by David Jason
I have to say, the actual Landaulette looked box-fresh at that later meeting. It had been to the restorers since we had it on the show and the bloke responsible for the work had done a lovely job, taking it right back to its original spec, inside and out. The engine had been reconditioned and when you switched it on, it ran like an old grandfather clock. The yellow coachwork and the black mudguards were impeccable – even after I had finished with them. The restorer of motorbikes in me was both humbled and agog. That said, no amount of attention to historic detail could make the Landaulette any easier to get in and out of. Hauling your legs over the side, clinging onto the door jamb … not dignified. Even when we made the show, my impression was that the only people who could climb into that car with any degree of comfort or style were gymnasts. A quarter of a century later, and with my days of excellence on the parallel bars sadly behind me, that impression only solidified. As for getting out, it still seemed to be the case that the only method was to swing your legs up and out, point them vaguely in the direction of the running board, ease your backside out of the chair and then very carefully fall on the ground.
Bruises aside, we had a grand old reunion that day, me, Pam and Philip. For all of us, the show had been something unique in our careers, a special time, and its impact and effect on people had been so much greater than anything we had envisaged while making it. We had hoped that Catherine Zeta-Jones would come and reminisce with us. Darling Buds was, of course, Catherine’s breakout show. They auditioned three hundred actresses for the part of Mariette, the Larkins’ daughter, and still didn’t find one that they were happy with. Then somebody saw Catherine performing in the musical 42nd Street at the Drury Lane Theatre in London and asked her to try out. The rest is history, much of it written in the tabloid papers, who caught one sight of Catherine playing the coquettish but innocent Larkin daughter on the small screen, and swarmed all over her – and, by extension, all over our location shoots. I had seen the press gather when Only Fools was filming, but this was on another level. Like she said, ‘With one hour of television, my life changed.’ What amazed and impressed me was the level-headedness with which she dealt with it all. She was only twenty-two at that point and some would have freaked, but the whole ridiculous carnival seemed to amuse her more than anything else. The show got her noticed in America, she moved to LA, began starring in movies, met and married Michael Douglas … just the usual chain of events that gets triggered by appearing in an ITV family drama serial set in rural Kent in the 1950s.
Catherine couldn’t come to Buss Farm that day, but she suggested I fly out to America and film a chat with her there. That sounded great to me: we’d get the interview done in her New York apartment, and then, no doubt, she and Michael would want to take me out to dinner with Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges, because they would most likely happen to be in town, too; and at some point in the evening somebody would say, ‘Hey, Dave, what are you busy with right now? Because it just so happens I’ve got a script which I know would be perfect for you …’ Then I woke up and remembered that this was British television, and the budget to fly me and a film crew across the Atlantic for a short interview sequence was unlikely to be forthcoming. True enough, a compromise position was arrived at. We would film an interview with Catherine in her New York apartment … but from Buss Farm, via a satellite link. My dinner with Matt, Jeff and the gang would have to wait.
Transatlantic teleconferencing, though: it was hard to think of anything less Larkin-like. Still, there we all sat, on a sofa in Kent – me, Pam and Philip – and there, on a giant screen, live from New York, still setting up and not able to hear us at this point, was Catherine. She looked fantastic, it goes without saying. In due course, the operator pushed in the plug, or the 20p piece dropped in the meter, or however it works, and we were in business. Pam said she Skypes her sister in Australia all the time, so she felt pretty comfortable with it, but I have never Skyped Pam’s sister in my life, so the scenario took some getting used to for me. There was a slight time delay, so we talked over each other a bit. At one point you heard one of her kids walk into the room – on their way to school it seemed – and she explained that she was just giving an interview about Darling Buds and you could hear the kid, off-screen, react as kids will; kind of, ‘Oh God, Mom – must you?’ It was great to talk to her again and see how unchanged she was: still natural, still grounded.
