David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  What happened after that, of course, is a matter of historical record. Mike, Terry and Eric went away and continued to plot their move into adult television, and a year later they regrouped with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and brought Terry Gilliam back on board to do animations, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus was born. Basically it was a more grown-up version of Do Not Adjust Your Set – but without me and Denise.

  ‘Did that rankle?’ I hear you ask. ‘Yes,’ I hear myself answer. It rankled a lot. I can’t speak for Denise but I know my nose was out of joint. Dear reader, the chances are you will have come across Monty Python’s Flying Circus at some point in your life and will be aware how big that show became and how important in the history of comedy. It was as though the band had broken up and then re-formed without us. Denise and I were part of the original group, but we got sidelined. Or that’s how it felt to me.

  After Mike, Terry and Eric left, Rediffusion did talk to me about possibly developing Captain Fantastic into a series of his own. They thought the character had enough life in him to stand up separately. I agreed with them about that, but I wanted to know how the show would be shot. For me, it was obvious that it would only work if film was used, as we did in the original inserts – with the speeding-up and the silent-era trickery. If you tried shooting it on tape, in a studio, without the filmed stunts … well, I couldn’t really see where that would go. But, of course, shooting an entire series on film would have been expensive. Rediffusion said they wouldn’t run to that. If there was going to be a Captain Fantastic series, it would have to come indoors and be made on tape. But the whole point of Captain Fantastic, it seemed to me, was that it was a fond parody of the silent era. If you lost that, you lost everything about it. It had to be made on film, or it was nothing. So I walked away from the idea.

  What an extraordinary little phase that was, though. A brush with Monty Python, a brush with Dad’s Army … it was as though everything I touched turned to gold – but only after I’d stopped touching it and gone to another room. It was Clive Dunn, of course, who got the role of Corporal Jones – and what a superb job he made of it. Would I have been anywhere near as good in the role? Who knows? But also, if I had ended up in Dad’s Army, would I have been able to do Open All Hours and Only Fools and Horses and Frost and all the other things that my career opened out into?

  Afterwards, of course, and all these years later, it doesn’t matter: I went on to do other things and to be extremely happy doing what I was doing. At the time, though, when you’re out of work, and unsure where you’re headed, or even if you’re headed anywhere at all, and you’re looking at the success that people are having without you … well, I was pretty bitter about it.

  I had to sit back and watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Dad’s Army ascend to the skies without me. It was like the Beatles all over again, and I was Pete Best. Twice.

  Incidentally, I bumped into Eric Idle many years later. It was after I had done Only Fools and Horses, so all the dust had long since settled. He must have been over from Los Angeles, where he had gone to live. I had a lunch arranged with someone in London, and when I walked into the restaurant, there was Eric at a table. We greeted each other warmly and did the usual how-are-yous, it’s-been-ages and how’s-it-goings. I was struck by how transatlantic his accent had become.

  ‘I see you’re still fucking about on television,’ he said, brightly.

  ‘Er, yes,’ I said, less brightly.

  And then we said our fond farewells and got on with our respective lunches.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A shaggy dog story. How I delivered Bob Monkhouse’s babies. And the West End finally beckons properly.

  CAPTAIN FANTASTIC AND Mrs Black might have been out of work, after the demise of Do Not Adjust Your Set, but Denise Coffey and I were very quickly offered the chance to revive our partnership in a television show that featured a dog. Unfortunately for both of us, the show didn’t just feature a dog. It also was a dog. Indeed, if you’d been asked, at the time, which was the bigger dog – the show or the dog – I don’t think you’d have picked the dog.

  I’m not sure where the finger of blame should ultimately point for this little pothole in the path of our careers. Maybe it should point at everyone involved, because we all, more or less cheerfully, went along with it. But my first connection with the project was a meeting at what was now Thames Television (formerly Rediffusion), with Daphne Shadwell, the former director of Do Not Adjust Your Set, with whom by now both Denise and I were quite close. Daffers referred to us as the ‘G’nommies’ – a contraction of ‘garden gnomes’. (Denise was even smaller than me, at five foot two.) It emerged that somebody had come up with an idea for a script for Denise and me – and for a third party, of a canine nature.

