by David Jason
Now, whether my interlocutors at Yorkshire Television were also tempted to say ‘Châteauneuf du Pape!’ in response to this presumptuous suggestion, I couldn’t tell you. I only know that they resisted the urge at the time. After I had left the room, they may have said all sorts of things. But they pushed ahead with the idea. A jocular Peckham barrow boy as a meditative TV sleuth? Many would have baulked at the notion. But I can only imagine that it smoothed the path for me not inconsiderably that John Thaw had so successfully come from The Sweeney to play Inspector Morse. He had made the transition from the gruff Flying Squad merchant who was always lumping wrong ’uns over the bonnet of a Ford Cortina, to a thoughtful (even over-thoughtful), classical-music-loving Jaguar driver in the Oxfordshire countryside. Once you saw him as Morse, the gruff, London dust-up merchant quickly slipped into the past and John himself got a massive shove up the ladder of actorly credibility. None of this was ever put into those exact words, but I don’t doubt that John’s success with Morse diminished the leap of faith that Yorkshire needed to take in my case.
Whatever, Yorkshire went to Excelsior, the production company that had done Darling Buds, and told them I was looking for a detective series, and the people at Excelsior did some research and sent me what they found – four books, including A Touch of Frost by R. D. Wingfield. So that was my holiday reading sorted for that Easter. Everything they had sent me would probably have worked to some extent, but it was Wingfield’s book that hooked me. That was where I met Detective Inspector William Edward ‘Jack’ Frost, who seemed to have a real pile of trouble on his plate at the time, including a serial killer on the loose, a possibly suspicious road accident involving the son of a Member of Parliament and a burglary in a strip club. The man got more work than Ant and Dec. I was totally drawn in by what I was reading. The plotting was woven together so cleverly that you were actually racing to turn the page while the story was gradually revealing itself. That level of enthralment is also what good narrative television is about, if you can get it right. I could see a future for Frost on the screen.
Richard Harris was chosen to take the first shot at adapting the books for television. I had been in a couple of Richard’s plays – Albert and Virginia, and Partners, which was the one where I used to get into a nightly fight with a tiger rug. Richard had also worked on the scripts for The Darling Buds of May. In our first meeting, Richard pointed out the great truth about detective series which is that, essentially, there are no new plots – not now, not after all this time. The variable is the detective. That’s where you make the difference. The success or failure of the show would come down in the end to what Frost was like. So I set my mind to constructing him.
My first concern was to lighten him considerably from the Frost in the books, where he is quite a dark creation. There’s a deeply troubled hinterland looming behind the detective there, and a hardened, embittered attitude to other people. But, without losing all the aspects of that edge, I wanted to make him more day-to-day, more accessible and above all more sympathetic. I wanted viewers to be able to feel some warmth for him and relate to him, because this is television after all, and that’s where my strength seems to lie. On the page, Frost is a heavy smoker but I had only just quit smoking myself and was reluctant to go back to it. So the on-screen Frost became a reluctant quitter – someone who has given up the fags but still hankers after them, a feature which was usefully human and gave us some nice bits and pieces for Frost in scenes where he was around other smokers. Indeed, there was probably more to be had out of Frost as an ex-smoker than there would have been if he had just been puffing away the whole time.
Then there was his bearing. Did I mention anywhere in this book that I’m not particularly tall? I think I may have done. I’m certainly not tall enough to have made it into the police force, for which you needed to be 5ft 7, which lofty benchmark I would have fallen half an inch short of, had the fancy taken me to become a copper back in the day. It’s Scotland Yard’s loss, I’m sure. Anyway, this marginal shortcoming could have presented me with an issue of plausibility, playing Frost. That’s why his body shape is extremely upright, almost every time you see him. Frost draws himself up to his full height and carries himself like a tall person, even though he isn’t one. I also went to an extra effort to make him physically imposing where I could. In any interior scene, I would try to be sure he took up the dominant position in the room, which is normally to be found around the fireplace. The hearth will tend to be a room’s focal point, so the minute Frost enters a room, likely as not, that’s where you’ll see him heading.
