by David Jason
The usual niceties exchanged, down we all sat and started to read. It sounds suspiciously blithe and easy to say the chemistry was there straight away, but I don’t know what else to tell you, because it absolutely was. You could hear right from the get-go, in the blend of the voices, that this thing was going to fly. Far from being a whiskery old man in battered clothing, Lennard was actually a well-dressed and rather dashing gentleman of the theatre – someone who, I later discovered, after a respectable life on the boards, actually believed his career was winding down at this point and who absolutely wasn’t expecting the boost into public prominence that this show would eventually and relatively quickly hand him, late in his sixties. But that wonderful, cracked, grumbly tone was entirely convincing as the voice of a Peckham tower-block dweller from the moment he opened his mouth to read.
The same went for Nick’s deliberate, gawpy take on Rodney. For me, the line that in many ways summarises Rodney is this one: ‘If there is such a thing as reincarnation, knowing my luck I’ll come back as me.’ Nick had the perfect tone and expression for that sense of put-upon hopelessness, and he had it from the start. Even though we were only reading, and not acting it out properly, it all seemed to line up physically, too. Nick and I couldn’t have looked less like brothers, of course. Nick was blond and I was dark. Nick was north of six foot tall and I … wasn’t. But the differences between us were what was perfect about it, allowing the possibility to linger forever more that Rodney and Del might not, in fact, share a father – a thought which seems to occur at some point to everyone in the cast, except, sweetly, to Rodney himself. (The mystery of Rodney’s parentage was only revealed to him as the clinching development in the very last episode of the series – a moment, incredible to think, still twenty-two years off at the point of this first read-through.) The physical disparity between us also meant that when Del was shoving Rodney around and giving him verbal stick, it could happen in the absence of real intimidation, which would have soured the fun of it. The fact that there was a twenty-one-year age difference between Nick and myself was also next to irrelevant because the story insisted on a thirteen-year gap and my spiritual youthfulness, freshness of skin and natural ebullience – not to mention the masterful work of the make-up department – would no doubt eliminate the other eight years. Also, as Del explains in that first episode, their father walked out on them, two months after the death of their mother, when Rodney was six. True, in a later episode, ‘Thicker Than Water’, Del claims that Rodney was five when their dad left – but let’s not get bogged down with numbers. The point is, we were to understand that Del had largely been mother and father to Rodney, making the bond between them parental as well as brotherly and giving Del an additional sentimental investment in his brother, which again could be usefully in play when the two of them were at each other’s throats.
I don’t think any of us had been given reason to believe at that point that we were the chosen ones. At the end of that reading, though, the cast was set. Ray turned to John and said, ‘That’ll do for me,’ and John nodded, and Nick, Lennard and I put our coats back on and headed off downstairs to the BBC bar to toast the new show we were in.
CHAPTER FOUR
Becoming Del
THOSE EARLY DAYS, when you start building a new character – that’s the most exciting part of the whole process for me. You’re working out who this person is, how they’re going to sound, how they’re going to carry themselves, how they would behave and react in different circumstances; and then you’re honing the character and trying to get to the point where those reactions and bits of behaviour can start to happen without you thinking about it, becoming almost second nature. Again, it’s that chance to leave yourself behind and become some other person for a while, which seemed to me the best reason for applying for a job in the acting business in the first place.
One of the first things we needed to establish about Del Boy was what he was going to wear. So much about him would flow from there, clearly. When I was working in repertory theatre, I nearly always used to start with the shoes. The shoes would often give you the class of person you were dealing with, maybe their walk and how they would stand, and you could work upwards from that base. I did the same thing on television with Dithers, the character Ronnie Barker gave me for the Lord Rustless sketches in the 1969 television series Hark at Barker. If Dithers had reached the grand old age of one hundred, it stood to reason, as far as I was concerned, that he would be suffering from corns; so we found him these soft, white, broken-down plimsolls and hacked at the ends of them so that his toes poked out. That immediately gave you so much to work with in the way he flopped about the place and generally carried himself. Dithers aside, though, building characters on the shoes-first principle stopped when I got into television. You don’t feel your feet are going to be on display so much, the way they inevitably are when you’re stomping about on a stage all evening, so you start out with the more obviously exposed items further up.
