by David Jason
Alas, barring a couple of other more or less regrettable excursions, that was pretty much the extent of my film career. In 1978, a half-hour comedy I’d made with Ronnie Barker a few years earlier, called The Odd Job, got expanded into an eighty-minute film, directed by Graham Chapman from Monty Python. Chapman also played the lead, a depressive who hires an odd-job man to bump him off. (Ronnie Barker had turned it down, which should have sounded more alarm bells with me than it did.) I played the unlikely hired killer, as I had for Ronnie, but I wasn’t Chapman’s first choice. He wanted to give the role to Keith Moon, which gives you an indication of the different direction in which he wanted to take the comedy – rather losing the essence of it in the process, I felt. Certainly this was the only time in my life when I was ever considered a substitute for the drummer of the Who.
When they tried to revive the Carry On format in 1992, with Carry On Columbus, starring Julian Clary, I was sounded out about getting involved. But I read the script and found I wasn’t laughing very often. Not for me, Raymond. (I do, however, do a good Julian Clary impression. What a pity this is a book, or I would do it for you now.)
More recently, the producers of Gnomeo & Juliet, the children’s animation, offered me a part in a film (probably not for children and certainly not an animation) about the man who invented Viagra. Don’t ask me which part. Let’s just say I found I couldn’t get all that worked up about it.
So, that’s the story of me and Hollywood … so far. But you know the old saying: ‘This time next year …’
* * *
AT LEAST ONE good thing came out of that Under Milk Wood shoot in Wales, though. It was where I met an actress called Olwen Rees, who played Gwennie. She was a beautiful girl and a lovely singer, and I grew very friendly with her and her husband, Johnny Tudor, who was a cabaret artist who worked the shipping lines.
A couple of years later, in 1977, I was touring in a production of The Norman Conquests which, among other dates, went to Cardiff. Olwen came to see a performance and brought along her friend, a striking, red-headed girl called Myfanwy Talog. Myfanwy was a teacher turned actress and, though I didn’t know at the time, quite famous in Wales on account of her appearances on Welsh television with the comedy duo Rees and Ronnie. You could say they were the Welsh version of the Two Ronnies, and Myfanwy was the leading girl in the show.
Olwen was doing a bit of matchmaking, clearly – and a very successful piece of matchmaking, as it happened. The three of us went out for dinner together and I was instantly taken with Myfanwy, and she with me. We started to go out together – which was quite tricky at first because she was in Wales and I was either in London or off on tour. You find a way, though, if you really want to do something. We made it last for eighteen years.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The noble art of raspberry-blowing. My apprenticeship as a shop assistant. And the bed that rocked in Billingham.
I CALLED RONNIE Barker the ‘Guvnor’. It was a jokey nickname at first, but it grew to express exactly what I felt about him. The Guv’nor is what he was to me, and always will be. It wasn’t just the depth of his comic gift, the abilities he had as a writer and a performer and a composer and an artist (even his handwriting was a work of art), it was the way he conducted himself, the kind of man he was. I’ve always tried to emulate him a bit and to feel him on my shoulder.
He was in his early forties when we first worked together, and firmly established. His television partnership with Ronnie Corbett in The Two Ronnies was already up and running and on its way to becoming one of the biggest items in British television history. Yet you would have been hard-pushed to find someone less grand or starry. The trappings of show business and the attention that it brought him were of no interest to Ronnie. He lived quietly, kept himself out of the limelight and wanted nothing to do with fame for its own sake. After rehearsals or filming, he would want to go home to his family. He hardly ever attended big social events. On television, he was almost always in character: that was the thing he loved and the thing he absolutely excelled at – playing comic roles. The only time Ronnie really appeared on-screen as himself was in those portions of The Two Ronnies when the pair of them sat at a desk and read the spoof news headlines, quite openly chuckling at each other’s gags. That’s pretty much how he was, off-screen, the whole time I was around him: genial, open, always looking for what was funny in any situation, and quick-witted in a way that often, I don’t mind admitting, left me trailing in his wake.
I remember one time, very early on, during a rehearsal for Open All Hours in a room at the BBC, something stupid happening and everybody ending up on the floor, which used to happen a fair bit. And when everybody had just about finished picking themselves up, Ronnie said to me, very seriously, ‘It’s amazing.’
