by David Jason
Look, I don’t know. It’s something like that. Google it.
Anyway, I can only report that the evening passed both pleasantly and smoothly and without me using the fish knife for the meat course or tipping the gravy into my lap, both of which might plausibly have been a concern, going in. Indeed, the only further incident of any real moment occurred after the dinner when, in the wake of Prince William’s formal speech of thanks, I found an agitated Richard Whiteley crouching at my elbow.
‘David,’ he hissed, ‘I think we ought to reply.’
‘What?’
‘I think one of us ought to stand up and make a speech in return.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘I just think it would be the right thing to do. We have to reply on behalf of the guests.’
Now, I may not know an awful lot about dining in high society, and I may be unable to tell the difference on sight between an invitation to an intimate get-together with royalty and a ticket to a stonking great gala dinner and Islamic-style garden opening featuring Alan Titchmarsh and a cast of thousands. But I do know that, at an event at Highgrove hosted by Prince William and Prince Harry in the unfortunate absence through polo-related injuries of their father, standing up unbidden, rapping on the nearest wine glass and peeling off a few remarks – perhaps lobbing in the one about the Englishman, the Scotsman and the parakeet – is definitely not something the etiquette manuals advise you to get involved in. Trust me on this. You don’t even need to google it.
Was this abrupt and off-piste plan, and the firmness of Richard’s attachment to it, fuelled in any way by the consumption of fine wines in unwise quantities? Was he off-piste in more ways than one? All must necessarily be speculation on this matter. Let me merely state that, shortly after this hissed conversation, somebody of an official nature discreetly intervened between Richard and the microphone and a social gaffe on the scale of the Grand Canyon was narrowly averted.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Richard would have given the performance of his life and had them all in the aisles, and people would still be talking about that speech to this day. Either way, it didn’t happen. The following morning Gill and I checked out of our hotel and returned to Buckinghamshire to give our family members, waiting agog for news from royalty’s front line, a necessarily sheepish debrief.
Obviously, I’ll stand in for the heir to the throne whenever I am called upon to do so. But to be honest, I’m more comfortable when things are closer to home and smaller. Not so long ago, I was asked if I would attend the Remembrance Sunday service at the war memorial in the village near us, and if I would read the Ode of Remembrance from the poem ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon, who is not to be confused in any way with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. It was a call for my services that I was proud to heed. No cause for crush barriers, stewards in orange jackets and a police presence on that particular morning, and no need to set aside a field in which to park the buses. My – if I may say – rather poignant rendition of ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning’ was thoughtfully received by a crowd which generous estimates later put at half a dozen.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A farewell to Del
I WAS ALWAYS worried about getting trapped by a character – about falling into a role and then not being able to climb back out again. I don’t mean in the sense of the old expression about the wind changing and your face staying that way. I mean in the sense of getting typecast – of coming to be associated with one role so tightly that nobody would ever be able to think of me as anything else. As Only Fools and Horses assumed its unanticipated position of dominance on the national skyline and printed itself so indelibly in people’s minds, I think all of us in the cast grappled with some anxiety about the possibility of that.