The costume designer appointed to the first series of Only Fools was a young woman named Phoebe De Gaye, who, in the course of her research, spent a lot of time walking around London markets, getting a sense of what the well-turned-out trader was wearing that season. In one of the earliest sketches of Del that Phoebe drew to begin to get a feel for him, he already had a tweed flat cap and a brown, sort of blouson-style leather jacket, both of which would become key elements of his look. He was also, however, in that drawing, a man with a fairly significant beer belly and I felt obliged to point out I didn’t have one of those to supply. Had I been a method actor, like Robert De Niro, I suppose I could have gone away for a month or two and grown one. But I wasn’t too keen on the idea – and anyway, I felt Del could benefit from having a perfectly flat, magazine-shoot-ready, washboard stomach, such as my own. [Author clears throat noisily.] In any case, I wasn’t sure that paunchy was quite the right build for Del. In my vision of him, he was quite spry and nippy, physically active around the place. That’s the direction I ended up taking him, and the beer-belly idea withered on the vine, as it were.
Acquiring Del’s first set of clothes necessitated a special trip to the shops. Go clothes shopping for myself? Not remotely my notion of fun. Indeed, in the general scheme of things, I would rather fall under a lawnmower or gargle drawing pins. Or even fall under a lawnmower while gargling drawing pins. Shop for clothes for a character that I’m going to play, on the other hand – well, what time do you want to meet? The prospect actually fires me up, and so it was with eager, even puppyish anticipation that I jumped into Phoebe’s battered old Mini and set off for Oxford Street one spring afternoon in 1981.
Mind you, that Mini wasn’t in the best of repair. Indeed, judging by the air quality in the interior, more exhaust fumes were percolating through the carpet on the floor than were going out through the exhaust pipe. Somehow, though, the pair of us got up to central London without either fainting or exploding, and, once our eyes had stopped watering, we spent a happy morning trawling the stores for cheap and nasty suits. I must have tried on about a dozen different types in various shades, until we found a grey one that we agreed was perfect in both the essential areas of cheapness and nastiness. We paired it with some Gabicci shirts – brightly coloured, slightly shiny in finish, just a little bit showy, but not too much. Gabicci, an Italian company with a warehouse in Edgware, were to end up being the predominant label in Del’s wardrobe – more by accident than by design, I have to say. Theirs were just the clothes we kept finding ourselves drawn to on the racks. When the series eventually started broadcasting and grew in popularity, this did not go unremarked by the directors of Gabicci. You can see how they might have had mixed feelings about the publicity: many a fashion line might have baulked at being thought of as the official supplier of smart-casual leisurewear to Derek Edward Trotter. But they took it in great spirit and even had me over to the warehouse for a show-round at one point. Nice people.
The cheap grey suit from the Oxford Stre
et shopping trip, and the red Gabicci shirt with fetching black breast pocket – those are the clothes I’m wearing in the opening episode of Only Fools, walking into that lounge for the first time, and little imagining that I’ll be walking into it, on and off, for the next decade and more. The flat cap and the leather blouson that came later were BBC wardrobe items, as far as I remember. Phoebe also dug out that patchwork sheepskin coat from somewhere or other – the one I mentioned earlier which, following clever Del-style bartering, now proudly resides in the globally esteemed Jason Collection of Trotter-related artworks, viz. my cupboard. What a piece that sheepskin is. One has seen far smarter sheep, definitely. But it suited Del. Or it certainly did so at first, before the 1980s wore on and he became more yuppie and a touch more city-wise and slick in his tastes. That’s when he graduated to Austin Reed suits at a couple of hundred quid a pop. But whatever Del wore, it was always important, I felt, that it should fit him properly. Even when he wore jeans, I insisted that they should be tailored, just to be communicating that care and fastidiousness about his personal appearance at all times – the little touches that say, ‘I’m a classy geezer, me.’
