David Jason: My Life (36 page)

Now, two of those three experiences were a pretty much unalloyed joy from start to finish. The other one starred Leslie Phillips.

Leslie was already by this stage in his career well established as a legend of British comedy thanks to his work in radio series such as
The Navy Lark
and then in British war films and
Carry On
movies. He had, under Nimmo’s aegis, embarked on a long
tour of
Not Now Darling
, a farce written by Ray Cooney and John Chapman, which was booked to travel round Australia and then come back through the Far and Middle East. Leslie had been playing this character in a West End run for quite a while before this. The tour was already under way when Derek asked me if I would like to take over from Andrew Sachs, who was playing the co-lead in that play. Andy had to fly back at the end of the Australian leg because I believe he had been contracted to start work playing a Spanish waiter alongside John Cleese in a television series called
Fawlty Towers
. I wonder what became of that.

Anyway, I said, ‘Absolutely – fantastic’. The prospect was really appealing. I loved travelling and seeing new places, and I was also of the firm opinion that the opportunity to travel and see new places at someone else’s expense and while being paid should never be batted away lightly. Wages in the bin, living like a king – what could be better?

So, the plan is for me to fly out to Australia, two weeks before the play is due to finish there, meet everybody, including Leslie Phillips, and rehearse my role. Andy will continue to play for those two weeks in the evenings, while I rehearse during the day. Then we will leave Brisbane and fly to Singapore, where I will take over from him. It all sounds perfect.

So, I take a twenty-three-hour flight from Heathrow, with a couple of stops for refuelling, which feels like a fortnight. You get a bit stir-crazy, stuck in a tube that long. But I finally land in Australia, feeling no brighter than if important parts of my body had spent an entire day and a night being squeezed through a mangle. I queue up at immigration and I show my passport and I’m asked to explain what my business in Australia is.

‘I’m an actor,’ I say. ‘I’m joining up with a touring production.’

The man at the desk says, ‘Can I see your work permit?’

Work permit? Do I need a work permit? Nobody told me I
needed a work permit. But I’m sure that, if I do need a work permit, a work permit will have been arranged for me. Derek Nimmo’s company will have known about the need for a work permit, and will have sorted a work permit out. They wouldn’t have flown me all this way without organising a work permit, if a work permit is necessary.

My interrogator goes away to make some further enquiries. Quite a long time passes. He returns.

‘No, you don’t have a work permit.’

His other piece of good news: they’re going to search me. Nothing personal, just a routine, random thing, but they’ll need to have a look in my luggage. So I haul my suitcase onto the table, and they go through every single thing I’ve got. The search is so thorough that I’m beginning to suspect that it will soon extend to me, and that I will in due course find myself naked in a side room, bending over a table and hearing the snap of rubber gloves on an Australian immigration official’s wrists.

I’m right: the search does extend to me. Fortunately, though, they confine themselves merely to a vigorous pat-down. Still, all this takes quite a while, and I’m not getting any less tired, or any less irritable.

The search complete, I’m left sitting alone with my bags while, I assume, phone calls are being made and people are trying to work out what to do with me. I wait, and wait, and wait. And after that, I wait a bit more. And then, after that particular wait, I do a bit more waiting, before going back to waiting again. Eventually the waiting tips me over the edge. Through the window can be seen the plane I came in on, still on its stand. I get up, locate my immigration official and confront him with trembling lips.

‘What’s happening with that plane?’

He says, ‘It’s being refuelled and then it’ll fly back to London.’

‘Put me on that plane,’ I say. ‘Go on – put me on it. You
don’t want me in the country, I haven’t got a permit, I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m fed up … just put me on the next plane. I just want to go home.’

The immigration official gives me an appraising look. Something in the tone of my voice, and in the twitching of one of my eyes, informs him that he is no longer dealing with an entirely reasonable human being. This could have gone either way, maybe, but it seems to cause a softening in his attitude towards me. He places a calming hand on my shoulder and leads me through to his office, where he phones the theatre company, organises for somebody to come to the airport and collect me, stamps a piece of paper and admits me to his country.

‘Welcome to Australia, Mr Jason.’

