by David Jason
Did we dare? The stakes always appeared to be so high. Every time you did anything related to Only Fools, you had the sense that you were risking the programme’s entire legacy. In our minds, the consequences of coming up short in some way or other weren’t simply that you would come up short in some way or other; the consequences were that you would ruin everything that you had achieved up to that point. That probably wasn’t true, in fact. It was almost certainly the case that people’s attachment to the show was strong enough to survive the blow of a one-off revival that, for whatever reason, didn’t quite come off. Nevertheless, the feeling that there were grave repercussions hanging on any move you made in this area always lingered dauntingly.
My feeling was that this sixtieth birthday ruse would depend on the writing, of course, and I was bound to be confident about the quality of that. Even so, I think John felt that I had more to lose than he did. I was going to be the face at the front of this revival attempt, and I would no doubt have to endure a fair storm of flak if it didn’t come off. The thought of going out to an expectant audience and not being welcomed with open arms was a horrible one. So all of these ruminations were going to and fro across the table that night, over some rather pricey but extremely delicious sweet and sour pork with egg fried rice.
Nothing was set in stone that evening. But I came away committed in my own mind to the idea. I just thought: boom or bust, we ought to have another go. We had built a huge audience that loved the show enormously, and either you used that fact as a deterrent, to freeze you in your tracks, or you used it as a spur. That, basically, was the choice we had, and my instinct, after that meeting, was to choose the spur.
But fortune has a way of deciding things for you. Soon after this, I was getting a phone call from Gareth to say that John was in hospital with viral pneumonia. He came out and went home after a while and we thought he was mending – but no. In April of 2011, John was taken from us, at sixty-four. It was just devastating, and, of course, most of all for his wife Sharon, and their kids, Dan, Jim and Amy.
A year after John died, they put a blue plaque in his honour on the outside wall of Teddington Studios. There was an official unveiling ceremony, attended by all of John’s family, me, Nick Lyndhurst and John Challis, among many others. I was asked by the family to go up on a podium and operate the velvet cord which pulled away the curtain to reveal the plaque. Everyone gathered round and at the appointed moment, after a few words in John’s honour, I gave the cord a solemn tug. Whereupon the curtain came clean off the wall and almost smothered me.
I’d say you couldn’t have scripted it, but John Sullivan could have – and he would have found a way to make it even funnier.
So, the sixtieth birthday reunion never happened. But I did eventually find myself back in that old Peckham tower-block flat – wandering again amid the duff wallpaper and the stacked cardboard boxes and the china tat. This was in the spring of 2017, for that UKTV documentary about Only Fools that I talked about near the start of this book. They rebuilt the set – a really thorough replica of it – and we filmed some sequences there. It was less bewildering than the time in the lock-up, going through the show’s props, when memories were coming at me from all angles and from all different periods at once in a full-tilt sensory bombardment. This was nostalgic, too, but it was calmer – almost romantic, in an odd kind of way. I took a moment in the beaten-up armchair that Grandad and Uncle Albert used to sit in and let it all float over me for a bit.
Mixed feelings, though. Imagine if someone opened a door and there, on the other side, was a perfect recreation of your childhood bedroom – the furniture, the carpet, everything as you had it. Imagine the competing things you would be feeling as you went and stood in there and felt the atmosphere of it all over again, with all that has happened since. It was a bit like that, venturing back onto that stupid set, as artificial as it was. Reflections crowded in. Wasn’t it wonderful then? And somehow weirdly innocent. Yet gone. And wouldn’t it be great to be back there?
Tessa Peake-Jones came along to that rebuilt set, too, and we spent some time reminiscing. We were laughing about the sequence at the end of series seven, in ‘Three Men, a Woman and a Baby’, where Raquel gives birth to Damien. None of us apart from John Sullivan had any experience of childbirth at that point in our lives (Tessa went on, after Damien, to have a son and a daughter), but the midwives in the maternity department at West Middlesex Hospital, where we were filming, kindly organised a screening of a video of a real birth to get us in the mood. It was the full, hard-core action with no gory details spared. This was very shortly after breakfast, too – but, then, of course, babies aren’t fussy about what time they arrive, and midwives aren’t fussy about what time they show videos. Anyway, who knew childbirth was like that? (Answer: us, after watching that film.)