I said, ‘What do you mean?’
He said, ‘Look at us. We’re getting paid just to make ourselves laugh. It’s not a bad life, is it?’
That was the attitude he took to his work, and it couldn’t have made him easier to be around.
He was very quick to make me feel that he saw something in me. At first, perhaps, it was simply the fact that I could perform a reliable pratfall. In Hark at Barker, he gave me the part of Abdul the Filthy in a sketch set in a harem, with Ronnie as a sheikh, magisterially eating bananas and tossing aside the skins. Every time Abdul entered, he found a new skin to slip on. That makes the humour in the sketch sound pretty basic, but in fact it was in the context of a very sophisticated cinematic joke. The idea was to make the skit look like an old piece of film, slipping in a faulty projector – that thing that used to happen sometimes with movie reels, where the image would suddenly get out of true, so you would be seeing the top half of the frame at the bottom and the bottom half at the top. In the sketch, you saw a girl falling into the hands of an evil sheikh in the bottom half of the screen – only for Ronnie to reach down to her from the top half of the image and pull her up to safety. To make this work, they had to build two identical harem sets, one on top of the other. Ronnie simply leaned out of the top set and pulled the girl up out of the bottom set. But when you saw it, he appeared to have breached the boundaries of the actual film. It was clever stuff – cleverer than any other sketch I had seen involving banana skins.
Another time, Ronnie had this joke he wanted to do, as Lord Rustless, the baffled old aristocrat. His Lordship was going to preach the amazing advantages for a household of having a communication tube, like on board a ship – a pipe you could talk down in order to summon your staff from other parts of the house. Rustless demonstrates the use of the pipe by talking into it and waiting for a reply to come back to him – except, instead of a voice being heard, a cloud of soot puffs out of the tube and covers him. We see Josephine Tewson, playing the old spinster Bates, also attempting to communicate using the tube, and also getting a face full of soot. The tube was loaded with black powder and, out of shot, someone would puff into the other end of it and expel the soot at the appropriate moment. They tried it a few times in rehearsal, but Ronnie wasn’t entirely happy with it. Eventually he said, ‘I want David to blow the soot out because his timing is accurate and I need someone who can time this.’ That rather put me on the spot. But I felt like I had been handed a little bit of responsibility, that I was moving up in his estimation. Fortunately, I got it right.
These were only little bits and pieces, but it was through them, I’m sure, that Ronnie grew increasingly to trust me as a comic performer and, in particular, to trust my timing. He had a scene in which Lord Rustless notices a pin on the floor, and bends down to pick it up, rather pompously intoning the old saying: ‘See a pin and pick it up, all day long you’ll have good –’ And at that point, I come crashing through the door behind him as Dithers, and knock him flying. To get the laugh, it had to be done on the button, dead on. We rigged up a monitor on the other side of the door, so I could watch Ronnie and time the moment. When you get it dead on, that’s what makes it sing, and I guess I had been up to these
kinds of tricks in the theatre long enough to know what I was doing.
It was also pretty quickly clear that we knew how to make each other crack up. There was a skit where Rustless had his staff lined up like an army, including me as Dithers, all of us standing to attention and ready for his inspection. Then Ronnie walked down the line, making kind of parade-ground comments: ‘Stand up straight!’, ‘Shoulders back!’ and so forth. As Dithers, I automatically looked like I’d crawled out of a rubbish bin and was effectively wrapped in rags. When Rustless reaches me, though, he simply says, ‘Buttons!’ In rehearsal, I found myself thinking ‘fly buttons’ and responded by bending forward to look down in the area of my flies. This creased us both up. Ronnie said, ‘Do that, definitely.’ As we carried on rehearsing, that little moment continued to make us laugh. We were both of us thinking, ‘This is absolutely going to kill them when we come to do it in front of the studio audience.’
So we get to the night of the recording, and the audience is in, and we do the inspection-of-staff scene, and Ronnie passes along the line and reaches me and says, ‘Buttons!’ And I lean forward and look down at my crotch. Nothing. Absolute silence from the audience. Not so much as a smile. There’s just a fraction of a beat in which Ronnie looks at me with slightly widened eyes. And then he moves on. Some fall on stony ground, was the lesson here. Also, beware the in-joke.
