David Jason: My Life (18 page)

So, less than confident, I attended the audition on the appointed afternoon. They called me and I came on from the
wings. There were four or five people on the auditioning panel, sitting in the stalls. I believe one of them was Ned Sherrin. ‘Do you have a piece of music for us?’ one of them said. I did indeed: I was carrying in my sweaty mitts the sheet music for ‘If I Were a Rich Man’. There was a pianist in the stalls. When he stood up, I could just see his head. I handed him my music, and then he sat down and disappeared. The next thing I heard was the sound of the piano starting up, and then continuing for a little bit, and then stopping.

Up came the pianist’s head.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Can you hear me OK?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I can hear you fine.’

‘OK,’ said the pianist. ‘It’s just that I played the intro and you didn’t come in.’

‘Didn’t I?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But let’s try again.’

His head went back down and the piano started up once more. I waited for what I thought might be my moment. (Problems with timing: the teacher wasn’t wrong about those.) And then the piano stopped again.

Up came the pianist’s head.

‘What happened?’

I said, ‘Did I miss it again?’

He said, ‘I’m afraid so.’

The pianist thought for a moment. I could sense some restlessness coming from the panel in the stalls.

‘I tell you what,’ the pianist said, ‘I’ll nod.’

‘OK,’ I said.

So, the pianist’s head disappears again, the music begins and then, after a few bars (I believe that’s the technical word), he jumps up from his seat so that his head appears briefly in my line of vision above the edge of the stage, nods and then drops
down again. And, on that more than faintly comical cue, I was away.

I have no idea how that rendition of ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ went. I only know that eventually the piano came to a dramatic finish and that, shortly after that, so did I.

‘Thank you,’ was, I think, as much as they had to say about it in the stalls.

After that they made me do a bit of acting, which I was a lot more comfortable with. And then there was one last test.

‘We just want to see what your range is,’ somebody said.

I wasn’t expecting this. This wasn’t in the script.

‘My … range?’ I said.

‘Yes. You know – how high you can sing, how low you can sing?’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘Do you know the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from
The Wizard of Oz
?’

I said, hesitatingly, ‘Er, yes …’

They said, ‘Could you just give us a couple of lines from the beginning?’

I said, ‘Bloody hell. Must I?’

Actually I didn’t say that. But it was what I was thinking. You don’t have to know much about music to know that ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ starts with a big sweep, from low to high. The first word of the song is ‘Somewhere’ and the distance from the ‘some’ to the ‘where’ is not a journey for the faint-hearted. It’s quite a test, even in the privacy of your own bathroom, let alone on a stage in front of someone who was possibly Ned Sherrin.

The pianist gave me a note. I went for it, missed, and found a clutch of other notes instead which I then chased as hard as I could in the approximate direction of the song. I must have sounded like a leaf-blower.

‘Thank you,’ they said, again.

I didn’t get the part.

But I did learn an important lesson about myself. I can’t sing.

Hang on, though … didn’t I already know that?

* * *

I
HAD A
better time at an audition for a production of
Peter Pan
that I went for in late 1966. There was no singing involved, nobody asked to test my range and I ended up landing a part as one of the pirates. That might not sound much, but this particular
Peter Pan
was a pretty prestigious production. It was booked to open on a glorious set (a towering mast, a multi-decked pirate ship, the works) at the Strand Theatre in London – my first experience of playing in the West End. And then, after a three-week run, it was scheduled to tour the country – my first experience of that, as well. I was in starry company, too. Peter Pan was Julia Lockwood, the daughter of the famous film actress Margaret Lockwood, and the owner of one of the world’s most wonderful smiles. Captain Hook was Ron Moody.

This was a bit of a dream for me. I was already a big fan of Moody. I had been to the original London stage production of the musical
Oliver!
and seen him play Fagin. (The film version, which made him enormously famous, came later, a year after the
Peter Pan
production, in 1968.) A wonderful bit of business he did onstage that night was lodged in my mind forever. It was a scene where Fagin was counting money on a table, very quickly sorting these coins into piles and slapping them down on the surface so that, as well as being a mesmerising piece of quick-handedness, the whole routine had this brilliant noise and rhythm to it – chik-chik-chik-chik, slap! chik-chik-chik-chik, slap! Superb.