Frost’s moustache is part of the attempt to add authority, too. I remember from knocking about in my youth how the very young policemen, who didn’t wish to appear so, would grow a moustache in order to suggest some unearned seniority. For some reason, a bit of growth under the nose adds a little extra weight and presence, so I decided Frost had played that game, and I grew him a tache. He needed an authoritative tone of voice, too – a sharpness, a crispness, a decisive edge. It was never in the script, but I used to put in something my father used to say to us as kids: ‘Chop-chop! Come on – chop-chop!’ It’s pidgin Chinese, apparently – brought back to Britain by sailors. It goes very well with a clap of the hands, and my father was very fond of it. It was also a good, crisp phrase for Frost – commanding but not hectoring. Once you’ve got a few little keys like that, the rest of the character opens up and grows. As for wardrobe, Frost was very easy to dress: jackets and ties, the clothes of someone whose work requires him to look respectable but who doesn’t really care that much or have the money to spoil himself. Plus he’s a widower, so you get a faint, melancholy overtone from the clothes of the fact that there is nobody in his life who is looking out for him in that area. He basically wore the same hat and raincoat for eighteen years. But then, people do.
God bless Yorkshire Television, meanwhile, who, whether because they were concerned about the ghost of Del Boy scuppering things or for other reasons, went to a lot of effort to invest this project with seriousness. I was delighted that Peter Jackson, the lighting director who had done such great work on The Darling Buds of May, was back on board for Frost. The director of the crucial first episode was the late, great Don Leaver, who had worked on Prime Suspect but also, still more impressively, on the legendary sixties show The Avengers, which was radically experimental in the way it was shot. Don developed the Frost style and other directors took it on from there. I really enjoyed working with Don; perhaps a little less so with Herbie Wise, the Austrian-born director who was another ambitious appointment to the series, being famous for directing the landmark Robert Graves adaptation, I, Claudius. Herbie was very much a solo artist. He worked at home on the script and built every shot beforehand. Then he would come to the set and shoot it, very rigidly in accordance with his pre-formed plans – which plans tended to be very smart, I have to say, and right on the money. But Don Leaver had been a much more fluid operator and Herbie’s approach – essentially, ‘you say the lines and I’ll film you doing so’ – took some getting used to. So did his habit of talking to you indirectly, through his cameraman or his first assistant, rather than coming to you in person. There was also one slightly unfortunate moment when we were setting up an interior shot of me going through a doorway and Herbie made the following formal announcement: ‘We will shoot this side of the doorway and Mr Morse will come through, and then we will pick up Mr Morse on the other side.’ Oops, wrong detective. Still, seen one, seen ’em all, I guess.
We took the decision to lead off with a properly dark story in a properly dark episode, called ‘Care and Protection’. It featured thirty-year-old human remains, gunfire and the disappearance of a prostitute’s daughter. Well, if we were going to put Del Boy right out of people’s minds, and say, emphatically, ‘This ain’t cheery Peckham, everybody,’ we needed to do it properly. In due course, then, after those weeks of gradually ratcheting worry, I sat down and watched A Touch of Frost go out. In a funny wa
y, it felt a bit like a first night in the theatre – the same rush of high anxiety and mild giddiness. Obviously, I had already seen the finished show – had, indeed, made notes on edited versions of it along the way. I certainly knew how it ended. Nevertheless, you’re sitting there at home and watching it and knowing that potentially millions of other people are doing the same, and that’s quite a feeling. In order to pass muster, the character on the screen has got to convince me that he’s himself and not me. If there are any moments at all when I think I can see me, it’s not doing its job. On this occasion, as the story unfolded, to my enormous relief, I didn’t see me peeping out at all. To my even greater relief, I didn’t see Del peeping out, either.