The fear was that getting typecast would turn the jollity and larks of being an actor into a bit of a grind. Wasn’t the whole point of the game that you got to be lots of different people? That certainly seemed to me to be where the fun lay, and I had always done my best, in as much as I could, to protect that aspect of things. Back in the mid-sixties, when still young, lithe and callow, I was offered a regular role on the legendary (though not always for the best reasons) ITV soap opera Crossroads. I had been playing (and with considerable panache, I don’t doubt, though I can’t check back because these scenes are tragically lost to the misty dustbins of time) the part of Bernie Kilroy, who once, in a plot twist not unusual for that trusty teatime drama, appeared to come back from the dead, thereby putting the frighteners right up Noele Gordon, the show’s major star. The producers wanted to convert Bernie into a permanent character – presumably so he could start coming back from the dead and putting the frighteners up Noele Gordon on a regular basis, and I was asked to sign a contract that would no doubt have tied me to the ATV Studios in Birmingham for a good while. Now, I know, with Crossroads the jokes come easily: the cardboard sets, the implausible storylines, the soap that would not wash, the place where actors go to die, he didn’t know whether to shoot the scene or shoot the cast, etc., etc. Yet I need to point out that this would have been steady and handsomely remunerated work – and Lord knows, I didn’t have anything else to go to at the time, and certainly no track record or reputation to fall back on. Indeed, my CV at that time largely consisted of a handful of repertory theatre roles, mostly in Bromley, and a non-speaking part in a commercial for a bookmakers. That I was being considered for any kind of telly work at all at that stage was a pretty remarkable change of fortune. I steeled myself, though, stared bravely into the wind, and turned the job down. It was kind of them to ask, but I thought I perceived in this generous opportunity the eerie shape of a potential trap. Given the nature of soap operas, I could see myself being the same character, for five episodes a week, month after month, possibly year after year. I saw one door opening – and every other door and window slamming shut and locking itself forever more. Steady and regular employment had its obvious attractions, but it wasn’t, at the end of the day, the dream.
Now, people feel differently, of course. Sue Nicholls, a lovely person, was in Crossroads at the same time as me, and she has been playing Audrey in Coronation Street since 1979 and wouldn’t have it any other way. Bill Roache has been Ken Barlow in Corrie for so long he’s even in the Guinness Book of Records for it. Some people love that single-role life and embrace it. But I couldn’t have done so. It was also why I eventually – years later, after the bruises went away – grew to be relieved that fate’s fickle finger winkled me out of the role of Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. A landmark part, obviously, in a landmark television show – but a role, in retrospect, that might have completely stymied me as far as doing anything else was concerned.
As the eighties wore on, and Only Fools continued to bowl forward and snowball, my growing worry was that Del Boy was going to do precisely that to me – turn into a trap that I couldn’t escape. A great man once said (was it Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen?): ‘Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.’ And, I would add, you probably can’t get a good cream for that. Either way, it made me anxious to think that Derek Trotter might end up having a similar effect with regard to my own features. He was such a bulky presence in the life of the nation, I was concerned that people would no longer be able to see past his face to mine – assuming I even had a face that wasn’t Del’s any more, which, what with people shouting ‘Oi, Del Boy!’ across the street all the time, I was often obliged to wonder about. And that, dear reader, as faithless as it may seem, was why, in 1987, with series five in the can and some time on my hands, I leapt at the chance to audition for the part of Skullion.
This was in a Channel 4 adaptation of Porterhouse Blue, the comic novel by Tom Sharpe about shenanigans in a fictional Cambridge University college. I loved the book, which is properly funny, and I loved the adaptation, which was by Malcolm Bradbury. In particular, I loved the central character of James Skullion, the long-serving head porter at Porterhouse College, a former Royal Marine now imp
eriously performing the role of gatekeeper at a corrupt and elitist university establishment through which the future great and powerful pass. Skullion goes into a furious rearguard action when the ancient traditions of the college come under threat from a new Master (Sir Godber Evans, played superbly in the Channel 4 version by Ian Richardson) and the disreputable forces of modernisation, bringing such unacceptable developments as condom machines, a self-service canteen and (would you believe it?) female students. It was a ripe and rich set-up and I was desperate to be a part of it.
Not much linking Skullion and Del Boy, you will have observed – and that, I’m sure, was a considerable part of my attraction to the role. But with the amount of heat coming off Only Fools at this particular moment in history, my worry was that, when it came to casting, the producers would look at me and only see Del – who wouldn’t, let’s face it, be your natural or instinctive candidate for a job in charge of security and general oversight at an Oxbridge college. Indeed, frankly, knowing what you knew, you wouldn’t even employ him to clean the chandeliers. But those initial perceptions weren’t now in my control, of course. The game had changed forever in that regard. It wasn’t about doubting my ability to inhabit another character; I knew I could do that. It was about whether other people would let me.