We turned our attention to accessories. John Sullivan wanted me to wear a fistful of jewellery. He saw Del with sovereign rings on every finger and with a chunky gold necklace – a bit of a ‘medallion man’, as we used to say. Though still highly visible in the 1980s, medallion men had their real prime in the 1970s, where it was considered a sign of immense virility to unbutton your shirt to the navel and dangle a piece of gold jewellery the size of a car’s hub-cap in a field of rippling chest hair. Never quite saw it myself, but there you go. It worked for Tom Jones, and in no uncertain terms, so who am I to quibble?
I am reminded, though, of my only personal encounter with the late, great Eric Morecambe, who was by no means a medallion man – a meeting which occurred in the immediate aftermath of some long-forgotten industry dinner or other.
On this occasion, the dining done, I had retired to the bar for a drink with Robin Nedwell, the aforementioned star of Doctor in the House who may or may not have been considered for the part of Del Boy, although that prospect lay several years ahead for both of us at this point in time. On the evening in question, the pair of us were propping up the bar and sipping our lemonades, with Robin clad for the night in the de rigueur international jet-setter uniform of the time, which is to say: velvet jacket with lapels you could land a plane on; a slashed shirt rent boldly asunder; and a massive medallion, possibly as much as half a stone in weight, proudly on display. Why? Because that was simply the look, wasn’t it? Suddenly, Eric, accompanied by Ernie Wise, massive legends of the industry, breezed through, on their way to the exit. Whereupon both of them paused where we were standing, and Eric reached forward to take hold of Robin’s medallion. He lifted it slightly away from Robin’s chest, looked at it through his famous black-rimmed glasses as one might scrutinise a piece of small-print in a newspaper, and said, ‘Ah, Robin: I see you’ve come second.’ With that, Eric carefully returned the glittering showpiece to its place between Robin’s pectorals and left. It was a devastating put-down, to which Robin did not take entirely kindly, and a memorable warning lesson about the dangers of wearing an outsized medallion in a built-up area containing Eric Morecambe.
Should Del Boy wear a medallion like Robin’s? More than that, should he wear a medallion, a broad selection of rings and some bracelets? I disagreed with John about this. I thought there was a danger of tipping Del into parody, and certainly of giving people the wrong impression about him. When you see that amount of ostentation on a person in real life, it’s often easier to read it (rightly or wrongly) as an indication of a character flaw, rather than as a sign of a strength in them. You perhaps instinctively wonder if they’re compensating for something, or covering something over, or creating a glossy distraction for themselves – and, again, you could be completely wrong and they might just really like jewellery. But I didn’t want people to entertain even for a moment those sorts of uncertainties about Del. There was a big streak of ostentation in him, yes – but not desperation. You wanted to bring out a flamboyance in the character but not to the point where it started to look like a need, which would possibly have taken people’s response to him closer to pity or contempt. So I wanted to back off on the jewellery. We settled for a smaller number of rings – just a couple on each hand – and a necklace with, not a medallion, but a gold letter ‘D’, for Del, which I felt was naff to just the right degree. Phoebe sourced these precious accessories in Chapel Street Market in Islington, north London. We got through three different variations on the ‘D’ necklace during the show’s lifetime but the basic joke never lost its sparkle.