Fun to recall those times and those laughs and those scenes. But I don’t go back and watch the show these days. Sometimes I might stumble across it when I’m flicking through the channels and I might pause for a while and watch a bit, just to remind myself what it was like, and that I was there. But I never watch for long. It’s too painful, looking at that young bloke on the telly – the bloke I still think of myself as being, really, inside my head, until I look in the mirror and remember that I’m not. How bitter-sweet to see yourself as you once were. It’s one thing in a photograph, but moving images on the television are so completely realised, somehow, and I find their impact is far heavier. It’s a version of yourself that’s gone, but television makes it alive. That’s a very difficult bridge to cross in my mind.
Still, as Shakespeare so famously wrote: what a piece of work is Del. Or he may have said ‘man’. Same thing, though. For me, Del Boy remains inescapable. He is never off the screen, and he’s in everybody’s head. I have been guilty, I know, from time to time, of resenting the extent of his hold upon me. But we can be impatient even with our best friends from time to time, and they’re still our best friends. Anyway, it’s bigger than me – well beyond my power to change, even if I really wanted to do so. Roger Lloyd Pack said it well: ‘A good sitcom gets into the DNA of our culture in a way that other things don’t.’ It’s true. If you are in a successful sitcom, this is how you will be remembered, and you had better get used to it. Never mind other roles: between now and the end of my allotted portion on this earth, I could find a cure for the common cold, bring lasting peace to the Middle East and be instrumental in launching the first manned mission to Mars, and the headline upon my demise would still be ‘DEL BOY CONKS’. In a funny way, that only makes me love him more.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Batman, Bond and Pop Larkin: the eternal connection
I AM BEHIND the wheel of a yellow 1926 Rolls-Royce Park Ward Landaulette, easing my way nervously down a narrow and twisty country lane in Kent. Ahead of me, a camera car films my lurchy progress. To the rear of me, perched on the leather seats, and obliged to lurch, sit Pam Ferris and Philip Franks – Ma Larkin and Charley from The Darling Buds of May. I am doing my best not to think about the possibility that this might end badly, with several thousand pounds’ worth of rare automobile on its roof in a field. Car-crash television, in a very literal sense, is what we’re trying to avoid here.
I’ve driven cars that were simpler to operate, put it that way. In this antique family charabanc, which is somehow both achingly straightforward and devilishly complicated at the same time, the gear lever and the handbrake are on the driver’s right-hand side, which is always going to make you feel a bit like you’re patting your head and rubbing your chest at the same time. And that’s never advisable while driving. None of your fancy synchro-mesh gearboxes here, either: it’s got a primitive ‘crash box’, to use the ominous technical term, so I’m having to rediscover the long-neglected art of double-declutching – stamping twice on the clutch, tugging experimentally at the gearshift, catching the engine on the accelerator and eventually, somewhere in the middle of all that, if I’m extremely lucky, finding a gear.
The steering wheel offers at least six inches of dead slack before the wheels turn, which they then do in an incredible hurry, meaning that pointing the car around a corner is like trying to thread a needle, which is never easy, and certainly not while you’re driving a classic Rolls-Royce. And definitely not while you’re driving a classic Rolls-Royce down a narrow and twisty country road in Kent with cameras fixed on you.
This vehicle isn’t exactly small, either – three rows of seats and a bonnet the approximate length of Cornwall. Landaulette? Launderette, more like. Not to mention the fact that it’s rare and precious, and therefore not something you especially want to be the wally to put a dent in, or worse. I am attempting to seem relaxed and perfectly in control for the benefit of the eventual footage, though it’s not easy with gritted teeth and gritted other bits, nor with low-hanging branches and bits of Kent’s loveliest hedgerow going ‘thwap’ against the bodywork and making ominous scratching noises. Nor with Pam Ferris and Philip Franks mockingly chipping in over my shoulder every now and again with unscripted and not especially helpful comments such as ‘Mind the foliage, won’t you?’ and ‘I think that’ll be second gear you’re looking for, no?’ and ‘Keep trying – I’m sure it must be in there somewhere.’