That was the start of a whole new chapter for me – forty-two episodes of serious drama which kept me busy and in demand over the next eighteen years. Happy times. The show’s producer David Reynolds and I would head off to the Fawsley Hall Hotel in Daventry, which was no hardship, and spend a couple of days with our finest toothcombs out, going over the scripts. Was the story too linear? Were we pointing too obviously at the criminal right from the start? What could we shuffle around to change that? How can we take the audience further down the wrong road so that the surprise and pleasure when the truth is revealed is that much greater? I discovered there was as much fun and interest to be had in stitching a red herring into a plotline as there was in finding an extra joke between the lines of a sitcom script. Drama at this point seemed to be budgeted at roughly three times the budget for comedy, which caused my eyebrows to rise, I must admit. But because David was in control of the money and knew what it would cost to add things, we could have proper, reasonable discussions about production values. Does Frost have a scene with the pathologist here? Or does he simply have a line: ‘What did the pathologist say?’ What works best on the screen? What better assists the pacing? Eventually, all our gathered thoughts would go back to the writer in the form of notes – and would be grabbed with both hands, mostly. It was a really rewarding position to be in, to feel that my experience in putting bits of television together really did count for something and that my ideas would be taken seriously. I had a job title and everything: executive producer. What a turn-up: proper employment at last.
We were also able to retain some executive power over what went out in the Frost trailers, which was a growing problem back then and is an even bigger annoyance for me nowadays. You could sense a growing desire among broadcasters to trail programmes ever more strongly and reveal more and more about their contents in advance. It was about the competition for audiences, clearly, and the basic insecurity that followed from that. The thinking seemed to be that the more you showed of what you’d got – and especially the good bits – the more people you would get on board. But, just as with leaked photographs from the sets of Only Fools, I was adamantly against anything that risked a spoiler and entirely on the side of doing everything you could to retain the impact and the surprise for the viewers who tuned in when the show went out. That seemed to me to be especially crucial with a narrative-driven programme like Frost.
We had a police consultant to guide us on procedural matters and tell us when we were straying away from reality, although we weren’t necessarily sticklers for applying what he told us. On one occasion our man was observing us filming an interrogation scene, in the typical windowless room at the police station, with the alleged perpetrator of the crime sitting in a chair at a table and me walking about the place in shirtsleeves, asking my questions. At one point, my theatrical wanderings had carried me around the table and behind the interviewee and afterwards the police consultant stepped in. ‘You wouldn’t really do that,’ he said. ‘You’re not allowed to go behind the suspect in an interrogation because it could be interpreted as intimidation.’ I thanked him for his input, but my feeling was that if Frost couldn’t go round behind a suspect and get right in his ear, then where was the life in it? Fortunately, the director agreed. There was one interrogation, I remember, where I walked behind the interrogee and leaned myself up against the wall for a while with my arms folded. Those were just things I instinctively found myself doing, otherwise the scene would be just two people round a table and, as gripping as the dialogue doubtless was, the viewers would be dropping off in droves. So we decided to let Frost go rogue on this one. If anybody was informed enough to call us on it, we’d explain that it was just another signal that Frost was a bit of a renegade, when push came to shove. The rules, as they say, are there to be broken – and certainly in television.
This being a detective series, there were, of course, many morgue scenes, and for these we would often head off to the actual working mortuary at Leeds Hospital. The corpses you saw on your screen, I hasten to add, were actors smothered in make-up, but the building and the examination rooms were the real McCoy, and we were looked after and offered guidance, when we were in there, by an extremely nice and thoughtful pair of pathologists from the autopsy unit. Now, you might possibly assume that the coincidence of a bunch of thespians and a place associated with grim and absolute seriousness could plausibly have given rise to larks aplenty in a richly black-humoured vein. You might possibly assume this even more strongly in the case of the Frost cast, which was more given to larking about than probably any other cast I have had the pleasure to perform childish pranks with, most of those childish pranks having as their butt the wonderful but frequently luckless Johnny Lyons. (He always gamely forgave us – and that was part of the problem.) However, I have to report that a genuine solemnity would descend on us during the filming of those morgue sequences – a truly unusual lack of levity. Which is odd, really, because I’m sure that people who actually work in morgues, and do the real things that we were pretending to do, muck about and use black humour all the time – indeed, I don’t know how you would cope in that line of work without doing so. We, on the other hand, seemed to experience a brush with our own mortality in that chillingly antiseptic place that gave us all the absolute shivers and made the prospect of a prank or an off-colour remark appear entirely out of the question. When I got outside after doing those scenes, emerging into the daylight in the yard, I would feel my spirits lift and experience a palpable sense of release.