To be perfectly frank, if someone involved in the production of Porterhouse Blue hadn’t been old enough to recall some of my work in the theatre, I don’t think I would have got through the door to audition in the first place. Even with that little leg-up, I still had it all to do. At the audition, after a bit of a chat, I was asked if I would mind stepping outside and putting on Skullion’s costume. I don’t think I had ever been asked to get dressed up for an audition before. Normally you would read something, or you might be asked to do a bit of acting, but you would do so in the clothes in which you had come in off the street. Dressing for the part – that hadn’t happened to me. At the time I didn’t think much about it; I just got on with it, donned the costume – the bowler hat, the pinstriped trousers, the crisp white shirt, black tie and black jacket – went back in and read. But reflecting on it now, I wonder if I was being asked to jump an extra hurdle here – if the producers needed to put me into costume so they could get Del out of their heads.
Whatever, I must have convinced them because I got the part in that blackly funny, beautifully shot drama. Great opening titles, too: choral music over pictures of doors and columns. Skullion’s moustache – another handy distancing device from Del – was the actor’s own. I was also able to bring in a trick my elder brother, Arthur, had taught me, back in Lodge Lane in Finchley, after his national service in the army: the ‘spit and polish’ method for cleaning your boots. It was the received way to get that proper, parade-ground shine on your footwear, and I’m delighted to pass it on to you here, ahead of your next parade. You stick a layer of polish on the boot first, using your finger or your cloth; then you spit on the boot; then you apply a second layer of polish (finger or cloth, again) on top of the spit and start buffing it, repeating the process, polish on spit, until the combination of the spit and the polish builds like varnish and comes up like glass. Wonderful. Skullion, as an ex-military man, would surely have known this, and the spit-and-polish method gave me some good extra business when he was cleaning his shoes at one point.
I’m not saying the boot-polishing scene clinched it, but without wishing to push my mantelpiece in your face, dear reader, I won the 1988 BAFTA for Best Actor for that performance as Skullion, on a shortlist which included Kenneth Branagh for his role in Fortunes of War and whose name I had confidently expected to see come out of the envelope. (Worry not: I think his career recovered.) Obviously, I was delighted – not least because of the timing, right when Only Fools was taking up so much of the oxygen around me. Again, I’m going to run the risk of sounding ungrateful about dear old Del and everything he brought me, and clearly I’m not. But I’m sure the scamp has cost me a few roles in my time, and I was just so pleased and relieved to discover, through Skullion, that other things, and other characters, were still possible for me.
As I understand it, a second series set in Porterhouse College was written, titled Porterhouse Black, which took the Skullion story on further. It was all ready to go, apparently. But then, in a tiresome development which happens a fair bit in broadcasting – and in business in the real world, too, I’m sure – there was a change of department head, somewhere higher up in the food chain, and the new man needed things to be new, as new men will or else there’s no point in being the new man, and the project was dropped. I was bitterly disappointed about that. People seemed to have liked the first one, I had loved doing it, and I would have taken another crack at Skullion at the drop of a bowler hat.
Of course, it would have been unrealistic to expect one four-part television drama to break me out of the Del Boy mould entirely. I merely had to hope that Skullion had at least chipped that mould a bit, and that a few people in the casting business might have noticed and found themselves wondering, ‘Well, if he can grow his own moustache and wear a bowler hat, what else might this man be capable of?’ Beyond that, I knew Del was still out there, ready to reimpose himself at the time of his choosing, and I had to get used to the fact that he always would be, no matter what I did. Point in case: more than a decade after Porterhouse Blue, in 1999, I played Captain Frank Beck in a television drama called All the King’s Men, about a volunteer force that Beck had formed during World War I, made up exclusively of fellow members of the royal staff at Sandringham, the Norfolk estate of King George V. This unit went off to fight at Gallipoli in 1915 and came unstuck. By this time, I had played Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May and Jack Frost in A Touch of Frost, both of which I’ll come on to talk about in a bit. But here, with Frank Beck, for the first time in my career – excluding the odd radio impression of Harold Wilson or whoever – I found myself facing up to the responsibility of portraying not an entirely fictional creation, dreamed up by a scriptwriter, but a representation of someone who had actually lived, and moreover a man of profound integrity who had acted heroically and died in a noble cause. I felt a lot of pressure not to mess up, and I read as much as I could about the period as research.