Is the car insured? Am I insured? Is the rest of the world insured? I’m just an actor here. I simply have to trust that someone somewhere has done the necessary paperwork and act on regardless.
The plan, carefully hatched and drilled, is that we will motor in convoy, us and the camera car, along this quiet stretch of road until its conclusion, where we will reach a T-junction. At that point the camera car will swing aside to the right and I will bring this remarkable and highly photogenic machine to a halt. Then I will use the space at the junction to turn around, the camera car will slip ahead again and we will all head back along the road, God and oncoming traffic permitting, to Buss Farm, home of the Larkins, our centre of operations.
So, after a preliminary passage of kangaroo-jumping, which I offer to my passengers as a kind of overture before the full five-act musical of bad driving that lies ahead, we set off slowly down the lane. Somehow I contrive to hold the car more or less on the tarmac – which is quite a remarkable outcome, really, given the narrowness and the twistiness and the eccentricities of the steering and the complications with the gears and the mockery of my fellow actors. Even with all these things in play, I still manage to keep myself from taking this Rolls-Royce up a bank and posting it expensively through a hedge. Applause if you will.
In due course, though, the T-junction comes into view, the camera crew swings aside, as planned, and I apply the brakes in order to come to a halt. At this exact moment, barely anything happens. Which is mildly alarming. It’s not that working the brake lever is having almost no effect at all. It’s just that it’s having … almost no effect at all. Now, it’s not like we’re going particularly fast, but we do need to halt at some point – and preferably before our road meets another road. Weeping quietly inside and offering prayers to all available deities, I plunge my foot down and hold it to the floor, to the point where I am practically standing up. Meanwhile, in an act which owes everything to instinct and almost nothing to physical science, I haul backwards on the steering wheel like it was a lever in a railway signal box. I then maintain that clenched position as this beautiful piece of antique engineering glides slowly across the blessedly empty road and finally agrees to come to a stop a few inches from the hedgerow opposite.
I’ll tell you something that’s got better since 1926: car brakes.
Still, at least I haven’t crunched it. However, I am now basically blocking the road – both lanes of it. I therefore commence the hunt for the reverse gear, a voyage of exploration which becomes an epic saga in its own right, about which an entirely separate feature-length production could have been made that day in Kent had the financing been available. In the early stages of this process, the traffic which was fortunately absent a few moments ago inevitably shows up and necessarily stops – a lorry to one side of me, a car to the rear. It is here that I discover one of the advantages of blocking the road completely in a rare Rolls-Royce from the 1920s: you are afforded patience by your fellow road-users to a degree that probably wouldn’t be matched if you were blocking the road completely in, say, a white panel van or a red Porsche. Nobody even hoots.
But inside the stationary Rolls, the hunt for a gear continues and, partly on account of the physical effort, but also perhaps as a result of the embarrassment, I am now wearing a light but durable coat of sweat. Absorbed as I necessarily am by my labours with the gearstick, it is a short while before I notice that a figure has appeared beside me at the window. It’s the lorry driver, who has got down from his cab – to see, I immediately assume, if he can play any useful part in the ongoing search for the relevant gear. And why not? Many hands make light work, and all that. But no: that’s not why he’s there. I offer him a weak smile and he, in return, offers me a small piece of paper and a biro and asks if I would mind signing an autograph. I have to reckon that this is not because he has suddenly become an admirer of my driving. Anyhow, I take his pen and paper, but I’ve got nothing to lean on, so I basically end up tearing a hole in the page with the point of the biro in the rough shape of my name. I sheepishly hand this ruined scrap back to the driver who makes a heroic effort to look grateful and returns to his lorry. I then go back to looking everywhere in the cab, including under the seats, for reverse.
