David Jason: My Life (46 page)

Excelsior Productions did get permission to adapt
A Touch of Frost
, and Yorkshire Television did agree to get involved in it, and I did land the part. Landed it, and kept it for fifteen series and forty-two episodes, screened over a period of eighteen years between 1992 and 2010. Which is a long time to spend in the skin of a shabby detective. But, boy, I did love playing that part.

We had to clean him up a bit. In the books, Detective Inspector Jack Frost was a chain-smoker, and I had recently given up cigarettes. I’d never been heavy – just four or five a day, normally in the evening with a drink. But I didn’t want to start smoking for the part and find myself drifting back into the habit again. By this time, smoking on television was starting to be a bit taboo in any case. Also, incidentally, from a purely practical point of view, smoking is a nightmare for continuity – you’ve got to watch the length of the ash all the time, otherwise it looks like someone has sucked down three-quarters of a cigarette in the time it takes someone else to come through the door. The less smoking you’ve got going on in a scene, the easier life is for everybody.

So we made Frost someone who had been a heavy smoker but who had recently quit – and actually, this ended up giving us more bits of business than if we had left him to smoke. It enabled us to give him chewing gum to occupy himself with, and it meant we could make him irritable and very grumpy about anyone else smoking anywhere near him. I remember in particular a scene in the Incident Room when one of his assistants lit up a fag to enjoy with his coffee, and Frost nipped the cigarette out of his mouth and doused it in the bloke’s coffee in a fit of jealous pique. Frost’s status as a reformed smoker opened up lots of little moments like that.

We didn’t clean up his eating habits, though. This was another show with a tough food regime – maybe not quite as bad as the one in
Darling Buds
, but still hard on the stomach. Frost was not a healthy eater: bacon sandwiches, chips, fry-ups. People would say to me, ‘You’re always eating in
Frost
.’ True enough. And not just that: I was always eating badly.

There was one manifest problem about me playing a detective: my height. At five foot six, Frost would most likely have fallen foul of the police height requirement and never have made it into the force in the first place. No easy way for me to get round that, really, but you’ll notice I stood as tall as I could when I played Frost, and gave him a very correct, shoulders-back bearing, so that my height would be less of an issue. I also added a moustache. It was a bit ageing, but I rather liked it. I could imagine Frost growing a moustache as a younger man to give himself a few extra years and a bit more maturity. Obviously my moustache came off between series so I could play other parts. I generally needed four weeks to grow it back and had to remember to stop shaving at the right point ahead of shooting. There were a couple of occasions when I missed the mark slightly and had to help it along with a bit of colouring-in, but, one way or another, it was always ready for day one of filming.

I didn’t want the show to be too formulaic. We decided that Frost wouldn’t have just the one sidekick, in the traditional set-up for this kind of show, but that he would change assistants between cases: we made him a detective to whom sergeants got seconded, to learn the trade. There were a couple of regular characters – Superintendent Norman Mullet (played by Bruce Alexander), the bureaucratic superior that Frost clashes with, and Detective Sergeant George Toolan (played by John Lyons), Frost’s loyal, lower-ranked colleague – but a steady supply of assistants presented us with the opportunity to keep the show fresh and to give Frost new characters to bounce off, people
who would come in and challenge his slightly set view of the world. One of my favourite moments in this area was with Maureen Lawson (played by Sally Dexter) on a stake-out, the pair of us sitting in the car, eating fish and chips. Frost says, ‘I expect you’ll be looking forward to getting back to your boyfriend. When are you next seeing him?’ Maureen very calmly replies, ‘It’s not a him, actually, it’s a her.’ Frost was old-fashioned and he needed a moment to take this on board – his chip just fractionally pausing on its way from packet to lips.

The show meant spending a lot of time away from home, at the studios up in Leeds or on location around Wetherby, Harrogate, Dewsbury and all stations local – even on Ilkley Moor without my hat. Yorkshire Television couldn’t have been more determined to make it easy for me, though. I asked if it were possible to rent a cottage rather than pay for a hotel. I could cook and look after myself, after all. I wasn’t after anything grand with a swimming pool and electronic gates, just somewhere simple that I could go back to at the end of the day, away from everything, and clear my head. Or as we would say now, to chill out.