  At the time, just about the most famous dog in the world, after Lassie, was the Dulux sheepdog. He was certainly the most famous dog in Britain. His extremely fluffy work in widely broadcast advertisements for household paint had ensured him that status. Why, in the early 1970s, there was barely a person in the country who hadn’t been inspired by that dog’s example to paint their sitting room magnolia. He was really packing them in, down at the DIY shops.

  So somebody came up with the idea of using the Dulux sheepdog in a television series for children. The theory was that the show was bound to be popular because almost everybody loved the Dulux sheepdog, or, at least, were prepared to give him the time of day. Therefore the people at Thames got in touch with the Dulux sheepdog – or, I should say, they got in touch with the Dulux sheepdog’s people. (When you’re as famous as the Dulux sheepdog was, you don’t pick up the phone yourself: you have handlers for that.) And the word from the Dulux sheepdog’s people was that the Dulux sheepdog was very keen on the idea – provided, obviously, that his personal terms could be met, regarding fee, basket, water bowl, supply of Boneo, etc., and, of course, provided no better offer came up in the meantime. (That’s always a risk with the really big names.)

  Here’s the thing, though. The Dulux sheepdog (and I can say it now because he’s not likely to be reading this) wasn’t a trained dog. By which I don’t mean he wasn’t house-trained, because he was. I mean he wasn’t trained as a performing animal. He wasn’t a circus act. He didn’t have a set of tricks up his sleeve. He was just a dog that looked lovely and had an unusually keen interest in interior decorating.

  Actually, thinking about it, even in the Dulux ads, the Dulux dog didn’t do much, did he? Not even decorating. You certainly didn’t see him paint the rooms, as I recall. Mostly he just walked through them, or sat in them with his tongue hanging out and his hair over his eyes. Mind you, there are a lot of actors who have got away with less.

  Anyway, in that meeting at Thames, we talked about the possibility of a set of stories involving a brother (me) and a sister (Denise) who would go about the place, solving mysteries and bringing criminals to justice, all the while accompanied by a dog (Dulux). There was no title for this show at first, until I rather brilliantly came up with one – Two D’s and a Dog.

  Do you see what I did there? David and Denise both start with the letter ‘D’, you see, and so does the word ‘dog’, which means it sounds nice coming after ‘Two D’s’. Put the whole thing together and you get ‘Two D’s and a Dog’.

  That blinding flash of inspiration on my part was greeted in the room with … well, almost no enthusiasm at all, actually, until it became clear that no one was going to come up with anything better. So, for better or worse, Two D’s and a Dog it was.

  After that, some scripts were written and before long Denise and I found ourselves on-set in the actual presence of the Dulux dog – a huge moment for us, as you can imagine. I think we were both a little nervous, being around a star of that magnitude, and especially given the size of his jaw. If I could confess something, though (and it’s not an uncommon phenomenon, this), I thought he looked slightly smaller in the flesh. But then people often say the same about me.

  H
owever, when it came to working with the Dulux dog … well, I’m not going to beat around the bush here: he was a total nightmare. We had a lot of problems getting the dog to do anything that the script required – which wasn’t much, frankly, but we did at least need him to be along with us a lot of the time, if only in a vague ‘I’m here too’ kind of way, and even that proved problematic.

  For instance: because I could drive a motorbike (and was now, unlike in 1958, legally entitled to carry a passenger without attracting the raised eyebrows of the authorities), someone had the cute idea of putting the three mystery-busting stars of the show on a bike-and-sidecar set-up – me at the front, Denise riding pillion and the Dulux dog in the sidecar.

  Thinking about it, me at the front, Denise in the sidecar and the Dulux dog riding pillion would have been funnier. And me in the sidecar, Denise riding pillion and the Dulux dog doing the driving would have been funnier still. Or maybe it should have been Denise driving, me and the dog riding pillion and no one in the sidecar. Or perhaps all of us should have been in the sidecar and nobody should have been driving. But you can see why we didn’t try it.

