David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  We battled on through the rest of the play, got an ovation and took our bows. I still felt a bit tense about what had gone on earlier, though. However, in due course there was a tap at my dressing-room door and in came Simon. He apologised profusely for going off on one. The way I understood it, he had felt very tightly controlled while playing opposite Crawford and, in that little misunderstood moment between us on the stage, he had had a vision of it all happening again with me. Anyway, from that moment on, the two of us started to have fun without even a flicker of a cross word. Which is just as well, really. When someone much bigger than you is in charge of chucking you through a door every night, you want to get on with them.

  Of course, all the throwing and diving made the role very athletically demanding. Fortunately, the show had its own osteopath – a man called Paul Johnson, one of life’s good people, who used a room in the theatre as a surgery for the cast and crew and for a lot of the West End theatre dancers in particular. He used to pay the production a visit on Wednesdays between the matinee and the evening performance and sometimes he’d be there on a Saturday afternoon as well. I was quite often in with him, asking him to see off the worst of the physical damage inflicted on my frame by chucking it through a closed serving hatch on a nightly basis. Paul was a big man, in all directions, who could massage pulled muscles back into life – a saviour for dancers but also, as I frequently discovered during this period, a saviour for a knockabout comic actor.

  I remember one period where, every time I finished the show, I would be in agony with my foot. The pain would subside completely overnight, only to climb back to agony-pitch again the following night. Paul took a look at me and said, ‘I’m not surprised. You’ve dislocated your big toe.’ Click – back it went. Did this ever happen to Gielgud? I ask myself. He didn’t make much fuss about it, if it did. Mind you, I do believe, in his younger days, Laurence Olivier was asked to name the best attribute an actor could have. He replied, ‘Stamina.’ That was certainly the best attribute an actor in No Sex Please – We’re British could have had. You and me both, Lozzer.

  After a year in the role, I was presented with a very nice lighter and an engraved brick with a hole hollowed out of the middle of it, which sits on my desk to this day with my pens in it. I was in No Sex Please for eighteen months, and I think I only had two nights off for illness in that whole period. (I was laid low by a throat infection, the traditional occupational hazard for the theatre actor. All the dust and germs of a thousand nights gather up high in the flats and then, when someone slams a door in the set, the spores of ages shower gently down around you and into your vulnerable passages.) For sixteen of those months, I had the greatest time, but as the end of my contract loomed, when I was asked if I wanted to sign up again and continue, I realised that it was time to move on. I had done as much with the role as I was ever going to do with it. I couldn’t see it developing in a different direction if I stayed in it, so, much as I loved it, I decided to opt for change. To my relief, the box office didn’t go down on my watch. In fact, it started to go up. John Gale saved himself a stack of money by having me in the role. After six months, we were packed out and he was paying me peanuts, relatively speaking, so he got to go laughing all the way to the bank. Did I burn with resentment about it, though? I can’t say I did. I was having too good a time.

  It was one of the friendliest casts I had ever been in, a proper team even as people came and went: people like Richard Caldicot, who was a brilliant foil; and Evelyn Laye and Jean Kent, who eventually took over from Evelyn – both big stars who knew the business inside out; and Simon Williams, of course, and Belinda Carroll, who was Simon’s wife in real life, and whom I could get corpsing like nobody’s business. Belinda eventually left, to be replaced by Liza Goddard, who was famous for being in the legendary kids’ TV show Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Before Liza’s arrival, the cast solemnly marked Belinda’s last night in the show by filling her knickers with shaving foam. During the play, that is. There was a moment when she had to come offstage, stay a beat or two in the wings, and then go straight back on. In that pause, fleeting though it was, her fellow thespians offstage nonetheless found time to squeeze a large helping of Gillette’s finest grooming product into the rear of Belinda’s underwear. Back out she went, of course, destined to play the rest of the scene and the rest of the play with a pair of silently frothing pants. A memorable final performance, I’m sure.

  Belinda, Simon, Richard … these were bigger and better actors than I had earned a right to be moving among. I was completely energised by the experience. I had that fabulous, liberated feeling that only comes at the start of your career, when you don’t have a reputation to lose, you only have a reputation to make.

