David Jason: My Life (13 page)

Nevertheless, for all its grounding in the established practices
of the greats, this business with the bongos did not entirely delight my fellow cast members in the scene – those at the front of the stage trying to carry on with their dialogue. As far as they were concerned, this little fart of a waiter was doing stuff that he shouldn’t have been doing and upstaging them. But that only dawned on me later. At the time, I was completely green and oblivious. As far as I was concerned, I was simply doing what the director told me.

And whatever else you want to say about my portrayal of Sanjamo, it made an impression. They liked their theatre in Bromley in those days, and we played to full and supportive audiences. Moreover, when the play was reviewed in the local paper, I got a mention. On 30 April 1965, in the
Bromley Press
, under the less than promising headline ‘
BUBBLE RUNS INTO TROUBLE
’, the production, and in particular its pacing, was greeted with really quite stunning levels of indifference. However, readers who got as far as paragraph eight (and I was one of them) will have discovered and no doubt digested the following:

A small but well-acted part is that of David White as the native butler of the governor.

A small but well-acted part! OK, so no one was ever likely to lift that line as the title for their autobiography or get it printed up on T-shirts. But I was more than happy at the time.

My contract was for two weeks’ rehearsal and two weeks’ performance. At the start, I bought myself a little hardback notebook for my accounts, and duly noted in biro my salary for the two weeks of rehearsals (£7 and 5 shillings per week) and for the two weeks of the production (£15 per week. In 2013 terms, £15 would be the equivalent of about £110. Not great, even for a waiter).

And now that I had an official signed contract I could get
into Equity. I rang up straight away, and said I wanted to join. The woman on the phone said, ‘What’s your stage name?’

‘David White.’

A silence followed while she checked the records. There was already a David White.

‘Would you like to choose a different name?’

Free-associating wildly, I said, ‘David White …
head
?’

There was already one of those, too.

This was harder than it seemed. As I dithered and cogitated some more, the woman said, ‘You could always call back, you know.’ But I wanted to get in quick, fearful of losing my chance. And for some reason my mind, casting around in desperation, fastened on to the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, burned into my imagination forever by the afternoon readings of Miss Kent back at primary school.

‘David Jason?’ I said.

The woman at Equity checked.

‘No, there’s no David Jason,’ she said.

There was now.

CHAPTER FIVE

Unrecommended behaviour at weddings and airports. Some business with a porter’s trolley. And the night that Hector from
Hector’s House
tried to seduce me.

THE FIRST PUBLIC
appearance of David Jason – henceforth to be regarded as standing in permanently for the artist formerly known as David White – was on 24 May 1965 at the Vanbrugh Theatre Club in London. And the person who lined up the work for me? My brother, again. Nepotism has its critics, but you probably wouldn’t have found me among them at this stage in my career. Hey, it’s just nature’s way of keeping things in the family.

How it happened was that Arthur had been asked by the actor and producer Malcolm Taylor to be in a stage production of the great Dylan Thomas poem for voices,
Under Milk Wood
. Unfortunately it clashed with something else Arthur was doing, but he told Malcolm that his little brother was also very good at Welsh accents and suggested he give me a listen. Malcolm would have been well within his rights to say, ‘Your little brother? Yeah, what do you think I’m doing here – running a nursery?’ and then go back to his list of phone numbers. But fortunately he didn’t. He agreed to see me.

So I went along to meet Malcolm and auditioned for him in the front room of his flat in Randolph Avenue, Maida Vale. This was another buttock-clenchingly intimidating prospect because Malcolm had a very serious thespian background. He had trained at RADA, in the same year as Diana Rigg, Susannah York and Albert Finney; he had appeared onstage with Laurence Olivier in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of
Coriolanus
– and, OK, he was only a spear carrier, but it still counts; he had acted at the Royal Court in Tony Richardson’s production of
Luther
. He was altogether someone who knew his theatrical onions. So here I was standing in front of the door to a basement flat in Randolph Avenue. I took a deep breath and pressed the doorbell. I heard it ring somewhere deep inside the flat. I rang again and suddenly the door opened and there, standing before me, was a small, rotund fellow with a huge mop of curly black hair and a cherubic face. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You must be Arthur’s brother. Come in.’