Nobody else had been cast at the point at which I agreed to do Darling Buds, and though it would be nice to say that I always knew it would fly and signed on the dotted line without hesitation, the truth was I had my doubts about whether there was enough drama in it. As it happened, atmosphere would carry it, as much as anything else. In the meantime, the nature of the project really appealed to me: a family-orientated, Sunday-evening show was something that I had fancied being a part of for some time, and because that particular style of entertainment already seemed to be on the wane, perhaps I needed to get in quick or lose my chance. My only stipulation for Yorkshire Television was that it had to be shot on film rather than video. Porterhouse Blue had been shot on film and I had come to appreciate fully the distinction in terms of richness and depth. When they agreed to use film on Darling Buds, I was on board. I just felt that film stock would give it heart as well as romance, and make all the difference.
After that, it was about building the character in the usual ways. I remember going into the meeting with the wardrobe designer and saying that I saw Pop Larkin in a pork-pie hat and a waistcoat. And the designer said, ‘Yes, absolutely – a moleskin waistcoat.’ I said, ‘Moles? I’m not sure I fancy wearing moles …’ She said, ‘It’s a material that people in the country would wear.’ So a moleskin waistcoat it was. We pulled out trousers with turn-ups, big boots and a pair of old-fashioned blue overalls for when he was working. We had to have copies of everything on stand-by because there was always the chance, given the setting, that something would end up getting accidentally covered in paint, or oil, or pig manure, which would have derailed the shoot if another set of clothes hadn’t been available to change into.
As for Pop’s body language, in many ways, I quickly realised, he needed to have an absence of body language about him. There wasn’t that restless, twitchy, questing physical energy that was going on with Del. On the contrary, you needed a contentedness to pervade Pop’s body – relaxed, shoulders down. This was a married man, in love with his wife and with life in general. He could afford to be much more still and loose-limbed than Del.
Something else that I threw into the melting pot early on: I’ve been quite a practical person in my life, having been an electrician and being a bit of a fixer-upper and a mender. So I’m used to working with tools and lifting stuff around and that, too, becomes a form of body language. I thought if I could feed some of that into my portrayal of Pop, it might make him come alive a touch more. So if he had to move a crate around, I asked that it should be a full crate, and if he had to feed the pigs, I made sure the bucket of slops was as full as it should be, rather than empty, which a lot of actors would have preferred. Just as you can always spot an actor pretending to drink from an empty cup, so you can also spot an actor picking up an empty suitcase. It tips up at one end because there’s no weight to hold it flat. Same kind of thing goes for a bucket. You need some weight in there. Then your whole body shape changes to compensate in the act of carrying it, and then it looks real, because it is.
One thing Pop did share with Del, though, was a habit of eating heartily and openly. There were never half measures with him: if Ma put haddock down in front of him, it would be a whole haddock. If it was turkey, it would be a whole turkey leg. Everything he ate was the full monty. The amount of ham sandwiches we got through on that show beggars belief. Anton, our stage manager, would be behind the scenes during rehearsals, slicing up this plump white bread, slathering it with butter and stuffing slices of ham inside it. So delicious. I put on a lot of weight during the making of those three series. But that was Pop. He really enj
oyed his food and he tucked in properly, without manners or graces, speaking with his mouth full, elbows on the table – the relaxed man, at home with his family.