  It wasn’t the greatest play in the world, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was a vehicle to make people laugh. It was a moment in the culture, too. Despite the sixties, sex was something most people couldn’t quite bring themselves to talk about, and here was a play about exactly that reticence and awkwardness and shame. People recognised themselves in it. And you had to be there on a Friday or Saturday night, when the place was packed with people absolutely in fits. You’ll know, I’m sure, the expression ‘rolling in the aisles’. Up to that point, I’d always assumed it was figurative – an exaggeration. At No Sex Please, I saw it happen. People actually laughed so hard they fell out of the chairs and into the aisles.

  Indeed, more than once we had people carted out with heart attacks. I’m not saying that’s something to be proud of – and all sympathies, of course, to the people concerned and their relatives. At the same time, it’s a sort of backhanded compliment.

  In the audience one night: Ronnie Corbett. He was getting ready to play Brian Runnicles in the film version of the play that was made in 1973. ‘But why him and not you?’ I hear you loyally cry, your voice thick with affront and tremulous outrage on my behalf. ‘After all you had done for that production,’ I hear you loyally add, dabbing tears of hurt from your appalled eyes.

  The answer is simple, actually. Ronnie was already a star. They couldn’t have raised the money for a film on my name. They could raise it on his. That’s how it works.

  In the audience another night: a coach party from Leeds including a student called Gill Hinchcliffe. Not that I knew her, or knew she was there at the time. It was something I found out a couple of decades later when she told me – not all that long before I married her.

  * * *

  I HAD BEEN living all this time in the flat above my brother and sister-in-law’s hairdressing salon in Thornton Heath, still jostling past the free-standing hairdryers on my way in at night. Then one day, Josephine Tewson, a brilliant actress I knew well from Hark at Barker and Mostly Monkhouse (she was later very successful in the nineties sitcom Keeping Up Appearances), told me she was moving out of her flat – a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment in a Peabody Estate building on Newman Street, just behind Oxford Street and right in the middle of London. She asked me if I knew anyone who might want to take it over. I told her I definitely did know someone: me.

  The day I moved in, I was fumbling in the doorway with my key and suitcases, when the door to the flat across the landing opened, exposing a man in a pinny, in the middle of doing the hoovering. This was Micky McCaul, a bookmaker turned estate agent, who with his wife Angie became firm friends and the best neighbours an actor in search of late-night drinking companions could wish to have.

  I loved that bachelor pad and I loved the neighbourhood, too, and the sense of being deep in the beating heart of the city, which was not a sensation that was always available in Thornton Heath. I liked the fact that everything was just a short walk away – Tottenham Court Road, the One Ton pub in Goodge Street, Macreadys, a private club at Seven Dials, run by Ray Cooney, among other people, where highly detaining graffiti covered the wall of the Gents. One day the landlord had it painted over. Within moments a solitary, neatly written line had appeared in the fresh paint: ‘Where has all the graffiti gone
?’ Sometimes I would drift up Oxford Street to watch the street hawkers at work, flogging their dodgy watches and perfumes off the pavement, or doing cup-and-ball trick routines on milk crates – and bundling everything away and legging it at the first sight of a policeman. It all had a sort of edgy romance to me.

  On Sundays, though, my only day off from No Sex Please, I would sometimes decide to get out of the city for a few hours and would drive out to Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire with Carol Collins, park up and sit there watching the gliders float around in the sky. It was a wonderful way to relax and get away from the job. One day when we were there, Carol said, ‘You’re always on about flying, and how fabulous you think it is. Why don’t you go down and ask how much it costs?’

  Always keen to look after the pennies, I said, ‘No, it’ll be far too expensive.’

  But my curiosity was piqued, and eventually I did go and ask, and it turned out that learning to glide was not nearly as wallet-stripping as you might have imagined. Indeed, it was clearly the cheapest way to get into the air, and clearly within reach of an actor with a job in the West End. So I started going out to Dunstable every Sunday and learning to fly a glider, and in due course I was flying solo and studying towards my Silver C qualification. I loved it – to the extent that I ended up in partnership with a couple of guys at the airfield and bought myself a share in a glider. I was now the part-owner of an aircraft. Admittedly it was the cheapest kind of aircraft money could buy, and I only owned a third of it. Still, this would have seemed an entirely fantastical development in the days when I was a callow lad, acquiring my first second-hand motorbike.

