David Jason: My Life (33 page)

They do say that, don’t they? Ah, well. If they don’t, they do now.

* * *

T
HROUGHOUT THE
1970
S
, alongside the television stuff, I continued to work pretty constantly in the theatre, taking roles in the West End and going out on tour. The fact that I had spent eighteen months in
No Sex Please – We’re British
without wrecking it had increased my reputation and left me in a pretty
solid position to be considered for other jobs in that line. In 1974, for example, I found myself teamed up with the actress Liz Fraser, who was quite a star in the British comedy firmament, having appeared in the movie
I’m All Right Jack
, in several of the
Carry On
films, and on television in
Hancock’s Half Hour
and
The Goodies
. We took over from June Whitfield and Terry Scott in the West End in a farce called
A Bedful of Foreigners
, written by Dave Freeman, who had written for Tony Hancock, Arthur Askey and Benny Hill. His play centred on two couples on holiday in France who discover, with various levels of dismay, that they have been booked into the same hotel room in a full hotel. Again, we weren’t exactly talking Chekhov – but we were talking seventies-style knockabout fun, which meant that Liz had to appear at least once onstage in a basque. I’m afraid those were simply the rules for this kind of play in that era. The run lasted for six months but, in all honesty, people had been coming for Terry and June, the TV stars, and it went a bit hollow in their absence. Relations between Liz and myself were workable but slightly distant. I think Liz assumed I was gay because, in the whole of the time we were acting together, I never once made a pass at her. It was the only explanation she could come up with.

Then I went out on the road with a play called
Darling Mr London
– and rather wished, in a roundabout way, that I hadn’t. This was a piece that had been co-written by Tony Marriott (one half of the team that came up with
No Sex Please
) and Bob Grant, who will be familiar to fans of the sitcom
On the Buses
, in which he played the character Jack Harper opposite Reg Varney’s Stan Butler. My character in the play was an international telephone operator called Edward Hawkins – a set-up which would obviously struggle for traction nowadays, in the age of Vodafone and 3G. However, it was all perfectly comprehensible in the mid-seventies, when, as everybody knew, phone calls were only made possible by someone sitting at a
switchboard with a fistful of plugs. Hawkins was meant to be a Mr Nobody kind of figure in real life, but at the same time was someone in possession of an amazingly suave and appealing telephone manner. This had enabled him to charm himself into the affections of girls in various countries around the world, with whom, in his mind, he was having a collection of hot affairs. (Mr Nobodies with rich fantasy lives: are we beginning to detect a certain theme emerging in my professional roles? Granville, Edgar Briggs, even Albert Toddey in the doomed film
White Cargo
… there would, indeed, seem to be a distinct thread of vulnerable wistfulness linking these characters. Though it was vulnerable wistfulness combined, commonly, let’s not forget, with a properly butch ability to vault a sofa.)

Hawkins has, in the course of these international conversations, omitted to mention the existence of his wife, meaning that he’s in big trouble when all these girls descend on England from their various home countries, in order to take part in a beauty pageant, and suddenly start turning up at Hawkins’s house in order to meet the man behind the voice.

Could I, as an actor, do a convincingly suave and appealing phone manner? Why, yes, I have to say I could.

The aforementioned Bob Grant took the role he had created of Hawkins’s lodger, who was a curate. Well, it could hardly have called itself a farce without a lodger who was a curate, could it? Meanwhile, the plot device of the beauty pageant was a convenient, if painfully thin, excuse for the girls (who were called things like Britt, Ingrid, Sylvana and Monique) to appear onstage in bathing costumes, or otherwise (in the popular phrase of the time) ‘scantily clad’. Most of the girls were played by English actresses putting on accents, but Miss Sweden was played by Leena Skoog, an actress who was so popular with the tabloid photographers at the time that she virtually had her own column, and who genuinely was Swedish – to the extent, indeed, that she could hardly speak English. Also in the cast was Valerie
Leon, who had been a big presence in the
Carry On
films, and Cheryl Hall, my former co-star in the short-lived
Lucky Feller
.

