by David Jason
I had encountered David Beckham once before this, but only fleetingly. That was at the Sun Military Awards, a couple of years previously. At some point during that evening, a figure immediately recognisable to me had appeared out of nowhere at my table and politely and modestly asked if he and his son could have a quick photograph with me, because they were such fans of Only Fools. To which, obviously, I had replied, ‘Listen, mate – can’t you see I’m trying to eat my dinner here?’
OK, I hadn’t said that. For one thing, I think dinner was finished. For another, I was more than a little flattered, if I can be perfectly honest about it, and had willingly and even excitedly posed for the photograph, and then felt warmly touched by the incident for the rest of the night. It was certainly something to impress my daughter with and, Lord knows, one clings to those as time goes by.
Now here was Mr Beckham again, accompanied by his PA, walking into the backroom where I was sitting in a chair having make-up done. We shook hands, him smiling with that rather wonderful combination of warmth and shyness that he has. He was thirty-eight at the time – a little bit of a charmer, you would have to say, and a man of considerable sex appeal. Has anyone else noticed that about him? Somebody should get on to it. Good-looking boy like that – I reckon there’s a rich seam of commercial opportunities to be tapped into there, with the right people in place. Anyway, it occurred to me that his physical allure would have been there even if you had stripped away the extra layer of pulsing magnetism that was placed around him by global fame. Watching this man advance perfectly humbly across a room and noting how women wilted to either side of him like corn in a hot wind, I found myself reflecting on how things had been for me in that area, back in the day. And what I found myself concluding was that things had been very different. Frankly, as a callow but willing youth on the north London dance-hall scene, and as an international man of jet-set pleasure in waiting, I had to work my socks off to attract the attentions of the desired sex, as a direct consequence, I suppose, of being both short and not especially shaped like David Beckham. The idea that female attention could have been yours by some kind of automatic physical right, upon mere entry into a room, without you putting in a serious shift of chatting, smarming, joking, larking, fooling, pranking, wheedling, begging, etc., would have been mind-blowing to me. Fame changes the game, it’s true, in terms of the impact you have on a room, but I’m not sure Becks would have known such struggles, even had celebrity never launched him into the stratosphere.
We chatted for a while. He hadn’t been blowing smoke, back at that Military Awards do, when he said he was a fan of Only Fools. He obviously really loved it. He was an east London boy, of course, so there was plenty about the show which chimed with him. He had watched it with his parents, and now he watched it with his kids. Getting to appear in a scene from it was apparently the fulfilment of a long-standing dream. It was extremely sweet, in the circumstances, how nervous he was. He told us that he hadn’t got a lot of sleep the night before because he had been so worried about getting his part right. He had taken his lines to bed with him in order to keep running over them, and had eventually fallen asleep with the script on top of him. I could sense the women in the room thinking, ‘Lucky script.’
I don’t know about a lucky script, but it was certainly a pretty good one, and faithful enough to the show. The skit opens with Del trying to flog a load of David Beckham underpants at the market, with Rodney modelling the garment, absurdly, over his trousers, and cursing Del, as ever, for making him do the donkey work and look ridiculous. Scepticism greets the news that this batch of underwear has been individually signed across the backside by Golden Balls himself, and, indeed, as Rodney fumingly turns to show the crowd his rear view, the autograph in pen does look like any old piece of scribble. However, Del does his best to reassure any potential buyers that he has a personal connection with Becks which has enabled him to land these prized garments. ‘It was me what arranged a bouncy castle for his son Brookside’s birthday party,’ Del explains. This manifestly bogus claim couldn’t cause the crowd to disperse any faster had it been a water cannon, and they remain unimpressed even by Del’s desperate announcement to their retreating backs of a sudden price crash (‘£4.50 each or two for £9’). Del and Rodney thereafter adjourn to the cafe to have a cup of tea and a rethink.
What followed was the main scene – Del and Rodney together at the table in the cafe, discussing the problems of selling Beckham-branded underwear, with the camera only eventually drawing out to disclose to the pair that they’re sitting next to the man himself. Beckham had some dialogue to produce in a very short space of time and it goes without saying that he was a long way outside his comfort zone. He would get halfway through a line and then dry and he would be covered in embarrassment and full of apologies – as if Nick and I cared. That stuff is par for the course and happens to the best of us. You can have a script entirely nailed – DLP, or ‘dead line perfect’ as we say in the trade. But then you’re in the studio, the director shouts ‘Action!’ and the camera rolls and the room falls horribly silent in anticipation, and the pressure causes a kangaroo to be let loose in the upper paddock of your mind. Been there, done that, a thousand times.
Anyway, the specific effect of this pressure on Becks was that he got quieter and quieter – and he hadn’t started out all that loud to begin with. After a couple of botched takes, he was practically whispering. Me and Nick told him not to worry about it. It was just a lump of tape, after all. We could do it line by line, if necessary – patch it together that way. I also told him a couple of stories about times when I had completely dried, and I confessed to him that sometimes, if I was struggling, I would have a line written for me on a board and held up to the side of the camera. Those tales seemed to put him at his ease and he relaxed into it. The volume returned to his voice and he got it done – and in some style, I would say.