Reader, what can I tell you? At some point later that afternoon, and with traffic presumably by that point backed up at least as far as the M20 at Ashford, I found it. The car abruptly shuddered and began to ease backwards – to the accompaniment of a cheer and a light smattering of possibly satirical applause from the two actors in the rear. Furthermore, having executed what was possibly the world’s worst three-point turn, I got the Landaulette pointing down the twisty lane again and piloted it uncertainly back the way it had come. Let the record show that the ribbing from the two passengers behind me did not noticeably become more merciful during this stage of the journey. Nor was there any diminishment in my own personal sense that I would imminently crash into a tree. Turning eventually into the gateway at Buss Farm, and making sure to brake well before the barn, I experienced the sense of deliverance one feels when the third wheel of the aircraft finally touches down securely on the runway after a particularly torrid flight.
Well, they do say you should never go back. I hadn’t driven Pop Larkin’s Rolls since we filmed the original show twenty-six years earlier, in 1991, so I was bound to be a bit rusty. This was May 2017. We were shooting a sequence about The Darling Buds of May for a television documentary about my career, based on the best-selling autobiography, My Life, which I may have mentioned is still … Anyway, this documentary was, in a sense, the film of the book and here I was, accordingly, on another journey back into my past – looking for the reverse gear, in the much broader sense. I seem to have been doing quite a lot of that kind of thing recently, what with the Only Fools documentary, this book … God forbid that I am now officially in my anecdotage.
Anyway, it was the first time I had been back to Buss Farm and it was both moving and reassuring to discover how unchanged the place was. The little lane is as it was, the farmhouse is still there, and the oast house and the idyllic surrounding location are seemingly untouched. It looked just like it did in 1991 – which is to say it looked just like it did in 1957, the unspoiled English garden of H. E. Bates’s books. Of course, all the rubbishy junk props that were strewn around the farm to make it look lived-in are gone, and the lawns and borders are all properly tended now. Much to my astonishment, Buss Farm has become a themed B&B, offering a Darling Buds-style stay in the country for anyone who wants it – and a quarter of a century after the show was broadcast, people evidently still do want it. While we were there for the documentary, the owner was tapping away at her computer nearly the whole time. ‘You’re busy,’ I said. She said, ‘Yes, and it
’s all down to the show. Without you lot, we wouldn’t have a business.’ So that was nice to know. True, she didn’t come across with any of the folding stuff, offer me a wink and attempt to wedge it in my top pocket. But I was more than happy to think I had played an inadvertently entrepreneurial role in a thriving hotel venture – which I can’t really pretend was the plan when I signed up to be Pop Larkin. It’s extraordinary, though, how the show has endured. Darling Buds was hugely popular at the time, and right from the get-go. The first episode went out on an April Sunday evening, offering a story in which a visiting tax inspector falls for the Larkins’ beautiful daughter and the rural life and ends up abandoning the Inland Revenue and joining the family instead. To the shock of all of us, it generated 19 million viewers, knocking Coronation Street off the top of the weekly audience chart. Darling Buds has not been constantly repeated in the way that Only Fools has, though. It’s not been kept in the public eye or placed where it could reach out to new audiences who didn’t see it at the time. Yet it had such a strong effect on the people who saw it in the first place that it seems to have remained in their minds ever since.
Amazing to reflect that the programme was popular and emblematic enough to warrant the issuing of collectors’ die-cast models of the Rolls-Royce that Pop drove, issued in Darling Buds of May-branded cardboard boxes. The Batmobile, James Bond’s Aston Martin and Pop Larkin’s Roller: it’s a strong thread. Actually, now that I think about it, there were die-cast models of the Trotters’ yellow Reliant Regal, too, so that’s two shows I’ve been involved in that have spawned collectible model cars. Is that some kind of record? I’m claiming it anyway. My legacy is set in enamel. My place in the history of Corgi Toys is secure.