The time I realised that Ronnie really had started to believe in what I could do was when he asked for me to appear in The Odd Job – part of a series of one-off comedy plays that Ronnie and Humphrey Barclay made for LWT in 1971. These pieces were brought together under the title ‘Six Dates with Barker’. Ronnie had sent me a script, by Bernard McKenna. The story featured a depressed husband, called Arthur Harriman, and the slightly loopy itinerant he hires to help him do away with himself and who, when Arthur eventually goes cold on the idea, continues to insist on the old-fashioned virtues of a job well done, and finishing what you started. I thought it was terrific, very funny but also slightly dark, and I could see myself playing the husband, which I was sure was the plan.
I said to my agent, ‘I think the script’s great. I’ll be very happy to play Arthur.’
My agent said, ‘No, Ronnie wants you to play Clive, the hit man.’
This seemed unlikely to me. Clive had all the best lines, all the zingers. Arthur was basically the feed. I rang Humphrey.
‘Just to clarify, is it right that Ronnie wants me to play Clive?’
Humphrey said, ‘Yes. Ronnie’s going to be the husband.’
I said, ‘But Clive’s part has all the jokes.’
Humphrey said, ‘Well, maybe. But this is the way Ronnie wants to do it.’
I was very struck by that. This was the polar opposite of my experience with Terry Scott in Hugh and I. It wasn’t about Ronnie being the big star, the needy comedian, having to get the laughs. It was about what Ronnie, as an actor, thought worked best for the piece. That was his fundamental philosophy and one I never saw him contradict. He saw the bigger picture at all times.
So we filmed The Odd Job and it went well. It’s hard to explain what makes two actors sit comfortably opposite one another on camera, and come across well together, and no doubt there are many contributing factors. But with Ronnie and me, I think a lot of it was about the rhythm with which lines went back and forth between us – that shared sense of timing, which can take a verbal form as well as a physical one. Sometimes you can find that rhythm with someone over the course of time. But with us, it was there pretty much straight away. It was possibly a bit competitive at first, like tennis. And, with Ronnie, the ball would come back harder than I was used to, and I would end up having to raise my game, pushing myself further to return it to him. But, at the same time, Ronnie wasn’t playing to win. He was playing simply towards the end of getting the laugh. In any scene you were doing, he knew where the laugh was – the winning shot at the end of the rally, as it were. And however we got it, and whoever ended up hitting it, he didn’t mind. He just wanted to make sure we got it.
The Odd Job ended up being shot in moody black and white. That wasn’t an artistic decision, though. It owed itself to something far more prosaic and very 1970s: industrial action. Workers at ITV were in dispute over pay and the crews on certain productions refused to use the colour technology as a kind of strike protest. As a result, of the ‘Six Dates with Barker’, five were in glorious colour and the sixth – The Odd Job – was not. I hope that wasn’t anything personal, brothers. I don’t think the piece lost any of its humour for the lack of colour, however.
Incidentally, one of the other ‘Six Dates’ was entitled 1899: The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town, written by Spike Milligan. It was a play in which the fog-bound Victorian city is menaced by an elusive figure who does for people by leaping out and blowing raspberries at them. I wasn’t involved in that piece, but a few years later, when Ronnie revived the story for The Two Ronnies and presented it as a weekly serial within the show, I was given the enormous honour of providing the raspberries for the soundtrack. As Ronnie B. knew, very few people blow a raspberry as well as I do. Indeed, this may well be an area of expertise in which I could be described – without fear of contradiction – as a world leader. It has to be remembered that Ronnie was ever the perfectionist. He monitored my raspberry-blowing extremely carefully, for volume, tone and duration. At one point, he had me in the soundbooth while he stood on the other side of the glass, and he conducted me, very earnestly, in an entirely blown-raspberry version of the ‘1812 Overture’. (Anyone interested in seeing me restage this performance at the Royal Albert Hall any time soon, get on to my agent.) Jobs don’t come much more profound than going into a BBC studio to spend a morning making farting noises into a microphone. The end credits for this portion of the show were printed on old-fashioned boards and filmed. I still have the credit board which reads ‘Phantom Raspberry Blower – David Jason’ and I’m enormously proud of my contribution to that little moment of comic history.