There’s some good stuff in that sketch, not least the line of Rodney’s, ‘Asking Trigger for help is like asking Ozzy Osbourne to look after your bats.’ Then there’s the nice exchange where Becks, having established that Rodney has a GCE in art, asks him who his favourite artist is. ‘I’d probably have to say Matisse,’ says Rodney. ‘Because I don’t think anyone could get near the way he could convey intensity using pure colour, you know? I mean, Matisse did for colour what Picasso did for form. How about you?’ To which Beckham replies, ‘I love Tony Hart. That Morph cracks me up.’
Becks then gives Rodders some modelling tips, instructing him to ‘glide’ and ‘oscillate’. That leads us back out into the marketplace, where, thus encouraged, Del and Rodney have another go at selling the pants, while Becks watches on from a distance. And this was where we did the sideways fall.
Apparently it was what Becks was bursting, above all, to do: to recreate the drop through the bar flap from the ‘Yuppy Love’ episode. He said he thought it was about the funniest thing he had ever seen. He’s not alone in feeling that way, clearly. Time and again, the bar-flap fall features in polls and lists of the great sitcom moments. Asked to nominate one scene from a British television comedy that made them laugh above all others, a large number of people will tend to plump unswervingly for that time when Del leaned on the bar next to Trigger, discussing what attracts women to men, then stood upright to acknowledge the seeming attentions of a girl on the other side of the room, only for a passing member of the bar staff to lift the flap behind him so that Del, returning to his position, drops through the gap like a felled tree. The definitive Only Fools and Horses comedy moment? You would probably have to put it in the top three, along with the dropped chandelier and the Batman and Robin sequence, and if, come the final reckoning before the great panel of comedy judges in the sky, my stand-out contribution to the field of light entertainment should turn out to be this solitary pratfall, then so be it, because I’m quietly rather fond of it too.
Let my further bequest be a willingness to pass on the secrets of that fall to any members of a futur
e generation wishing to duplicate it. Especially if they’re as determined to get it absolutely right as David Beckham was. I had to give him top marks for that – he didn’t want this to be a half-hearted fall. He wanted the full effect and he was prepared to do whatever it took to achieve it.
Top tip number one: it’s all about the eyeline. This much I was able to explain to him. The direction in which you’re looking at the start of the fall should be the direction in which you continue to look while falling. Alas, this is going to involve you in an almighty scrap with your natural instincts, which are going to be screaming at you to turn your eyes in the direction of the fall, for the very good reason that bodies are generally pretty keen to find out where they’re going, especially when they’re falling over. If your eyes go, your head goes with them, your arm comes out and your knee turns reflexively to break the fall – and all of that happens in a split second, in accordance with the human being’s prime desire to protect his or her head.
Now, I’m not saying that a fall conducted in accordance with natural human instincts isn’t funny. Del Boy could have started to drop through that gap where the bar flap used to be, and he could have turned and put his arms out to save himself, and it would still have got a laugh. Indeed, when John wrote the scene, he suggested that Del should begin to fall through the flap but catch himself and hold himself up. It was more like a stumble than a fall in John’s original vision for it. That, too, would have been funny.
But what I am saying (nay, insisting) is that a fall conducted in accordance with natural human instincts, though funny, isn’t anywhere near as funny as a fall conducted without them. My suggestion to John was that Del should go down like a plank of wood because … well, because that’s just funnier. And the reason I knew it was funnier was because I had spent a large portion of my earlier life as an actor in the theatre putting this particular theory on falling over to the test.
I refer here to my distinguished years, during the sixties and seventies, as a theatrical performer in the genre known as farce. You will perhaps, dear reader, have witnessed a theatrical farce at some point in your life, or at least be familiar with the basic features of the genre. These could be said to include leading male characters whom the plot will eventually separate from their trousers, leading female characters whom the plot will eventually separate from several layers of their outer clothing, constant and often complex comings and goings through manifold doors, unexpected visits, frequently from wives or, if not, a vicar, or sometimes both, and a sequence in which at least one character ends up hiding in a wardrobe (trousers optional).
However, amid all of this, the essential item on the set of any farce is a sofa, commonly placed at the very centre of the stage. Indeed, one of the best ways in which to ascertain whether the play you are watching is a farce or not is to ask yourself, ‘Does it have a sofa in it?’ Actual trades description statutes, I’m sure, insist that a play cannot be labelled as a farce unless a sofa is on the stage for at least 80 per cent of its duration, and should you ever attend a play purporting to be a farce and discover, upon the lifting of the curtain, that there is no sofa present, you should depart the theatre immediately and commence legal proceedings against the producers on the grounds of false pretences.