I get to the hotel and crash out. The following evening I go and watch the play, which comes off very nicely and goes down well. Afterwards I’m introduced to the cast and the crew and I meet Andrew Sachs and Leslie Phillips, and everything seems very nice and very pleasant.

The next day we start rehearsals. Or sort of. The director tells me Leslie won’t be turning up today. ‘He thinks there’s no point coming in until you’ve at least done some blocking,’ the director says. Well, that’s a bit disappointing, but given that Leslie is working in the play at night, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. So I spend that day doing some blocking with the director, trying to get all my positioning sorted out.

The next day I go in at 10 a.m. Still no Leslie. Still no anybody, actually, apart from the stage manager. ‘Where is everyone?’ I ask. ‘I think they’ll be in about two,’ says the stage manager. ‘But I can rehearse with you if you like.’ The stage manager has the book with the script and all the moves in. We spend the morning rehearsing, with me playing my part, and him playing all the other parts in the play. Inevitably, this quickly becomes lunatic, on the grounds that I keep losing track of who he is. ‘Who are you now?’ I stop to ask – over and over again.

We break for lunch. After lunch it gets to two thirty. Still no Leslie, still no cast. ‘I’ll make a call,’ says the stage manager. He goes out to the phone and then returns with a grave face. He says, ‘I’ve got some bad news. The rest of the cast won’t work with you.’

‘Why ever not?’ I say.

‘Because you’re not a member of Australian Equity. You’re a blackleg.’

I didn’t know I needed to be a member of Australian Equity, any more than I knew I needed a work permit. ‘Isn’t this all taken care of by Derek Nimmo’s company?’ I say. ‘Apparently not,’ says the stage manager.

We spend the rest of the afternoon and the whole of the next day sorting out my Australian Equity problem. I end up arranging to pay my subs and become a member of Australian Equity. That’s twice now that Derek Nimmo’s company has let me down on the basic paperwork. But hey: onwards and upwards.

On the fourth day, the cast are free to work with me without breaking union regulations, so we get some stuff done. Or, at any rate, we get some stuff done after everyone turns up, which is in the middle of the afternoon. Still no Leslie, though.

Friday is the last day set aside for rehearsals for that week, and at last, that afternoon, Leslie finally appears. I’m very grateful: something like a full run-through might now be possible. ‘I’m going to be whispering,’ Leslie informs me, in a whisper, at the start of the session.

‘Sorry?’ I say.

‘I’m going to be whispering,’ Leslie whispers.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I can’t hear you. You’re whispering.’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say,’ whispers Leslie, in a now slightly irritated and slightly louder whisper. ‘I’m going to be whispering. I have to save my voice because I need it for the play.’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘OK.’

Although, inside, I’m thinking, ‘This is not great.’

Off we go, me talking, Leslie whispering. We reach a point in the play where I’m standing centre stage with Leslie and he turns his back to me and addresses one of the other characters. It all goes rather quiet for me at this point, now that I can’t see Leslie’s whispering lips and I realise that I’ve missed my cue and have no idea what’s going on.

I think it’s safe to say the whole thing isn’t going tremendously well. In fact, I seem to be experiencing animosity and coldness from pretty much everyone in the cast. I think they all loved Andy so much, and had grown used to him: now here was this new boy barging in, whom nobody knew from Adam. The ranks closed against me. It was my first experience of that in a cast.

We try to rehearse for the second and final week – me with the stage manager and with some of the cast, on the odd occasion when they would turn up, and even less frequently with the whispering Phillips. The play finishes its Australian run on the Saturday. Needless to say, I am not invited to the last-night drinks.

We pack up and fly on to Singapore, with me feeling pretty bewildered and miserable, not to say frighteningly under-rehearsed. In Singapore, we have three days while the set is being built at one end of the hotel ballroom. Derek Nimmo is due to fly in to oversee the opening of this part of the tour. Determined to talk to him as soon as I can, I sit in the hotel’s splendid reception area and wait for him to come through.

‘David, my dear fellow, how are you getting on?’ he says.

‘Derek, I need to have a word with you,’ I say.

‘Oh, my dear boy, we’ll have some coffee, shall we?’