There was a similar debate between us all about Del’s hairstyle. It was definitely important that Del should be regarded as someone who took care of his hair – indeed, as the kind of man who was careful with all of his personal grooming. But how much care, and how far would you push it? John, who would have been remembering Chicky Stocker, the south London geezer who was his key inspiration for Del, thought there should be a lot of grease involved – that Del would have one of those styles where the hair was set, just so, every strand carefully stuck in place with lacquer. (Derek Hockley, my early model for Del, was similarly exact in his hairstyle, which was essentially a sculpture chiselled from pure Brylcreem.) John also raised the possibility of giving Del thick and well-tended sideburns, in a passing tribute to Elvis Presley, whom geezers do generally adore. Phoebe, the costume designer, on the other hand, saw Del with permed hair – fresh out of the hairdresser with lots of lush ringlets in the ‘bubble’ style that was popular with certain late 1970s footballers and also (as her research in the field revealed to her) with London market traders. I would have needed a wig for that one. Again, though, my instinct was to rein back a bit and be calmer about it. We used my own hair, tidily backcombed into a very low and understated quiff, and held in place with some grease, but not too much of it – the hair of a man who has clearly spent some time in front of a mirror, and has obviously taken a moment or two to enjoy the reflection coming back at him, but without heading for parody territory. And no Elvis sideburns, as adorable as Elvis was.
Looking back now, I can see how lucky we got with the styles and the clothing we used – not just Del, but Rodney’s dowdy jeans and battered jackets and Grandad’s crumpled trousers and beaten-up hat – and with the look of things in the show in general. The years have gone by and what the characters are wearing is not substantially different from what you might plausibly see people wearing today. Only Fools is not immediately locked into a period, visually speaking. Consequently, younger viewers, coming to it for the first time, don’t see something which straight away looks like a historic artefact. I wonder whether a bubble-permed Del would have survived as long. The chances are that he wouldn’t, or that he would be generating a different kind of laughter. You take these tiny decisions at the time and have no idea what they could amount to in the long term.
With the clothes and the accessories and the hair in place, I could start to work properly on the physical gestures, building up Del’s body language. My feeling was that he should be physically quite busy – that he would go in for flexing his neck, twitching his elbows away from his body, rolling his shoulders a bit, shooting his cuffs. I’d seen it in London lads – the peacocking, the showing out, a form of strutting even when you’re standing still. You will recall, I hope, Lord Foppington, from the beginning of this book – the character from Restoration comedy that I played early on in my career in the theatre. Lord Foppington was a far more extreme version of the type, clearly, but there’s a basic connection with Del, I think. It was explained to me when I played Foppington that, in the eighteenth century, in polite society, the display of an elegantly turned male calf was a sign of distinction – even a bit of a turn-on, it seems. Well, let’s not forget, they were making their own entertainment in those days. But once you had that concept in m
ind, you were gifted an entire manner of standing – one leg out wide, with the foot twisted to bring the calf into view. And from there, you could go on to evolve an entire, calf-centric walk, which worked upwards from the legs, through the hips and into the spine, ultimately forcing your shoulders out wide, too, and lifting your chin. Now, it was less broad, obviously, in the case of Del Trotter, and the clothes were less noisy and the posing was less pronounced. Nevertheless, that slightly showy, arms-akimbo thing, and what that in turn does to your shoulders and your neck, and then your chin, and to the way you set yourself in relation to other people generally, is basically a version of the same thing. To some extent, as remote as it may seem, I saw Del as Lord Foppington on a council estate, Lord Foppington on a working man’s budget.
Then there was the question of what Del should sound like. Voices have always been a huge interest for me – a hobby, really. I was a freelance impressionist from early days in the school playground, specialising in unflattering parodies of teachers, and I was mad about accents ever afterwards. Even now I sometimes find it hard to talk for more than a couple of minutes without lapsing into some kind of voice not quite my own. This obsession really came alive in the 1970s, when I worked on Week Ending, the Radio 4 topical satire show. I loved that programme – especially the on-the-fly nature of it. I would go along to the Paris Studios in Lower Regent Street bright and breezy on a Friday morning and we’d have a half-hour show knocked together by lunchtime. The producer would edit it together in the afternoon and it would go out that night at 11 p.m., and then get repeated on Saturday afternoon. Bill Wallis and David Tate were in the cast and we used to compete for the right to do the necessary impressions: everybody would have a crack at it, and the most convincing voice would win. I used to do Tony Benn, the fabled Labour MP who was in the Cabinet at that time, and Jim Callaghan. Bill Wallis would do Harold Wilson.