Watching him work from close up was a real privilege. The same goes for working with Julia Lockwood, though she could be quite sharp. I was in the wings alongside her one night when
Ron made an exit after a scene with his manservant, Smee. The scene had ended with Captain Hook grandly putting out an arm for his cloak – but Smee is standing behind Hook, dutifully holding up the cloak on the other side. So Smee meekly jumps round to take the cloak to the extended arm. But by the time he gets there, Hook has put that arm down and extended the other one. There was a little bit of toing and froing like this, and some knockabout stuff, with Hook getting more and more huffy and Smee wincing and getting into more and more of a mess, before Hook snatched the cloak, and off they both came.

As Ron passed Julia backstage, I heard her say to him: ‘There’s a round there.’ Meaning she thought the moment could get a round of applause, if it were done properly. People had laughed, but they hadn’t applauded. ‘Donald always got a round there,’ she added. She was referring to Donald Sinden, who had played Hook in another production of
Peter Pan
that Julia was in.

This clearly got to Ron. He didn’t like coming off worse in a comparison with Donald Sinden. He interpreted it as a challenge. Over the next two or three performances, he really began to work at that moment with Smee and the cloak – expanding it and eking the maximum amount of humour out of it. Sure enough, at around the fourth attempt, he left the stage to applause. He had got his round.

Ron was a sensational performer altogether and a terrific improviser when things went wrong. One of Hook’s props was a tin lamp, meant to look like a candle behind glass, which was actually battery-operated, for convenience purposes, with a switch on it. At one point Ron was supposed to enter in the darkness with the lamp switched off and shout, in despair, ‘Something blew out the lamp.’ One night, unfortunately, something hadn’t blown out the lamp. It was still on. The audience began to laugh. Ron looked very slowly from the lamp to the audience and said, ‘Something
tried
to blow out the lamp.’ He got a round of applause for that, too.

You couldn’t help but learn from the experience of being around people like that. Indeed, this whole period was a huge learning curve. One very important lesson I picked up by observation during that production: never be rude, arrogant or otherwise objectionable to the member of the backstage crew whose job it is to fly you on the wire. One of the Lost Boys came to understand this the hard way. He had begun to get above himself, as the production wore on, and he was being a bit high and mighty with the crew – bossing people about, complaining if things weren’t exactly as they were meant to be. Big mistake. When you’re all harnessed up and ready for a flying scene, you’re in a very vulnerable position. You’re basically a puppet – attached to strings that someone else is in control of. Even when you were getting on perfectly well with the crew, they would often muck about and put the fear of God into you. You would be standing in the wings, wired up and waiting to go, and the person responsible for hauling on the wire would just gently lift you up onto your toes, making you panic and think he was about to send you flying out onto the stage before your cue. And then he would equally gently set you back on your feet. And then he would put you up on your toes again, and set you back on your feet again – just twitching the wire, messing with your mind.

The point is, the Lost Boy with the attitude problem had upset the wrong people. One night, for the scene where the Lost Boys flew onto the ship and fought a battle with the pirates, a member of the crew gave that guy’s wire the most almighty tug. He took off like a rocket. Instead of landing gently where he was supposed to land, he went smack into the mast and fluttered down like a smashed butterfly. He then had to sit on the deck in a heap, gathering his senses, while the rest of us fought around him. He was very careful in front of the crew after that.

After the West End run, the show packed up and, with a
slightly scaled-down cast, set off on tour. I was enormously excited at the prospect. Indeed, I was so excited that I used it as an excuse to treat myself to a thick fur coat I’d seen hanging in the window of a boutique called Lord John, quite near to the fire station on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a caramel-coloured coney, with buttons the size of a baby’s head, and it was so huge on me that it had to be taken up at the back to stop it dragging on the ground. When it was buttoned up, I, to all intents and purposes, disappeared and became, instead, a walking teddy bear.