We sit together in the reception. He looks at me and he can tell that all is not well in the fields of Rome, or whatever that unforgettable quotation is.

I say, ‘I want to go home.’

‘I beg your pardon, dear boy?’ says Derek.

‘I want to go home on the next flight,’ I say. ‘I can’t do this tour. There isn’t one person in this company who will speak to me. Leslie Phillips can’t even be bothered to look at me.’

Derek asks me to explain in detail the problems. He is understanding because he has to admit that he’s had someone on the phone to him, expressing (albeit in possibly more choice words) that things are not exactly running smoothly. Derek has arrived expecting to have to calm the waters and now he’s got me in his face as well. He knows the show will be in some serious trouble, and so will his company, if I walk out at this stage. He pleads with me to stay.

‘Open tomorrow and do the show for a week,’ he says. ‘If you’re still unhappy, I’ll find a replacement.’

So I consent and on we go. The first night is, to say the least, interesting. Before curtain up, Leslie calls a cast meeting on the stage. ‘Now, listen up, everybody,’ he says, although I feel he’s only really talking to me. ‘Tonight we open. Remember: this is a farce. We’ve got to attack it. Keep up the pace, pace, pace.’

I thought to myself, ‘Christ. Pace? I am so under-rehearsed I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’ Everyone in a new play gets nerves on a first night but my nerves on this occasion are more like nightmares.

So we open. Leslie has got everybody going at breakneck speed. As the play goes on, everything is flying at me so quickly, I don’t know whether it’s Tuesday or a lemon. Every time I come offstage, I have pieces of paper with prompts and lines and clues written on them, stuck to the walls and the backs of the flats. Only those pieces of paper come between me and a rank, miserable, mumbling public humiliation.

Come the fourth night of the run, though, I’ve started to settle in a bit and the cast has calmed down. And so, I think, ‘I’m here, I’ve got to go through with it and I might as well enjoy it. Nobody’s talking to me, nobody cares, so I’ll see what
I can do. I’ll play the play for my enjoyment and sod the rest of them.’ Because now I’m just beginning to sense that the audience is starting to like me.

The play requires Leslie to play a slightly oily fur-coat salesman who does his best to smooth his way into the affections of his female customers. I’m playing Crouch, his lowly assistant, who stitches the fur coats together, and I’m generally his stooge. As you enter stage left, there’s a kind of platform area, one step up from the main floor of the stage. At one point quite early in the action, Ann Sidney comes on, playing a potential customer. Leslie and I are standing together, over to one side, on the platform. Leslie’s line is something like, ‘Hey, Crouch, what do you think of her, then, eh? I’ll see if I can fit her with a coat.’

With that, he would give me a salacious nudge and set off across the stage towards Ann. This fourth night, he nudges me and I step down off the platform, as if propelled that way by his elbow, and give a look of confusion, as if to say, ‘How did I get down here?’ or perhaps, ‘Blimey, I seem to have shrunk.’ And there’s a big laugh from the audience where there hasn’t been a laugh before – much to Leslie’s confusion, as he heads across the stage with his back to me. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, and I can tell by the slight pause in his stride that the audience’s reaction has hit him. He thinks it’s something he’s done. But he carries on.

So that was fine. I got a slight reward. The next night, we do it again. Again, a big laugh. And I can see him now, thinking, ‘Where’s that come from? What am I doing? Or what is he doing?’ This time he turns round to look at me. And I stop looking around and give him a look. Whereupon we get another laugh for that. And as soon as he looks away, I give another puzzled look, and get another laugh.

At the end of that week, Leslie has clocked what I’m doing. So now, instead of nudging me, up on the platform, he puts his arm around me, so that I can’t make the move off the step. He
also moves across to Ann backwards, so that he can keep his eye on me. So I think, ‘That’s all right: I can stand to lose that moment because I’ll get something else later on.’

And so, over the next week or two, I set out to explore the piece for my and the audience’s entertainment. There’s a portion of the play when I’m onstage and Leslie’s not. That’s when I decide I’ll have some fun. Which I do. I’m finding laughs that haven’t been there, and the occasional round to go with them – to the point where Leslie has to come up from his dressing room and stand in the wings and see what’s going on.