David Jason: My Life (14 page)

The party was fun. Tony had some nice friends, including a number of extraordinarily beautiful women. I consumed a smattering of wine over the course of the evening and felt quite relaxed. However, come about 1 a.m., everyone was sitting around the living room, and someone got out some tobacco and some cigarette papers and started to roll a joint.

It was the first time I had ever been in the same room as a real live funny-fag. It was a total novelty for me. I’d never seen it done, and I have to admit, it rather fazed me. Alcohol I could happily entertain the concept of. But the thought of illicit substances made me nervous. The joint, which, by the time it
had been stuffed and rolled, ended up being roughly the size of a roll of carpet, was ignited and passed round. Again, as a complete novice, I didn’t really know what the etiquette was, but I happened to be smoking a cigarette, so when the joint reached me, I said, as casually as I could, ‘No, you’re all right – I’ve got one on.’ I then took the sweet-smelling roll of carpet and passed it to the person next to me.

This happened a couple of times – the joint going round, me, somewhat anxiously, not participating. Bill Clinton asked us to believe that he didn’t inhale. Well, I’m asking you to believe that I didn’t even get the thing near my lips. Eventually the roll of carpet was finished, and not long after that everyone around me was away – giggling and laughing and having (literally) a high old time. Feeling left out and altogether surplus to requirements, I decided to go home, thanked Tony and left. As I walked back to the car, I remember feeling like a bit of a stiff – not exactly Mr Cool or Mr Sixties. Not exactly in with the in-crowd. One of the out-crowd.

And there, I have to say, through the period of hectic cultural change and hitherto unprecedented revolutions in personal freedom, I remained. I wasn’t out to spoil anyone else’s good time. Dope just wasn’t (as we would have said in those days) my scene. Credit me, at least, with a bit of gumption. When there was so much stuff flying around, it took quite a lot of willpower to be yourself and not just go with the flow. I remember the peer pressure being such that, if you said no, the partygoers thought you must have just landed from the planet Zuton – or were maybe a police officer in disguise.

Still, some curiosity must have lingered. Flash forward with me, if you will, to the early 1980s, and an evening in the flat I eventually took in Newman Street, central London. Present: me, my mate and his wife and my girlfriend at the time, Myfanwy Talog. Either him or me had got hold of a couple of joints – I really don’t recall which one of us or
where from. We decided, in the interests of science and human understanding, to carry out a little experiment: to smoke them and see if we could find out what the fuss was all about.

Both the girls declined to participate. But neither of them seemed averse to the idea of me and him having a go. So the pair of us passed the lit joint backwards and forwards for a while, smoking it as if it were a cigarette, and we waited for the effect to take hold.

Periodically I would peer through the fragrant smoke and say, ‘Nothing yet. What about you?’

He replied, ‘Nothing whatsoever.’

A few more puffs went by.

‘Anything yet?’

‘Nope. Not a sausage.’

Some more puffs.

‘What about now?’

‘Nothing, mate.’

We concluded that it was hopeless.

Fifteen minutes later, someone at the table said something completely anodyne – along the lines of, ‘Are you sure they’re your shoes? They don’t look like your shoes.’

And that was it. Though we didn’t know it at the time, we were off.

It was as if this line about the shoes was the funniest thing anyone had ever said, about anything, ever. We laughed until the tears streamed down our faces and the breath drained from our lungs. We were just about recovering ourselves when one of the girls said, ‘What’s the matter with you two?’ And off we went again. Because that was hysterical, too. Everything was hysterical. It’s strange – even after all these years, I can remember it reasonably clearly.

Time became rather flexible. Everything seemed to be happening at quite a woozy distance. It appeared to be taking
about twenty minutes to answer a simple question. I could hear what I was being asked, but getting the words together for a response was becoming an increasingly time-consuming process. And the fact that it was difficult was, in itself, funny. The girls, far from amused, grew more and more disgruntled and impatient. And the more disgruntled they got, the more amused we became.