Doing Darling Buds was a whole new kind of experience for me. This was the first time I had gone into a show with my reputation preceding me. The success of Only Fools meant I was boxing at a different weight now, whether I liked it or not. I knew that I was right for the part of Pop Larkin; at the same time, I also knew that Yorkshire Television were hoping I would bring along with me some of the audience who had watched Only Fools – that I had a value for them in that purely mathematical, bums-on-seats sense. It was definitely not something I had had to think about before, and, even though it was quite an empowering thought, it brought another layer of pressure. Plus there was my own determination to prove that I wasn’t just a one-hit wonder; that I could successfully adopt another character that would be accepted by people and that would help me slightly slacken the powerful grasp of Del Boy. In the context of all this, I found myself being handled incredibly thoughtfully by Yorkshire Television. Perhaps a little too thoughtfully, sometimes. After the second series of Darling Buds, Vernon Lawrence, who was Head of Yorkshire Television, took me out for dinner. Back in the day, Vernon had been a sound engineer on The Goon Show, and anyone who could claim a connection with that piece of genius was good enough for me. Halfway through this meal, he suddenly got up from the table, came round to my side and, much to my consternation, plunged to his knee and took my hand, in the traditional manner of the love-struck suitor who is about to propose. This rather kindled the interest of the restaurant’s other diners. ‘I want you to tell me that you will do another series of Darling Buds,’ Vernon shouted. It was ridiculous and funny, but also, I can’t deny, flattering. Now this was all new to me: one-to-one contact with the head honchos, ceaseless access to and feedback from the people who were making the decisions. At the BBC I had felt very much like a hired hand – like it was my privilege to work there, which it unquestionably was. Here, though, I was given a contract to lock me in place, for the first time in my career, and I felt properly wanted. Moreover, with Vernon and David Reynolds, Deputy Controller of Entertainment at Yorkshire Television at that time, I realised that I could get things done. They were a phone call away. Got a problem? Solved. It was so unlike the BBC’s set-up where you frequently seemed to be dealing with committees within committees and were constantly required to submit paperwork in triplicate and then wait around for a couple of months before anything moved.
We made two six-episode series, along with two Christmas specials, and then ran out of material. H. E. Bates, alas, was in no position to provide us with new stuff, having passed away in 1974, so writers were commissioned to supply scripts for the third series from scratch. There were a few conniptions at the time about whether this was the right thing to do, or whether the show would lose its spirit without the ‘truth’ of the books underpinning it. Personally, I didn’t think it made a great deal of difference and I would have been happy to carry on for at least another series after that, given how much people were enjoying the show and how much we were enjoying making it. If it had been up to me, we would have sailed happily onwards.
Quite apart from anything else, we were making my mother happy. She loved that show. Of all the things I did, Darling Buds was her absolute favourite. It spoke to her, as it spoke to so many people, of a time she could remember very well, a simpler period when what you didn’t have, you didn’t miss, and when you were happy with your lot. It was carefree, sunny and escapist – a vision of bucolic bliss. OK, the interiors weren’t shot in Kent at all, but up at Yorkshire Television. (All credit to the lighting director, Peter Jackson, for blending them so that nobody would know. Jackson was an artist who would not be rushed in his subtle adjustments of the lighting rig, and I can still hear now his slightly nasal voice saying, in a manner which brooked no dispute, ‘I’ll tell you when I’m ready.’) And, OK, the strawberry-picking scene in episode one was filmed outside the strawberry season, so the field had to be planted up beforehand with greenhouse-grown strawberries imported from Holland. But nobody said this wasn’t television, did they? It was easy on the eye, it was easy on the ear – classic Sunday-evening viewing in the old style, with the signature tune acting as a wonderful, gentle siren to call you through from the kitchen or down from upstairs. I sometimes think that telly could do with a bit more of that today – a family drama, designed to make people feel good. That kind of show seems to have gone, by and large. All that Darling Buds was really saying was, ‘Aren’t we lucky? Isn’t it a lovely world we live in?’ That message would be a tough sell for television nowadays. There appears to be more scope given to things that are angry and aggressive, loud, harsh. I understand that, but it saddens me a bit, too.
Hark at me, though – sounding nostalgic about a piece of nostalgia. And nostalgia, as the saying goes, isn’t what it used to be. Strange old business, though, and a strange old place I found myself in at the start of the 1990s, as I now realise, looking back. Having spent the best part of a decade doing everything in my powers to cement Del Boy in people’s memories, I then started working as hard as I could to try and make people forget him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
My life on the beat
I WOULD LOVE to tell you that, after Pop Larkin, I breezed suavely into the part of Detective Inspector Jack Frost in A Touch of Frost, pausing only to change my soiled blue overalls for a raincoat and a trilby, and that the rest was television history. The truth is, though, in the winter of 1992, as the transmission date for the first ever episode of that series neared, I was nervous as a kitten. I was pacing about at home, staring fretfully out of windows, and narrowly resisting the urge to chew on the furniture. I have it on the authority of my wife, Gill, that she had never seen me so much a-jitter in the run-up to a broadcast.