  Now, it took forever to get the dog into the sidecar. He wasn’t keen on the idea at all and was, I felt, several times on the verge of storming back to his trailer, slamming the door and refusing to come out for the rest of the afternoon. Finally, though, after much soothing and enticing by his handler, he overcame his inner demons and agreed to go in there, on cue, when the door was opened for him. And then I had to spend a long time gently driving up and down until he got used to the motion and we could trust him not to fling himself from a moving motorbike in fear, which would have been embarrassing for all of us, and a nightmare for the insurers.

  Eventually we could get the dog into the sidecar relatively smoothly and trust him to stay there. However, getting the dog out of the sidecar was another matter. We discovered this while filming an episode in which the three of us resolved to go into a haunted house to find out why it was haunted. (Scooby-Doo, eat your cartoon heart out. You too, Shaggy.) Denise, the Dulux dog and I roared up to the front of the haunted house in question, and Denise and I jumped off the bike, full of purpose and ready to go charging through the front door and demystify the place forever – and the Dulux dog just sat there like a lump. Which rather drained the moment of its dramatic intensity. The cry, as usual at such times, was ‘Cut!’ followed by words which, if my daughter should read them in this book, I would struggle to explain. The director, the props boy, the handler – they tried everything: coaxing, calling, dangling treats, offering a pay rise. Still the dog sat there. Finally, the handler lost his patience and shouted, ‘Will you come out?!’

  At which point, the dog snapped at him – ‘Rrrough!’ – and nearly had his hand off.

  Honestly, if I’d gone to the press with that story at the time, I could have ruined the Dulux dog’s career in show business forever. Think of the headlines: ‘TOP DOG IS REALLY ANIMAL SHOCK’, ‘THE DULUX DOG: THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS DARK UNDERCOAT’.

  Two D’s and a Dog lasted for one, faltering series, broadcast in 1970, after which, to no public outcry whatsoever, it was cancelled. The show does not appear to feature prominently in the archives under ‘Golden Children’s Television’ – and I have to say I’m quite glad about that. Indeed, I quite hope the tapes have all been scrubbed, Dulux dog and all, so they can’t come back to haunt me.

  Didn’t someone once say something important about the perils of becoming professionally associated with children and animals? Indeed, they did. But nobody ever listened to them.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, MY FRIENDSHIP with Humphrey Barclay, the producer of Do Not Adjust Your Set, grew. We spent a lot of time together and became good mates. We were part of a small gang who met up every now and again for meals at the Ark in Notting Hill, where we would quaff wine and have merry interludes. One time Humphrey invited me to join him at a chalet in Switzerland for a skiing holiday. Also there were Suzy Miller, who was Humphrey’s secretary, and Suzy’s boyfriend, who quickly earned the nickname the ‘Spider of the Piste’ on account of the figure he cut, from a distance, on the slopes in his all-black clothes.

  Apart from a holiday in Jersey with my old business partner Bob Bevil, this was the first time I had been abroad and only the second time I had ever been on an aeroplane. I flew into Geneva and then, following the extensive instructions written out for me by Suzy, took a train to Les Diablerets, where Humphrey picked me up. I was wearing, needless to say, my monumental fur coat. I took a few skiing lessons, venturing out onto the piste in my normal clothes, having none of the specialist gear. I absolutely loved it.

  Back in London, Humphrey said he wanted me to meet an old friend of his called David Hatch, who was a radio producer at the BBC. The three of us got together in the bar of the Langham in Portland Place, opposite Broadcasting House. When I walked in, David was already at the bar, standing in a pose that would become very familiar to me, holding his beer glass up at his chest, as if it were an extension of his lapel.

  Hatchy and Humphrey had been in the Cambridge Footlights together. I liked him immediately. During the course of our conversation he said, ‘Well, David, have you ever done any radio?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ he said.

  ‘Nobody’s ever asked me,’ I said.

  To which he replied, ‘Well, I’m asking you now.’

  He had taken over a late-night sketch show – one which he felt was a bit linear and not a little boring. He wanted to give it a kick up the backside, and make it a satirical sketch show, sending up Parliament and the powers that be. He put together a collection of young writers, keen to cut their teeth in the comedy business, and a small company of actors, including Bill Wallis, David Tate, Sheila Steafel and me. Together, from 1970 onwards (and, in my case, on and off, all the way through to 1991), we began to make Week Ending.