After ‘Six Dates with Barker’, Ronnie left ITV and went over to the BBC where, in 1973, he made another set of one-off shows, this time in a series called ‘Seven of One’. (Why Ronnie left ITV for the BBC, only those in the know would know, and as I wasn’t in the know, you know, I wouldn’t know. You know?) The title of the series was meant to be ‘Six of One’, and Ronnie intended to follow it up later with another series, entitled ‘And Half a Dozen of the Other’, but someone at the BBC slightly ruined that gag by insisting that there should be seven shows in the first series. So, somewhat meaninglessly, ‘Seven of One’ it was.
Each of the shows was essentially conceived as a pilot for a possible sitcom. There was, for instance, I’ll Fly You for a Quid, written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the tale of a Welsh family who will gamble on anything. Ronnie was especially keen on that one, and frustrated that he never got to make it into a series. There was Another Fine Mess, written by Hugh Leonard, which was about a pair of Laurel and Hardy impersonators. But the clear stand-outs were a play called Prisoner and Escort, another Clement and La Frenais piece, about a convict being carted off to prison; and a play by Roy Clarke about a penny-pinching Yorkshire corner-shop owner and the thwarted nephew who works as his assistant. That one was called Open All Hours.
Ronnie was really keen for me to be involved in the ‘Seven of One’ series somewhere and he said, ‘There’s a part for you in practically every one of these, but I can’t have you in all of them. I think you should be in either Prisoner and Escort or Open All Hours.’
We discussed it more thoroughly, and eventually we decided that the best place for me would be in Open All Hours, playing Granville, the hapless nephew of Arkwright the shopkeeper.
Did I know immediately that this rather lost character in his Fair Isle jumper would end up propelling my career to another level? It would be both tidy and romantic to say that I did, but the truth is I absolutely didn’t. As far as I was concerned, Granville was just another ch
aracter to play. In fact, by comparison with Clive in The Odd Job, I secretly found him a little bit thin and disappointing. I didn’t think the relationship between Arkwright and Granville was anywhere near as rich as the relationship between Clive and Arthur. Altogether, the script didn’t leap out at me the way The Odd Job script had done. Of course, it was a very different kind of piece. But the main thing was, if Ronnie thought it was worth pursuing, I felt there must be something to it. And it meant I would be working with the Guvnor again.
* * *
IN 1974, HUMPHREY Barclay once more favoured me with encouragement and work, offering me a role in a sitcom he was producing for ITV, entitled The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs. Not just any old role, either: the lead. Humph’s belief that I could carry a series was a real vote of confidence in me. I was, after all, still relatively untried on television at this point in my life. Humph was convinced that both me and the show would fly, and always spoke about it afterwards as one of the funniest things he was ever involved with. I wish he had been right about the show flying.
The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs was written by Bernard McKenna (who wrote The Odd Job) and Richard Laing. I played Edgar, essentially a humble and rather clueless pen-pusher, who is promoted, by an administrative error, to the post of personal assistant to the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In that position he somehow manages to be successful, despite himself, in a whole variety of espionage missions. There was a lot of deadpan stunt work, which I relished. I seem to remember getting my tie stuck in a filing cabinet in one episode – and in another, driving a car very fast over a humpback bridge, so that all four wheels left the ground. Did I vault a sofa at any point? It would be hard to imagine I didn’t. I also remember hanging off a windowsill at the top of a tall house in Regent’s Park while my Secret Service colleague Spencer (played by Mark Eden) tried to haul me in from inside by the sleeve of my cardigan – only for me to slip out of the cardigan and plummet to the ground. Or, at any rate, plummet to the pile of cardboard boxes carefully arranged out of shot to break my fall. I think everyone on the production was slightly surprised at my willingness to perform these stunts myself. They would quite happily have supplied me with a stuntman. But where’s the fun in that? I was happier being given the chance to channel my inner Buster Keaton.