  See the swerve I pulled off there? Admire the work of a master.

  Having thereby more or less uncontroversially dispensed with my duties to the world’s media, and breathing an enormous sigh of relief, I rejoin Gill and Sophie, raising an eyebrow to convey that their abandonment of me in my hour of need has been duly noted in the record book. Then, at last, we enter the hall.

  It’s a massive room, set for dinner, with countless large, round tables covering the floor and with a big, gold-painted stage at one end. Again, we don’t quite know where to go, but somebody guides us, leading us through the throng and between the chair-backs – and there, already at the table and rising out of their seats to say hello, are Nick and his wife, Lucy. What a joy. I’m so happy to see them. Nick’s son, Archie, is there, too – sixteen, the same age as Sophie. The last time I saw Archie he came up to my waist: now, I come up to his. I know, I know: it’s what happens if you feed them. Yet how has this boy become a man? Where did this lump of time go?

  Nick and I fall easily into each other’s company again and our families settle in and the entertainment begins. The set-up is absolutely the familiar one: a string of awards, each with their own special presenter, clips of all the nominees shown on the big screen, then an envelope-opening and a handover and an acceptance speech. The clip packages are pumped out through the PA system at stunning volume – loud enough, I would estimate, to make a charging rhino think again and turn back. But it keeps you on your toes, I guess. A Street Cat Named Bob gets Best British Film. There’s an award for a crowd-funded movie and overall there seems to be a lot of innovative UK film-making going on, which is a good thing.

  Alas, though, you would be quite a long time listing the people who unfortunately could not be with us tonight – including, it turns out, the big stars whose names glittered so prominently on the promotional material. Julie Andrews? Not in the building, apparently. Joan Collins? Somewhere else entirely, it now emerges. Hugh Grant? Otherwise engaged. Catherine Zeta-Jones, whom I really would have loved to bump into? Not around, sadly. Ewan McGregor? Has belatedly discovered a pressing need to stay at home and wash his hair, it seems. Ricky Gervais, bless him, sends a filmed ‘thank you’ for his Best Comedy prize for the movie David Brent: Life on the Road. Only Simon Pegg, who wins the Global Contribution to Motion Picture Award, seems to have made it in time for dinner.

  No matter. Nick and I are having a very nice time. The award for Best Drama is sponsored by Blind Pig Cider and, although it does us no credit whatsoever, this detail catches Nick and me at the wrong moment and we lose it for a while. Much to our further surprise, the half-time entertainment is a troupe of belly dancers. Now, I consider myself a fairly well-travelled person,
whose work has taken him as far afield as Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and even to Billingham near Middlesbrough. But, in all those horizon-expanding voyages, this is the first time that I have witnessed belly dancing in the flesh, done full-on, in all its remarkable suppleness, and as the performance unfolds, in every sense, in front of us, in quite spectacular style, I find myself most intrigued – purely from a professional and technical standpoint, as a fellow stage performer, you understand. It may be that Nick is as impressed professionally as I am, but I wouldn’t know for sure because he, too, is trying very hard to appear politely uninterested.

  At around 9.50 in the evening, soon after the dessert (an extremely rich and indeed practically explosive chocolate bombe, unlikely to be forming part of anybody’s calorie-controlled diet any time soon), Nick and I get our big moment. Some kind words are said about the lasting effect and influence of Only Fools. They show some clips on the big screen. The bar-flap sequence is in there, obviously, and it gets a laugh, as it always seems to. Batman and Robin also ride again – me and Nick emerging through the mist like a pair of idiots – and there’s laughter for that, too. We are summoned to the stage separately – me first. Fighting down the lingering aftermath of the chocolate bombe, I head up the slightly rickety wooden stairs, step over a couple of trailing cables and emerge into the lights, where the head of the Malta Tourism Authority, who are the award’s sponsor, hands me a tall glass vase with a star at the top and my name on the base. I improvise a few words of thanks, and – really movingly, for me – everybody in the room is on their feet and there’s a lot of warmth coming off people which I know isn’t just the wine or even the chocolate bombe. I don’t, after all, despite my premature fears, feel like anyone is trying to retire me or subtly nudge me in the direction of the garden. On the contrary, I feel buoyed up – ready to accept a major movie project if anybody in the room wants to offer me one. Say what you like about the surrounding faff, but standing on a stage while a roomful of people applauds you for some stupid larking around you did in front of a television camera several thousand years ago is a flattering situation to find yourself in.