Darling Mr London, A Bedfull of Foreigners, Chase Me, Comrade, Honeymoon Bedlam, Look, No Hans … reader, I appeared in them all and am ready to attest that a sofa was the key item of furniture and the centre of the principle action in almost every case. Sometimes it was a particularly ingenious sofa. In Darling Mr London, for example, it was a sofa bed that was designed to return from its expanded bed state to its compressed sofa state while I was still in it – indeed, when I had just dived on top of it in search of a hiding place. From the auditorium the sofa appeared to have swallowed me – as indeed, with my participation in unlocking certain bolts and throwing certain parts of the structure back over myself, it had.
Mostly, though, you would find yourself working with a standard, non-collapsing sofa and, as such, in the interests of spicing things up a little bit, you developed a few tricks or bits of incidental business (not strictly speaking scripted) which brought the sofa into play. For instance, during a conversation you might walk idly round to the side of the sofa and then, without looking at it, you might stretch out your hand and lean to one side to support yourself meditatively on one corner of it. Whereupon it was readily apparent that if your hand slightly missed the sofa and had to clutch at it in order to hold you up, you would earn a laugh from the audience. What was even more apparent, however, was that if, during that seemingly innocent gesture, your hand missed the sofa altogether, causing you to fall sideways behind it and thus disappear completely from view … well, the laughter you earned from the audience was exponentially greater. Furthermore, if, during that fall, you continued to hold the gaze of the person with whom you were supposed to be having the conversation, then the laughter increased in volume yet again. This much I had established through long and dedicated practice and by steady honing in front of live audiences, all over the country, night after night. As absurd as it may seem, when John Sullivan put the script for the pub scene with Trigger in front of me, I had in effect been preparing for that moment for about twenty years.
All of this I gladly imparted to David Beckham. Keep looking where you were looking and hold the body stiff. Only break the fall right at the last minute, by which time you will be out of shot. Here’s the good news: you’ve got a crash mat to fall onto. Knowing that you at least have a soft landing ahead of you helps the mental process considerably. Beckham is an athlete, of course, so I was working with a good student. He picked it up really fast – and it worked.
While he was looking on at Del and Rodney from across the market, we had him leaning against a metal trolley. Then he crouches down to sign an autograph on a football for a little boy and the trolley gets pushed away, so when he stands up again and goes casually to resume his position, there is nothing there for him to lean against. It was very nicely set up, I thought, with the words that Beckham whispers to the little boy about keeping hush and not drawing everybody’s attention to him forming a neat parallel with Del’s line to Trigger in the original: ‘Play it nice and cool, son – nice and cool, you know what I mean?’
Unfortunately there was no time after all this for Becks to teach me how to bend a free kick. Maybe some time in the future. But the finished item, when it was broadcast, got 9.5 million viewers, the peak viewing figure for the night. Not too shabby, Dave. Not too shabby, my son.
However, I’m not saying I took this personally, but the year following these efforts, for the 2015 Comic Relief fund-raising effort, they used a Del Boy statue. They stood a life-size model of Del outside Whitemead House in Bristol, whose exterior had so selflessly played the part of Mandela House in the series, and encouraged people to go and put money in it. It was quite a technologically fancy statue, it has to be said. You could tap a contactless credit card on one of its pockets and automatically donate a quid or two. Even so. Replaced by a statue! I ask you. Is there any greater ignominy for an actor – least of all for the one who taught David Beckham to fall over?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Back on the shop floor
IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I had been appearing as Granville opposite Ronnie Barker’s grumpy corner-shop owner Arkwright, in the sitcom Open All Hours, Ronnie sent me a clipping from a newspaper’s television listings, stuck to a white card. The clipping read:
7.30 Open All Hours. Granville goes all out to impress a local beauty and improve his lowly status. Comedy starring David Jason (R).
Underneath, the actual star of the show had written, ‘Your agent is getting above himself. Ronnie B.’ A slip of the subeditor’s keyboard, I assure you. Back then, the notion of Open All Hours without Ronnie Barker, my hero and mentor, firmly in charge of it would have seemed implausible to me.
Time will always surprise you, though. Some thirty years later, in 2013, I was invi
ted to have lunch in London with Mark Freeland, who was then the BBC’s Controller of Comedy Production and who wanted to talk to me about the possibility of getting me back on the BBC in some way. Again, I’m aware that it’s possible to sound rather casual, or even blasé, about these summonses to the meal table by the great and good to break bread and listen to enquiries about my general availability. But as someone who spent so many years grabbing any work that came within the vicinity of his outstretched fingertips in order to keep his career ticking over, I can’t overstress how remarkable and unlikely this position of privilege still feels to me. Quite apart from anything else, there’s free food on offer: I mean, what’s not to like?
Anyway, in the course of my conversation with Mr Freeland, I mentioned something that I had found myself thinking about a lot in recent years: whatever happened to Granville? Freeland asked me what I meant. I said, ‘Well, you know – what became of him? He was stuck in that corner shop, working for his greedy old uncle, wearing that terrible tank top, longing to break out of his little dead-end world, but never making it … Did he escape? Did he find love? Or is he still there?’
‘Who was the writer on Open All Hours?’ Freeland asked.