I followed him down a small dark passageway and into his warm and bohemian-style flat. He took me into the living room, which had a low, marble-topped coffee table and a large sofa, and Malcolm sat down opposite me in a comfortable armchair. He asked me what I’d done – and it didn’t take me long to tell him. He then asked me to read from
Under Milk Wood
– the opening speech of the narrator first, then some of the other parts, the Reverend Eli Jenkins and Mog Edwards. And, of course, the Welsh voices that the words asked for came very easily to me, being half-Welsh and having spent all those summers in Wales.

Malcolm gave me the job there and then. It was going to involve a couple of days of rehearsals, back at his flat, beginning in a fortnight’s time, and then a week of performances at the Vanbrugh Theatre, which was RADA’s own auditorium, with no set wages, but a split of the takings.

In that cast was the terrific Ruth Llewellyn, subsequently
better known as Ruth Madoc (and also as Gladys Jones from
Hi-de-Hi!
), and the imposing Windsor Davies, who would later do a lot of Welsh-accented shouting as Battery Sergeant Major Williams in
It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
. So I was among some properly rich Welsh vocal talent here.

The resulting production wasn’t so much a play as a semi-staged reading. The narrator was on his own, stage left, and then there were eight actors in two rows of four, with music stands in front of us holding the scripts. The show began blacked-out with the rough outline of our figures and a pin spot on the narrator: ‘To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the dark town, starless and bible-black …’ At the end of the narrator’s speech, the backcloth would start to lighten with the morning. And now the sound effects were fed in: the dog barking in his sleep, ‘farmyards away’, and so on.

Playing Reverend Eli Jenkins required me to get my tongue around a litany of Welsh waterways without biting it clean off:

‘By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,

Edw, Eden, Aled, all,

Taff and Towy broad and free,

Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,

Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,

Small is our River Dewi, Lord,

A baby on a rushy bed.’

You try saying that after a couple or three pints of Brains SA. I thought it was fantastic – just the best stuff to read aloud. It was the start of a big love affair for me with that Thomas piece. I’ve been able to recite large chunks of it ever since.

It was also the start of a great alliance with Malcolm Taylor. He was only three years older than me and we clicked straight
away. Indeed, Malcolm subsequently became one of my closest friends, and eventually a business partner. (We founded Topaz Productions together in the late 1980s.) We were to share many nights of London-based, bachelor-style carousing and, in the mid-to-late 1960s, fancied ourselves rather dashing, I think, in our open shirts and casually knotted silk scarves – two actor-laddies about town. This phase came to an end when Malcolm was fortunate enough to marry the lovely actress Anne Rutter, with whom he spent the rest of his life and with whom he brought up two lovely and talented girls. I was his best man. I was more than happy – nay, merry – to be so and delivered the conventional poor-taste speech. I no longer recall the exact text of my sermon, but I do remember that I wore my hired top hat throughout it (indeed, I refused to take it off all day) and that something I said caused a relation of Annie’s, in full Scottish regalia including kilt, to leave immediately in a huff. Sorry, Scotland.

Afterwards, still merry, I gathered up a bridesmaid and drove to Heathrow Airport in the MG Midget sports car that I owned at the time, so that we could wave the newly-weds off on their honeymoon. Driving plastered? This is not behaviour that one would, in all conscience, recommend to anyone today. Furthermore, Malcolm was intending to evade the then rather strict regulations on the import and export of currency by wedging some extra notes into his socks. Thus the departing honeymooners were waved through passport control by a well-oiled figure in loosened morning dress shouting, ‘Look in his shoes! Look in his shoes!’ This is not behaviour that one would, in all conscience, recommend today, either. The bridesmaid and I then returned to central London, with the Midget’s top down and the wedding festivities gloriously continued.