I think I can honestly say that I have never been a particularly demanding actor, in the sense of calling for special treatment and perks. Top-quality champagne in the dressing room, bowls of M&Ms with the brown ones removed – these are not the kind of starry backstage privileges that I have ever insisted upon as the condition of my participation. I mentioned earlier the state of the standard-issue motorhomes that Nick and I shared on the sets of Only Fools, most of which, we got the impression, had been lucky to scrape through an MOT test and wouldn’t have wanted to try their luck any further with a visit from the health inspectors. Yet we used them. It was the same back in 1972 when I took over from Michael Crawford as Brian Runnicles, the lead in No Sex Please – We’re British at the Strand Theatre in London – my big arrival in the West End, the whole ‘name in lights’ shebang, a huge deal for me at the time after years of chipping away in the provinces. Being the star of the show meant I got the Strand’s Number One dressing room. Despite the glamorous label, it was a poky, tatty room with a chipped sink and a carpet like a tramp’s trousers, whose only privilege resided in being closer to the stage than any of the other dressing rooms. Mariah Carey, I’m sure, would have taken one look and insisted on a complete repaint, fresh orchids every night and a daily pedicure for her poodle. I just lumped it. But I guess that’s just one of a number of things that Mariah Carey and I don’t have in common.
However, I have to confess that, during the shooting of Frost, I finally capitalised on my leading-man status by drawing myself up to my full five foot six and a half and asking if, instead of booking me a room along with everyone else in the chosen crew hotel, the production could run to renting me a place of my own, out in the Yorkshire countryside: somewhere I could go back to and shut the door and find a bit of quiet at
the end of a working day, when I was increasingly finding that I really needed the peace to descend. Lo and behold, my Barbra Streisand-like, bill-topping magnitude prevailed, my demands were met, and a hired cottage was found, with French windows and a little garden. I don’t think this was extravagant, in all honesty: it was probably cheaper than a hotel room, in fact. I certainly didn’t ask them to redecorate or fly in lobster from Sicily or anything.
The truth was, I had grown tired of the hotel thing. I had done an awful lot of it during the Only Fools and Darling Buds days and had developed a number of bugbears regarding such routine hotel-life irritations as slamming fire doors and noisy lift mechanisms and late-night conversations in corridors and people having fifty shades of fun on the other side of your paper-thin wall. The popularity of those two programmes hadn’t made staying in hotels any easier, either. There was a tipping-point moment on a Darling Buds shoot one evening when I phoned downstairs and asked if I could have some room-service supper brought up. My relatively simple order seemed to unleash a long line of visits to my room, unfolding over a period of anything up to forty-five minutes. First someone arrived with the half-bottle of wine. Then he left and closed the door. Then there was another knock, and someone came in with the main course. Then he left and closed the door. Then there was another knock, and someone else came in with bread and butter. Then he left and shortly after there was another knock and somebody else came in with the dessert. Then he left there and shortly after there was yet another knock. ‘Ah,’ I said to myself, for I had got into the rhythm of it by now. ‘That’ll be someone else with the coffee.’ It was, indeed, someone with the coffee. I began to suspect that the word might have got out about who was up there in that room and that people were finding an excuse to pop in for a glimpse. I also began to feel like a monkey in a cage, which was a bit disheartening, especially when you’re trying to eat your supper.