They found me an old farmer’s cottage in a place called Kirby Overblow off the road from Leeds to Harrogate. It didn’t have central heating, so, on cold nights, I would get in and light myself a fire. Conversely, on warm evenings, I could sit out in the garden and that was always a pleasure – to come back from filming and have a large one and watch the evening go by. People used to ask, ‘Don’t you get lonely?’ I didn’t. Not at this stage of my life. I enjoyed the quiet time.

They also gave me my own driver – the magnificent Lawrence Turner. Either late on Sunday afternoon or first thing on Monday, Loz would collect me from Buckinghamshire in his spotless Lexus and take me on the three-hour drive up to Yorkshire. We’d put the world to rights for a while, then I would work on my scripts. And then we would stop halfway and have
a bacon and egg roll and a cup of tea – a very Frost-like meal. Loz was on call any time I needed him.

We used to call it ‘the circus’. You’d arrive at the location and all the lorries would be there and the sets and the make-up and catering. You would film for maybe three days, and then the circus would pack up and be gone, leaving just some patches of flattened grass behind it. Whenever I’m out and about and I see a film unit at work, I still feel that glow of excitement I used to get, driving onto the set to work.

And because this was a serious drama, encompassing serious matters and ugly crimes, on those sets there was an entirely different atmosphere from the kind I was used to – an atmosphere of sober, careful, almost academic concentration with none of the pranking and larking about that typically went on during the filming of sitcoms and costume dramas.

Yeah, right. I don’t think any television show I’ve done, with the possible exception of
Only Fools
, prompted quite so much mucking about on the part of the people involved in it as
Frost
did. Certainly no show I’ve ever done prompted quite such
elaborate
mucking about. John Lyons was a great character who has become a good friend, but I have to tell you, the winding-up of Johnny Lyons that took place over the course of
A Touch of Frost
would make a pair of ninety-minute television specials all on its own.

It commenced when Johnny and another member of the cast went out one night and had a few jars. When they got back to their rooms at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, Johnny went to the window and looked out and realised that he could see his drinking companion opposite, standing at his own window and also looking out. So Johnny – a sensible man in his fifties at this point, it should be pointed out – dropped his trousers and mooned him.

The following morning, Johnny’s drinking companion made the mistake of laughingly telling me about this. I got hold of
David Reynolds. David jokingly said, ‘We ought to do something. He’s bringing the reputation of the team down.’ I said, ‘I know: let’s create a letter from the manager of the hotel.’ So gophers were employed to find some headed notepaper and the pair of us constructed a letter, ostensibly from the hotel manager to David, stating that it had come to the manager’s attention that certain activities were going on in certain rooms that were bringing the hotel into disrepute and offending other guests and that, as a consequence, the manager felt he had no option but to take further action and involve the police. David then summoned Johnny to his office and, in a quiet meeting between the two of them, presented him with the letter and expressed, with much slow and solemn head-shaking, his disappointment in him. Johnny, as expected, went white with mortification.

His mortification lasted for several hours. In the hope of extending it a little longer, I went and banged on Johnny’s caravan door during the afternoon, while David hid to one side. When Johnny came to the door, I said, ‘What’s this I hear about David getting a letter from the hotel manager?’ Unfortunately, Johnny heard David suppressing his laughter, which led him to smell a rat. ‘You rotten sods,’ said Johnny. ‘Well, that’s it. You’ll never get me again.’

David and I laughed and said, ‘Oh, you reckon, do you? Want to put money on it?’

Johnny very misguidedly said, ‘Yeah, I will. Fifty quid.’

Game on.

David and I waited for shooting to start on the next episode and, in tandem with the director Roger Bamford, devised a new and still more fiendish trap. This one involved Roger issuing Johnny, mid-morning, with a whole new page of dialogue to learn, telling him it was a last-minute script alteration, and instructing him to get it off by heart for shooting at the end of the day. This dialogue, written by David, was actually just a lengthy and deliberately convoluted recap of the episode’s plot,
at the end of which I, as Frost, had the one line: ‘Good thinking, George.’