  We’d get together at the BBC on a Friday morning, and the half-hour show would go out at eleven that night. I played roles in sketches and did voices and impressions. My Jim Callaghan, for example, was unshakeably in office between 1976 and 1979. I also doubled as Tony Benn and a variety of newsreaders. I loved the immediacy of the programme and the way it forced you to apply your skill as an actor so quickly, across so many different parts. I’d find myself playing, for example, the aide to the Minister of Defence (played by David Tate and always, for some reason, portrayed in his bath, with a rubber duck), or perhaps sending up a royal wedding, or maybe reading some of the one-liners that formed ‘Next Week’s News’, the show’s regular sign-off. This was basically an excuse for the writers to show off their punning skills. Thus I found myself musing, in the firm voice of a newsreader: ‘If Evita has got Juan Peron, what has she done with the other pair?’ (This joke requires some Spanish pronunciation. Also some knowledge of Argentine political history. Ask a teacher. If you’re still struggling, try saying ‘one’ for ‘Juan’. If you’re still struggling … oh, let’s move on.)

  The atmosphere on Week Ending was very egalitarian. We sometimes had to audition among ourselves for parts in sketches. We’d all have a go at doing the necessary political voice and whoever was best at it and made the rest of us laugh hardest got the part.

  Hatchy went on to be one of the big cheeses in BBC Radio – although not before he had been hauled up to the BBC’s ivory tower himself on occasions, and given a dressing-down because there had been complaints about a perceived bias against the reigning government. David would point out that it wasn’t bias at all. The fact of the matter was, the ones who happened to be in power were the ones making the decisions, so they happened to be more available for satire than the ones in opposition. It wasn’t political, then, so much as practical. I don’t think the big people had an answer to that. In any case, the government changed numerous times during my years on the show, without the jokes drying up. We let them all have it, indiscriminately. Funny how politics works: one lot comes in until
we get fed up with them, and then we sack them and bring in the other lot. It reminds me of this great verse:

  Little fleas have littler fleas

  Upon their backs to bite ’em

  And littler fleas have smaller fleas

  And so on, ad infinitum.

  One Friday Hatchy invited along to the recording a young, quiet, bespectacled cub reporter from the Luton News who, off his own bat, had been sending in material of a consistently high standard to the show. That was my first meeting with David Renwick, who became a good friend of mine, and went on to write for The Two Ronnies and Not the Nine O’Clock News and, latterly, to create the sitcom One Foot in the Grave and the drama serial Jonathan Creek.

  In 1977, my work for Week Ending resulted in me being given a spin-off solo sketch show, The Jason Explanation. It was the beginning of many things for many people, myself included.

  One day, early in our acquaintance, Hatchy announced that he had got some tickets to see Alastair Sim performing in The Magistrate, by Arthur Wing Pinero, at the Chichester Festival Theatre. We drove down to Sussex – Humphrey at the wheel, Hatchy and me in the back, relentlessly and mercilessly taunting the driver, as I recall. (‘He’s turned left. I would never have turned left there.’ ‘He’s made a mistake, of course.’ ‘We’ll be lucky if we get there before midnight.’) What a thrill to see Alastair Sim, though. I had been a huge fan ever since I saw him play Scrooge in the 1951 film version of A Christmas Carol – the definitive Scrooge, in my humble opinion. In The Magistrate, he was Mr Posket, and I will always remember the brilliant routine he did with a pair of braces, in a scene where he was getting ready to go out. These braces were hanging down his back and he had to wriggle to get them up onto his shoulders, one at a time. Every time he got one side up, the other pinged back down. Eventually he got them both under control and stood up – at which point they both flew off at the same time. The amount of business he got out of a simple pair of braces! Years later, I was offered the Mr Posket role and, remembering Alastair Sim and the braces, I thought, ‘Great.’ Then I thumbed through the acting edition of the play, hoping to find a description of the business with the braces. But it wasn’t in there. I would only have had my memory to go on, and I didn’t know exactly how he had constructed it. So I didn’t do it – I turned the role down. I didn’t want to do the play without this thing Sim did. That business would have been the high point for me.