You may be getting ahead of me here, but it turned out there was quite a lot wrong with the play. For starters, some of the cast couldn’t act their way out of a paper hat. Also there were pieces of farce in the staging that didn’t work, which became glaringly obvious when we put it in front of an audience. I kept saying to Grant, ‘We should have a look at some things.’ There was, for example, a moment where a male character was seen going through a door, in the room beyond which – as the audience has been led to believe – supposedly lurked one of the girls in a state of undress. From behind the door was heard a quantity of affronted screaming and various other bangs and crashes, and then the man returned to the stage, apparently the victim of an assault which had left a broken tennis racket hanging around his neck. He would then stagger about for quite some time, supposedly regathering his senses. This little piece of action went for nothing on a nightly basis. You could almost feel a cold wind blowing off the audience, and then watch a number of balls of tumbleweed bowl silently across the stalls. I gently suggested to Bob that perhaps the actor could try reining in on the staggering a bit, but no. The staggering went on in full. It was the same with another moment in which Bob, playing the curate, was obliged to come on in his pyjamas. For some reason, not explained by anything else in the play, Bob chose to have the pyjama bottoms held up by a lavatory chain, tied around his middle. Bob thought this was hysterically funny, but the audience, on the whole, tended to disagree. Again, I quietly suggested losing the toilet chain, but, again, my suggestion was ignored. It wasn’t as though I could really press any of these points, because Bob was, of course, the co-writer of the play, so he essentially had the authority to do what he thought fit and to wear as many toilet chains as he thought appropriate.

An additional problem was that Bob had something that I
suppose might fall into the category of ‘intellectual aspirations’. He was, I believe, a graduate of some sort of university in the East End of London, and he thought he knew about comedy, in the academic sense. In the evening, when we were on the road, I would often share a meal with Bob and his wife, who was on tour with us, and try to discuss parts of the play, only for him, invariably, to set off on a sentence which began, ‘Well, what you don’t understand is …’

My opinions clearly weren’t welcome. About three weeks into the tour, I overheard Bob and Tony Marriott, in the dressing room next to mine, discussing the possibility of having me replaced. I was pretty philosophical at the prospect. I was frustrated that nobody was setting to, and rolling up their sleeves and getting rid of the stuff in the play that didn’t work, and concentrating on the stuff that did. But there it was. The plot to get rid of me seemingly evaporated.

Darling Mr London
wasn’t, all in all, a flying success. The great shame is that there was one spectacular moment in the show that almost unfailingly brought the house down. It came where my character, Hawkins, is in bad odour with his wife, who has told him he will have to leave the marital bed and sleep on the pull-out sofa. By this point in the play, the audience have seen this sofa bed go up and down a couple of times, perfectly conventionally. This time, though, after I have readied myself and the sofa for bed, it is suddenly beholden upon me (not uncommonly in farces – but not uncommonly in certain B&Bs too, as I well knew) to find somewhere to hide in a hurry. Offstage could be heard, from all sides, the sound of the girls calling ‘Where’s Edward?’, clearly about to come on. So, in a desperate attempt to find cover, I used to take a run the width of the stage and dive into the sheets on the bed, which was tricked so that it would close up with a snap and revert to being a sofa with me apparently vanished into the softly upholstered heart of it. From the auditorium, it looked like the sofa had
eaten me whole. This, I tell you, with no word of a lie, stopped the show. People would be falling about, unable to believe their eyes. It was very difficult to achieve and relied on some cunningly removed bolts. I think it’s the best piece of business I ever did on a stage.

OK, there was a night or two when Sod’s Law was in operation and the bolts malfunctioned, meaning I would dive in and the sofa wouldn’t spring back together around me. And then the magic rather evaporated. But that happened surprisingly infrequently, and when it worked, it was brilliant.

We opened in Billingham in the north-east of England – and not for the first time in my life as a touring player. Billingham was a famous start-up destination, where many plays, with their eyes set on the West End, seemed to begin their uncertain journey – for the fundamental reason, I believe, that it was pretty cheap to do so. Billingham was famous for a) its shipbuilding and b) its chemical factory. You could see the smoke rising gently off the latter, and if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction the entire cast ended up with terrible throats. The theatre was a municipal building – meaning that it doubled as a concert hall and a lecture theatre. It also had attached to it a gymnasium and a roller-skating rink and your best hope was that the play you were doing didn’t contain too many quiet, sensitive moments. When the sound level on the stage dropped, you could hear the noise of the Wurlitzer organ pumping through the walls from next door, along with the thrum of the circling skates on the floor.