  Back on land in London, socialising after work was inherently complicated. In the early 1970s, the pubs closed at ten thirty, which meant no further service and that achingly familiar cry, ‘Ain’t you got no ’omes to go to?’ The cry was the same in any pub in the city. I sometimes used to wonder whether it was the same bloke, going round to them all on his bike and putting his head through the door to do the shout. Whatever, it meant an actor found it very hard to clock off in time to get a drink. Sometimes you would be in a position to rush in just before closing, order two pints and line them up, but then you only had ten minutes’ ‘drinking-up time’ to sink them, so that wasn’t much good. It just left you with an enlarged belly and a desperate urge to pee.

  Fortunately, for those difficult, dry times in an actor’s life, there was Gerry’s.

  Gerry’s was an underground cavern down a steep set of stairs between two shops on Shaftesbury Avenue. It had been opened by Gerald Campion, a short, rotund chap who, as a boy, got the part of Billy Bunter in a television series and became a bit of a child star. Like a lot of child stars, when he grew up and started seeking adult work, he found his former fame more of a hindrance than a help. Intimately understanding the profession and its needs, he opened a members-only after-dinner club for actors where you could drink and eat until two or three in the morning. So an awful lot of actors would end up at Gerry’s.

  I used to be excited to spot Hywel Bennett in there, when he was at the top of his game. He had acted with Hayley Mills and had been in the movie The Virgin Soldiers – the DiCaprio of his time, you could say. James Villiers was often in there too, another great British film actor who made me feel a bit starstruck. Ronnie Fraser was in Gerry’s so much he had his own drink named after him – a tall vodka cocktail, mostly vodka. Mike Pratt from Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) actually ended up serving there. I would also bump into the great John Junkin, who became a good friend and ally.

  You had to be buzzed in via the intercom, once your name had been checked on the list. Then you found yourself on a narrow downward flight of stairs which quickly turned to the right through ninety degrees. A few more steps and you were in the magic kingdom. Everybody who was already in the club would turn to see who was arriving, so people liked to make a bit of an entrance as they swept down those final steps to the floor. Before you lay a dimly lit cellar, illuminated mainly by candles, and to the right, stretching back about thirty feet, were a number of what can only be described as horseboxes – booths, I suppose, would be the flattering term. In front of you was the bar, always frequented by a few diehards. To the left, two more horseboxes and the less than desirable Ladies and Gents toilets, also used as the storeroom.

  It wasn’t salubrious, then. But the point was, it was your club. You were among your own kind, you felt, and were very comfortable to be so. You could squeeze into a booth, if one was available, and order a meal – nothing fancy, steak and chips, mostly – and the beer and Scotch flowed freely. In those days, I stuck with beer – light and bitter, specifically. Many a night I would stagger out of Gerry’s in the early hours of the morning with Malcolm Taylor, in a state of over-refreshment, having unsuccessfully attempted to woo the waitresses. Those were thrilling times altogether. I was acting in the West End, living in the West End, drinking in the West End – I couldn’t have got much more West End without changing my name to ‘West End’.

  CHAPTER TEN

  How not to make a movie. In bed with Elizabeth Taylor, but not Richard Burton. And various other adventures in the screen trade, not all of them entirely satisfying.

  WE COME NOW to the portion of this narrative which must deal with my days in Hollywood – obviously an unforgettable period for me. The details are etched so vividly in my mind, it’s as though it were yesterday, although, I confess, at the time I was constantly pinching myself to check that it was really me.

  Really me, arriving in the entertainment capital of the world! Really me, driving on Sunset Boulevard with the sky above an incredible blue and the sun glistening in the palm trees! Really me, passing in a state of almost childish wonder through the gates of Universal Studios and onto its famous movie backlot!