I had felt very confident about it while we were making it. The stories and the scripts were good. The cast was excellent: Bruce Alexander as Superintendent Norman Mullett, John Lyons as DS George Toolan, and my dear elder brother Arthur White as PC Ernie Trigg. We had certainly had a good time shooting it. Yet, as the day of broadcast got closer, I found myself surfing a rising wave of anxiety. Among the many things making that wave was a growing sense of responsibility towards the people at Yorkshire Television, whom I had persuaded that playing a detective in a serious drama serial was the way forward for me. But would I similarly persuade an audience? Would people believe in me, barging about in a police station in my freshly grown moustache? Or had I embarrassingly overreached myself? Such things can leave an actor feeling decidedly squeaky around the nether regions – and not least when it’s fairly clear that several million people will be tuning in to find out how you got on.
Inadvertently or otherwise, you create expectations about yourself and the stuff I had done on television had been overwhelmingly comic in intent rather than serious. By this time, of course, I had put Pop Larkin between myself and Del Boy in people’s minds and had perhaps revealed a bit of flexibility. Then again, the gap between those two characters, though clear, was not vast. You could say that, in terms of format, going from Only Fools to Darling Buds was a shift from comedy to comedy drama but, as I’ve already explained, in my opinion Only Fools was never really a sitcom and was always a comedy drama itself, so, in that sense, it was barely even a sidestep. Also, for all the differences in demeanour, Pop and Del were, at root, a pair of lovable rogues who shared, along with a love of a laugh, a liberal attitude to taxation issues. As Pop so perfectly put it, ‘Tax, Mr Charlton? Tax? I wish I had the money to pay tax.’ Though technically criminal, that foible hardly put them at the scene of grim murders, vanished prostitutes and unexplained bodies in rivers. Anyway, Del continued to sit heavily in the scales, as he always would. Accordingly, the question nagging away in my mind, as I stomped about at home in that period, was: ‘Would you buy a brand-new TV detective off this man?’ Or would the audience watch me arrive at my first cr
ime scene and be waiting for me to draw a deep breath, widen my eyes and say, ‘Châteauneuf du Pape, Rodney!’
In the opening episode of Only Fools, you may recall, Del took a load of dodgy combination-lock briefcases off Trigger’s hands. In the opening episode of Frost, there’s a dodgy briefcase, too, but it’s found with half a pair of handcuffs still attached to it – handcuffs which match the other half already found mysteriously dangling on the wrist of a dead body. The distinction between those two uses of the briefcase as a dramatic device seemed to me to summarise fairly neatly the nature of the leap I was trying to make here. From Del Boy to Frost: in my own mind, I was essentially launching myself across a canyon and I would either land on the other side or end up as a distant puff of dust on the rocks below, like Wile E. Coyote.
The root of all this was a meeting at Yorkshire Television in 1992 when I had been asked the question, ‘So, David, what do you want to do next?’ It was the first time in my career that anyone had ever asked me that, and it was quite a shock. Normally, at those kinds of meetings, people had summoned me because they had a particular job in mind for me. The idea that there was now some kind of blank slate onto which I could chalk my own feverish desires seemed implausible to me. What did I want to do next? Blimey. If ever a question brought home to me the privileged position that I had somehow come to occupy, it was that one. And because the very question had surprised me, I was right on the verge of replying ‘Dunno, really’ – which would probably not have sounded all that impressive or forward-looking of me. But fortunately I recovered my self-possession enough to mention playing a detective in a detective series, an ambition which had grown in me the more of those things that I watched and enjoyed on the television myself.