It seemed to go on for days, although it was probably only about an hour and a half, at most. At some point in that period, the two girls gave up trying to get any sense out of us and left us to it. They left and went over to my friend’s flat. Much beyond that, I don’t recall, though I must have stopped laughing and found my way to the bedroom eventually. That was where I regained consciousness the following morning.

So, now I’d tried it, at least. But that was it for me. Once was enough. It had been funny, and even euphoric. But at the heart of it was the thought that I didn’t have control, and that aspect of it I found frightening, rather than liberating. Obviously it’s about the kind of person you are. Some people are good at letting go, and some people aren’t. But perhaps it was also something about being involved in comedy. If you’re a comic actor, the idea of people laughing at absolutely anything is actually rather worrying. You want to know why people are laughing. You want to be in control of the reason they laugh. You want to know it’s coming from something you’ve done – something you could do again if you had to. The idea of relinquishing control of the laughter to a substance … I couldn’t get on with that at all. Call me timid or old-fashioned if you must, but me and drugs didn’t mix, and from that moment on, I made a pact with myself: sink or swim, it had to be me.

* * *

W
HILE WE
’
RE ON
the subject of artificial stimulants, I should perhaps relate how me and alcohol learned to be careful around one another as well. Tales of tippling actors are legion, of course. Many, I’m sure, are the greats (and even more numerous the not-so-greats) who have found that, while out onstage, it helps to have a little something coursing through the system. I was lucky to get a salutary lesson in this area very early in my career.

It happened in the mid-to-late sixties, while I was on tour with a theatre production in Glasgow. Brian Izzard, a flouncy and flamboyant television producer with a large amount of hair (certainly at the back, if not at the front), happened to be in town and, having seen the show I was in, he invited me to meet him for lunch the next day so that we could ‘discuss a few projects’.

I was more than happy to join him. The idea of going to lunch in order to ‘discuss a few projects’ still seemed fabulously romantic to me then, and almost chic – a highly desirable feature of this new life as an actor that I had signed up to. Plus, when you were on tour, the offer of a free meal was never to be declined. It was one of the reasons why, in those early days, I was always delighted when my agent came out to see me in far-flung places around the country, which she loyally did. I knew she’d take me to dinner afterwards and I’d be living high on the hotel restaurant’s hog for once – choosing roast beef and all the trimmings, most likely, and not stinting on the starter and the dessert. Not forgetting, it goes without saying, her warm and exceptional company and her tender concern for all areas of my professional and personal well-being.

Anyway, the producer and I met at some suitably appointed eaterie and, while I browsed the menu for roast beef, he called for a bottle of wine. ‘Oh, why not?’ I found myself saying, as he heartily charged my glass, prior to heartily recharging it barely a few moments later. Before long, over the main course, bottle number one had been drained and my amiable companion was ordering another. ‘Very nice,’ I agreed. Bottle number two
also seemed to go down rather smoothly. The occasion had now taken on a warm and comforting glow, which by no means receded with the arrival of bottle number three. Come the pudding course, the producer suggested that maybe a glass of dessert wine would round things off most pleasantly, and I didn’t disagree with him – even though I had never heard of dessert wine and had no idea what it was.

Somewhere around three thirty in the afternoon, I emerged from the restaurant, followed soon afterwards by my legs. The producer and I shook hands and vowed to meet again to take our discussions about projects further – though, to be honest, the details of those discussions and those projects were already beginning to be a blurred and misty memory, as of something that happened in a far-off place, to someone else entirely. I then turned and, relying almost entirely on instinct, made my way back to my digs.

It was about four by now. I lay down on the bed and watched the overhead lampshade begin to perform sickening circles around the room. Clearly there was no way sleep could come to me in this state, so I sat hunched forward on the edge of the bed, rising occasionally to walk the room’s tiny perimeter when the dizziness became too much.