Filming went well, the piece seemed to come across OK, and a while after it went out, I got a card from Frank Beck’s great-nephew, saying how much he had enjoyed the film and how he felt that I had treated the character of Beck with dignity and respect. So that was nice to hear. However, he went on to say that when my name was first mentioned in connection with the part, it had sent more than a few ripples of consternation through the family. ‘David Jason?’ I could imagine them saying – and it was possible for me to picture their eyes widening in alarm to the width of dinner plates. ‘What, you mean … Del Boy?’ The ghost of Derek Trotter had loomed yet again. But I could see where their concern was coming from. A wheeler-dealer Gallipoli hero, anyone? A nightmarish vision must have risen in the Beck family’s minds of a dramatic reconstruction in which their loved and revered relative would be seen stomping around Sandringham in leopard-print underpants and saying ‘Luvvly jubbly’ and ‘cushty’ every five minutes.
Born to linger – that’s Del. People found it hard to let him go – and so did those of us who were responsible for him, in fact. Nobody expects these things to go on forever, and after series seven of Only Fools, which finished broadcasting at the start of 1991, the show seemed to have reached a natural enough end. John Sullivan was now writing other things, including Dear John, about a bloke whose wife has left him, and a comedy about cab drivers called Roger, Roger; the cast was doing its best to move on to other pastures. Yet, even if the energy wasn’t there for another series, the appetite clearly remained for more Trotter-related stories, so the BBC suggested a compromise position in which the team reassembled every year for a one-off special to be broadcast at Christmas. So we did that for three years, until 1993. But that didn’t seem to diminish the aforementioned public appetite, so we
then did the 1996 trilogy, in which ‘Time on Our Hands’ made the family millionaires and brought the story to a tidy conclusion. Still no apparent sating of the appetite, though. Five years after that, the call came again: what about some more annual one-offs? So there were three further Christmas Specials after that – ‘If They Could See Us Now’ in 2001, ‘Strangers on the Shore’ in 2002 and ‘Sleepless in Peckham’ in 2003. You could say those shows were three steps too far. Some critics in the press did say that. But more than 21 million people watched that 2001 programme, and audiences for the other two weren’t exactly shabby (17.4 million and 16.3 million), not least in the context of the times. None of those additional shows was entered into lightly, without serious forethought, and self-indulgence wasn’t the motivating factor. We kept thinking we could set it aside and move on, but at every stage there was still clearly this huge public desire for more which ultimately proved irresistible. People kept wanting Del to come back. Including me.
One night in 2011, seven years after we had finally set the show to rest, I was invited to a dinner in London with Gareth Gwenlan and John Sullivan. The appointed restaurant was a Chinese, I was pleased to discover, though not your usual takeaway joint. This Chinese was based in the sumptuous Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, in the heart, as we say, of London’s glamorous West End. I remember thinking, as I walked through the gilded and marbled lobby and took my seat at the expensively linen-wrapped table, that it was an unusual kind of place in which to find John, who was a down-to-earth bloke the whole time I knew him and not really the sort to have an opinion about posh restaurants. I could only assume that the BBC had chosen the location. Anyway, I ordered a number 16, a number 23 and two number 40s and we fell to talking.
The main topic of discussion was another Only Fools and Horses revival. John wanted to know how I felt about doing a special number, centred on Del Boy’s sixtieth birthday. The idea was that Del would throw a party and all the gang would turn up, which was a neat way of getting everyone together in the same room again.