  Ah, what a lovely week’s holiday that was. The summer of 1978, I believe. Linda Ronan, who handled this area for the Richard Stone Partnership, had got me a set of commercials for Cobb & Co., a pub-restaurant chain in New Zealand. The reason they wanted me was because of some physical antics I had got up to in a comedy series for ITV called The Secret Life of Edgar Briggs. The series had inspired a selection of scenarios for adverts in which I played a salesman for whom everything goes wrong and who creates chaos even as he is trying to make his pitch – a kind of anti-commercial, if you like. Anyway, among the perks of the job was a flexible air ticket, meaning that I could break my return journey anywhere I chose. I chose Los Angeles, where a great former girlfriend, who used to work in the bar at Gerry’s, was now living. She had succeeded in securing a job with a publishing house and had emigrated. She agreed to put me up and show me the sights, and we had a fabulous week before I headed back to London.

  Those seven days of tourism, which included trips to a number of very good burger bars, represent, even now, the full extent of my experience of Hollywood. Not for want of trying, I should say. Or perhaps I should say, not for want of dreaming. If any actor tells you their idle contemplations haven’t turned longingly, at some point or other, to the prospect of a major American film deal, they’re almost certainly fibbing. Yet it may be significant that, when I was actually in Hollywood that time, I didn’t think about doing anything to make the dream become a reality. My agent, Richard, had a representative working in Los Angeles – his son, Tim. So, at Richard’s suggestion, Tim and I met for lunch one day. Tim booked somewhere buzzing and businessy on the Sunset Strip, or thereabouts – the kind of place where you could believe everyone was talking deals and projects. He was adamant that we should get a good table – by which he seemed to mean one in the middle of the room. I was puzzled about this insistence at the time, thinking that surely all the best tables were the ones over by the wall, out of the way. But, of course, it was in order to be sitting where the maximum number of other diners would walk past you during the course of your meal, meaning you had the chance to catch someone’s eye and say hello if you needed to.

  I was a wide-eyed innocent throughout that t
rip – to an extent that seems bizarre to me now. I was an actor, in Los Angeles, with an agent – and yet it didn’t occur to me to network or mingle or put myself about or turn the trip to my commercial advantage. Maybe, deep down, in my heart, for all the fantasies about a life in film, I lacked the belief. Maybe, in my heart, I thought it was far above and beyond me. It really was back to my innocent Incognito days: I suppose I wanted someone to tell me I was good. I was incapable of telling them. I was the wrong way round in LA.

  This is not to say that the film world has not come a-calling for my talents on at least a couple of occasions. Reader, I have indeed graced the silver screen. However, I think it’s fair to say that at no point while I was gracing it was cinematic history made. In fact, one of the films was so bad that cinematic history was almost unmade.

  In 1973, I was busy in No Sex Please in the West End when Tim Stone got in touch and said, ‘We’ve had some interest from a company called Border Film Productions who want to make a movie with you. They’ve seen you in No Sex.’

  Well, that suggestion certainly tickled my interest, even though I had no idea who Border Film Productions were. The truth is, I’m not sure I ever properly found out who Border Film Productions were, even while I was working for them.

  Tim sent me the screenplay for a film called Albert’s Follies. That in itself was tremendously exciting – opening an envelope and pulling out a screenplay rather than just a play or script. I settled down to read it in a state of pink-cheeked glee. The screenplay was by a writer called David McGillivray. McGillivray went on to write a lot of scripts for the British sex-film industry. Perhaps you’ve seen his I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight from 1975, or 1974’s The Hot Girls; or maybe you’ve even come across the script for his sadly unmade 1976 piece, Unzipper Dee Doo Dah. Whatever, all that was in the future for him. What he had come up with in Albert’s Follies seemed to be a fairly innocent kind of farcical comedy. The character it was proposed I should play, Albert Toddey, was a civil servant and an ordinary, rather meek bloke. But when things got tough, Albert would suddenly transform into a kind of James Bond figure, suited and sleek, and rescue the situation – or, at least, in his dreams he would. A slightly old, Billy Liar-style kind of set-up, you might immediately suggest; and you might immediately be right. But I was so busy being completely impressed by the simple fact that I was reading a screenplay, that I didn’t really pause to have any particular reflections on its contents, critical or otherwise.