At five, not noticeably more sober, I headed to the theatre where, in just two and a half hours, I would be required to take to the stage and play a part which, alas, could not, by any scope of the imagination, allow me to pass myself off as shit-faced. I asked for a big jug of black coffee to be brought to the dressing room and swigged it down, while pacing up and down. In makeup, I passed the time breathing deeply, hoping the make-up girl would interpret this as some kind of vocal exercise rather than as embarrassing evidence that I was as pissed as a newt.

By curtain-up, I had gathered enough self-possession to step into the lights – and although portions of the ensuing evening seemed to vanish without me really noticing what was going
on in them, I was able to leave the stage at the end of the play (and the theatre almost immediately afterwards), congratulating myself on my inner strength and resourcefulness in having got away with it. But, of course, what else is the gift of acting, if not the ability to convince other people that you are something other than what you actually are?

Except I hadn’t. The next day members of the cast came up to me with worried expressions on their faces and said, ‘What was up with
you
last night? Were you pissed?’ I had missed cues, interrupted speeches, stumbled over lines, and over my own feet, not to mention the feet of other people, and generally turned in a complete and utter howler.

Consider me well and truly warned of the perils of mixing drink and acting. Never again.

* * *

I
N JULY 1965
, mindful of my glowing and almost certainly box-office-boosting reviews for ‘a small but well-acted part’ in Noël Coward’s
South Sea Bubble
, Bromley Rep re-employed me – this time in
Diplomatic Baggage
, a farce by John Chapman. My role? Hotel porter. (Porters and waiters: a theme was very quickly emerging in my early work. Lots of actors wait tables while ‘resting’ between jobs. Not me. I did electrics while ‘resting’, and waited tables while I was working.)

But I was a lot more involved this time – a greater part of the plot, without any artificial or controversial expansion of the character by the director. Being a sixties farce, and typical of the genre, the play was all about going through doors and in and out of windows and cupboards – very much of the classic ‘oops, here comes the wife, better climb in the wardrobe with the mistress and the vicar’ school of theatre. And it got me involved in one bit of business in particular that, in many ways, set the mould for much of my early career.

What happened was, I wheeled a trolley of room-service food into a hotel room, where our philandering protagonist was busy entertaining his mistress. And then I exited. Soon after this, and at the most sensitive moment in the ensuing seduction scene, of course, the philanderer’s wife calls up from reception. (I did say this was typical farce material.) Now in a flap, the philanderer resolves to conceal the mistress in the trolley, hidden by the tablecloth – as you would. Or certainly as you would if you were a character in a British farce. And then he calls up the porter (me) to take the trolley away.

So, in I come and grab a hold of the trolley, ready to whisk it out – only to discover that, for some reason unknown to me (although known to the audience), it is now unexpectedly, almost unbudgeably heavy. What I worked up for this moment was a huge pratfall – one in which, clinging to the trolley’s handle, I appeared to be entirely horizontal at one point, hovering briefly in the air before crashing completely to the floor. Then I got up and began to inspect the trolley suspiciously for the cause of its additional burden – nervously circuiting it, tentatively lifting the lid off the silver salver resting on top of it, and so on, but, of course, never looking in the obvious place.

All this stuff got a big reaction from the audience. It also got a big reaction from the local paper. ‘For me David Jason stole the show,’ reported the drama critic of the
Bromley Press
. ‘The physical demands made upon him are tremendous and one wonders whether he can keep it up to the end of the fortnight’s run. As the Paris Hotel porter his acting is superb and the round of applause he received on Monday was thoroughly deserved.’

I did, indeed, survive the physical demands of the fortnight, I’m pleased to be able to report – and with little more than superficial bruising across about 85 per cent of my body’s surface area and some mild hip ache. And, to an extent, the die was cast by that routine. It’s what I became known for: introducing additional physicality into farces. If you wanted an actor who
could fall over while trying to move something – or even fall over while not trying to move something – I was a pretty decent bet. If you were looking for someone to play Hamlet, on the other hand – well, it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the chances of my career setting off down that path were quietly extinguished the minute I showed I could fall trying to move that trolley in Bromley.