I can’t recall now what I paid for this stately garment but I do know that I flushed as I handed over the cash. I had persuaded myself, though, that, at least to some extent, this was a practical purchase. I reasoned that a big chunk of fur wouldn’t go amiss while out on tour, especially in the colder climes we were set to visit up north, and that it would even service me with an additional bedspread to supply the overnight insulation not provided by certain landladies’ pitifully thin sheets. And I wasn’t wrong about that. Many were the winter nights when sleep was made possible for me in such places as Aberdeen and Newcastle by the primitive method of lumping an animal skin on top of myself.

Deep down, though, I knew that I had bought the coat as a statement. Clothes never really meant all that much to me and, even in the ragingly fashion-conscious sixties, and even though I was located right at the heart of swinging London, were nothing I particularly bothered about, beyond the odd fancy addition of a jauntily tied silk scarf. But I fancied myself very much the sixties gentleman in that coat – more than that, an actor about town. I wore it until it was completely denuded of fur around the buttons and until the bits of fur that hadn’t dropped off were dry and stiff and only lightly rooted in its cracked leather. That fur served me handsomely as coat and impromptu bedding up and down the British Isles, not just during
Peter Pan
but for quite a while after. By the end of its life, I looked like a teddy
bear that someone had had for eighty years. (And probably smelt a bit like one, as well, but let’s not dwell on that.)

On tour, the atmosphere of a school trip prevailed. The cast travelled together in a hired coach – although not the stars. Julia and Ron went separately. They also stayed in hotels, whereas we had to find our own digs in each city. Transport was provided, in other words, but not accommodation. You would ask around among your fellow actors for tips on the best and cheapest bed-and-breakfast places in which to stay. If that failed, there was always a list of landladies at the stage door. I was to do a lot of time in B&Bs as a touring actor in the early seventies, and I will come on to some of the drawbacks, and even the horrors, in due course. This first time, though, the whole touring life was new to me and I found it all positively romantic.

Julia Lockwood remained a little apart from the more humble among us, even on tour. You would get a ‘Good evening’ as she passed through the theatre, but that was about it. Mostly she spent her time in the company of her travelling female assistant. Ron, on the other hand, was happy to muck in and often came out with us all for a meal after shows. We usually ended up in Indian restaurants because they combined the virtues of being cheap and open until late. It was Ron, I believe, who decided to take decisive action against the amount of random flatulence that seemed to beset our social group, particularly on the way back to digs after these curried meals. Wherever we were, Ron took it upon himself to nominate what he called ‘the flatting post’ – which might be a pillar or a lamp post or a postbox, according to his whim. Subsequently, anyone wishing to vacate themselves of accumulated wind had to be touching the post when they did so or else a punishment would be levied. Ron was good company – always ready with a joke or an impression. He did the best impersonation of Alastair Sim I had ever seen.

On other nights, a few of us pirates would take ourselves out
to a nightclub in a forlorn attempt to meet girls. You might get as far as opening a conversation in which a girl asked you where you were from and what you did. ‘I’m an actor,’ you would say, as suavely as you could. ‘I’m up from London.’ That was it. The girls as good as turned their backs and fled. It didn’t sink in with us for ages that, if you came out and said you were a visiting actor, a girl immediately knew you were only there for a week, and were most likely only after one thing. It seemed to be just about the worst calling card you could present. Better by far to say you were an electrician, frankly. Accordingly, we couldn’t pull girls to save our lives when we were on tour. By contrast, the gay members of our fraternity seemed to be having a high old time. It didn’t matter which city we were in, they always seemed to know where to go to find willing company. That used to really wind us up. They would come in the next day with their tales of exotic conquests and exhausting nights of passion, and we’d be spitting feathers.

Frustrations aside, this was a happy time, darkened by only one moment. My piratical prop in one scene of the show was, for some reason, a bugle on a lanyard, which I used to sling around my neck. All the props used to be gathered on the props table backstage, so that you could collect what you needed just before your entrance. I always seemed to be beaten to the props table by a particular pirate who thought it was amazingly amusing to say to me, ‘Do you want your prop?’ And then he would toss the bugle towards me but hold on to the lanyard so that, just as the instrument was reaching me, he could tug it back to himself, out of the air, and catch it. It was quite funny at first, I suppose, but slightly wearing after the twenty-third time. Alas, one night this pirate went through his usual bugle-lobbing routine, but accidentally let the lanyard slip.