When
Under Milk Wood
finished its week-long run and the takings were divvied up, we each received the slightly shrivelled sum of £6 and 6 shillings – but so much more came out of this
venture than mere pecuniary reward. Five years later, in 1970, Malcolm restaged the production at the Mayfair Theatre where it ran for a month, to quite a lot of acclaim. Also, very significantly for me, there was a party after one of the Vanbrugh Theatre shows, at which I was approached by someone called Ann Callender, who said she was a theatrical agent. I believe I was filling a paper plate with sausage rolls from the buffet table at the time.

‘Do you have an agent?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Would you have any interest in acquiring one?’ she said.

‘Not really, thanks,’ I said and went back to my more pressing interest at the time, which was in acquiring another sausage roll.

I think Ann must have reported this rather truncated exchange to Malcolm Taylor. At any rate, Malcolm now came up to me, mid-sausage roll, and explained that, actually, an agent was no bad thing for an actor to have, and that Ann was no bad thing as an agent. I sought her out.

‘Can we start that conversation again?’

So now I had an agent.

An agent, but, at that exact moment in time, no work. Bob Bevil had promised me, when I left our electrical business, that, whenever the acting dried up – as it does for the best of them from time to time – he would try to hand me a job or two to put a bit of money in my pocket. So it was that, with my glamorous theatrical career but recently ignited, I set off, along with my mate and fellow sparky Johnny Dingle, to wire a block of flats in Borehamwood. (Johnny’s real name was Dorman but he answered only to the nickname Dingle.)

Back to reality. On that particular job, as I recall, tea was brewed in a garage used for storing building materials. When I say brewed, I mean brewed. The technique was to take a galvanised bucket, fill it three-quarters with water, bring it to the boil over a Calor-powered gas ring, and then add tea bags,
condensed milk and sugar. At 10 a.m. precisely, and again mid-afternoon, you would hand your mug over to the chief brewer, who would solemnly dunk it into the bucket and hand it back to you, now filled with a dark brown and strangely creamy liquid. It was, without question, the worst cup of tea you could possibly imagine that hadn’t been deliberately sabotaged.

Also on that job, Johnny and I took to breaking the monotony of electrical work by staging mock fights with one another. We’d start by swearing, then chuck stuff about and slap each other with bits of conduit, banging and roaring and basically making as if in the middle of the barney to end all barneys. Well, it passed the time. One of the things to look forward to was lunch. Johnny’s mum used to send him off to work with the most delicious liver-sausage sandwiches. If he was in the right mood, I could easily persuade him to swap me one for some of the chips I would have popped out in the van to acquire from the local chippy, as was my culinary delight.

This was the pattern for the first three or four years of my acting life. I would pick up parts where I could. And when there were no parts to be picked up, it was back to the overalls, the pliers, the pointless mucking about, the stodgy lunches and the extremely dodgy tea.

It kept my feet on the ground, I guess. It definitely kept the lining of my stomach on the ground.

* * *

A
NN, MY BRAND-NEW
agent, called. She had some work for me. Visions of Hollywood movies danced in my mind.

‘You can be an extra,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘In a crowd scene,’ she added.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘In an advertisement,’ she concluded.

‘Oh,’ I said.

Hollywood would have to wait.

The advertisement was for something so important that I can’t now remember what it was. But I do recall that I was required to form part of the crowd at a racetrack and cheer as some racing cars shot past. That wasn’t an especially onerous piece of acting, you would have to say. I went along, I stood, I cheered, I went home. But hey. It was all work, as far as I was concerned.

One good thing came out of the experience. I ended up standing in the crowd next to a bloke called Tony, another jobbing actor from London like me, trying to get a foothold. We hit it off – to the point where, at the end of the day, Tony asked me if I wanted to go to a party he was throwing at his place at the weekend. I was more than happy to accept.

Tony gave me his address. He lived in a flat near the Edgware Road. Off I went, on the appointed evening, bottle in hand. (I was well versed, by this point, in the classic partygoer’s trick of taking the cheapest bottle you could find, putting it among the other bottles on the drinks table, somewhere near the back, and making sure you drank from another bottle altogether, hopefully superior. Reader, if you haven’t already adopted this tactic, do so immediately.)