Johnny’s face was again white – this time with terror at the task lying ahead of him. A naturally conscientious man, Johnny was always worried when he had a lot of dialogue because he liked to work at it and take his time to learn it. Accordingly, in every moment of downtime during the day’s shoot, Johnny was to be found staring at the page of rogue script and cramming like mad to get the lines learned. I generously took the time to do a couple of read-throughs with him by way of rehearsal, but he really wasn’t happy about it. All through lunch he was muttering to himself and telling anyone who would listen, ‘I’m never going to get this learned, you know.’

That day we were on a reservoir near Leeds, doing a story about the recovery of a body from the water. At the end of the day, Roger announced, ‘Right. We’re going to do that extra scene.’ The cameras were set; the lights were readied. Roger called ‘Action’ and John staggered through his massive paragraph of nonsense. Just before we reached my line, though, Roger called, ‘Cut! We’ll have to go again, John. You’re not really in command of it.’

So Johnny went for a second take. Again he staggered, and again Roger called ‘Cut!’ before the end. ‘No, we’ll have to go again, John,’ he said. Johnny went for a third take, and this time he made it through and this time we did reach my line. Whereupon I said, ‘Good thinking, George. And that’s fifty quid you owe me and David Reynolds.’

After much stamping about and many Anglo-Saxon words, Johnny had to admit that he’d been caught again. Yet, amazingly, came the same misguided response: ‘You’ll never get me again.’

Oh, but we did. And again and again, the ruses growing ever more elaborate and involving more and more members of the cast and crew, until the glorious day when Johnny found that, unbeknown to himself, he had been filming in front of a picture
of his own face, blown up by the art department to fit like an advert on the back of a bus that had travelled the entire length of Leeds.

But you couldn’t be winding up Johnny Lyons
all
the time, so
Frost
was also the show on which I started doing rocket launches – to great acclaim, I must say. Well, sometimes.

The problem with film shoots, I started to realise, as the years advanced, was that there were bound to be some portions of empty time – time when all you could do was sit around and wait. And if left hanging about in my caravan too long, especially in the notorious period directly after lunch, I would sometimes have to fight the urge to nod off. I needed something to keep myself going in those downtimes.

So, along with my dresser, Ned Smailes, who shared my enthusiasm for these kinds of things, I began turning my caravan into a workshop, making models from plastic kits. Sometimes I might work on a model in the evening too, for relaxation purposes. Well, as a man who passed from his fifties deep into his sixties during the course of this show (and also as a member of Her Majesty’s constabulary), I wasn’t likely to be knocking my pipe out until four in the morning, was I? I figured it was better to put my head in a paint pot for a couple of hours and wind down that way.

First of all, Ned and I did ships and planes. Then the planes and ships developed into rockets. And the rockets developed into launchable rockets – nice big ones, anything between two and five feet tall, with an engine and an explosive component, which could fly between 500 and 900 feet into the air – because I realised that you could get a bit of a performance with those. I would assemble a rocket using the tools that I now took around with me for the purpose, packed in an old make-up case. Loz, the driver, who was a former engineer, was invaluable in acquiring various specialist parts from obscure sources across Yorkshire. Then, once the rocket was complete, I would
announce a public launch for cast and crew on a specific day after lunch.

The best venue was the big field at the back of Leeds Hospital where, for two or three years, we were allowed to film in the mortuary. Everybody would turn out and we’d have a countdown, followed by lift-off. As the launches became more sophisticated, we built a launch pad from an old lighting stand, and added our own launcher, with a key, lights and its own two-tone alarm sound effect. You’ve never seen anything so camp in all your life.

Ned’s and my ultimate masterpiece was a
Saturn V
replica with one of the biggest engines you could get. Quite a complex build. When you launched it, it would, rather like the real thing, hover just as it lifted from the pad, and then set off into the sky – very pleasing. We used to launch that a lot. (These rockets come back, by the way. Well, they do if you’re lucky. When the rocket reaches its apogee, if I may be permitted a technical term – and if you don’t know it, look it up – there’s a small additional explosion which blows the nose cone off and produces a parachute to bring everything back to earth again. Happy days.) Eventually, with constant use, our
Saturn V
started to char. And then, on one unfortunate day, it failed to rise off the launch pad at all, but just sat there, burning, which charred its rear end fairly terminally. So we retired it – but only very reluctantly.