Opposite the stage door, just beyond the pedestrianised shopping precinct, was a tower block built specially to house university students. The arrival of
Darling Mr London
must have coincided with a university vacation, because we were able to get cheap accommodation for the cast in the otherwise largely empty tower. Any way you could find to save money while out on tour was always welcomed, but on the negative side, the
regulations in that tower block were just as stiff, if not stiffer, than in even the most draconian B&B. There was an 11 p.m. curfew, a strict ‘no guests’ rule and, just to ensure the regime was enforced, there was a bloke on the door with an Alsatian. The curfew was frustrating, but we would smuggle a few beers up with us after a show, and convene in someone’s room for some drinks and a chat. The facilities were spartan – a communal bathroom on the landing, and a single bed, as narrow as a plank. Yet somehow these antiseptic surroundings did not succeed in discouraging Derek Newark and Leena Skoog from letting nature take its familiar course.

One morning I went to Derek’s room to knock him up for breakfast. All I could hear from the other side of the door was hysterical laughter. I tapped on the door.

Derek said, ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s David.’

‘Wait a moment.’

Derek opened the door and there was Leena, tucked up under the sheets and lying on the tiny, almost monastically narrow student bed, which was now sloping downwards at a jaunty angle. During the course of the night, both the legs at the foot of the bed had got tired of lending their support to Derek and Leena’s combined exertions and had snapped clean off. They thought it was entirely hilarious. And so, I guess, did I, although I would have liked to have seen them explain it away to the bloke with the Alsatian.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Struggles with an inflatable life raft. The mouse that was a roaring success. And if it’s Tuesday, it must be Jakarta.

IN 1977, I
was asked to go to the London Weekend Television Studios at Elstree to meet Ronnie Taylor. Ronnie was a writer who was very influential at LWT at the time. He was – like Spike Milligan, Dick Emery and countless others – one of that generation who had been in the war and had got involved in putting on shows, to pass the time and entertain themselves. When they came back from the war, they simply carried on. He was about my height – in other words, average. (Ahem.) He had greying hair, was neatly and conservatively dressed in a shirt and tie, such that you might believe he was someone with a sensible, proper job, rather than a writer of comic material. He had a warm personality and was extremely easy to like. He was also very quietly spoken. That’s often been a surprise to me, with comedy writers – it was certainly true of John Sullivan, for instance. You expect people who write funny things to be loud, and constantly saying things like, ‘So, there were these two vicars, right …’ Often it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Ronnie said he was going to do a pilot for a comedy series
he’d written and he asked me to read for him. On the way home afterwards, I was thinking, ‘I recognise that stuff from somewhere.’ It seemed very familiar to me – the tone and pace of it. That turned out to be no surprise. Ronnie used to write radio scripts for Reg Dixon, who was a music-hall comic. Ronnie had decided he could adapt and modernise those scripts, and that was the substance of this series he’d come up with.

The show was
A Sharp Intake of Breath
– the breath in question being the noise people make, sucking air past their teeth, just before they tell you that they can’t possibly mend your car while you wait, or fix your gutter without also having to retile your roof, or before they stress the impossibility of satisfying any number of other straightforward requests for service. I had the starring role of Peter Barnes, an ordinary bloke who is constantly thwarted by authority and bureaucracy and petty officialdom as he tries to go about his life. Again, as so often with the parts I was getting at this time, the keyword seems to be hapless. The show had this nice kind of repertory idea, which was that Richard Wilson was in every episode but played a different part in each – my boss, my doctor, my solicitor, my father-in-law, my tailor. Richard had great timing and I admired him enormously and was very pleased for him with the success he went on to have in
One Foot in the Grave
. Similarly, Alun Armstrong played a mechanic one week and a tourist the next and a salesman the week after that. I think Alun was a bit confused about me because he assumed I would want to go to the bar at lunchtime and sink a few drinks, and I wasn’t interested. I think he found that a little uncomradely and it drove a bit of a wedge.