David Jason: My Life (23 page)

From the director came no words of comfort or encouragement, no arm around the shoulder: just an icy ‘Go again’. And the camera would have to be dragged back up the aisle once more, and everything reset.

Finally, just shy of double figures, and sweating like a hippo in mud, I cracked it. I got an enormous round of perhaps slightly ironic applause from the audience of extras, bowed (also ironically) and left. Then I went home and waited several days for my ears to stop being hot.

No wonder I drove my agent into an early retirement around this time. OK, not exactly. Ann Callender’s broader desire to spend time with her highly successful husband, David Croft, and their family of (eventually) seven fabulous children may also have had something to do with her withdrawal from the business. Either way, I now became, at the recommendation of my friend Malcolm Taylor, a client of Derek Marr. Ann and David remained a part of my life so I have more than merely professional reasons for being permanently grateful to her for
introducing herself to me over the sausage rolls after that production of
Under Milk Wood
.

* * *

T
HE SECOND SERIES
of
Do Not Adjust Your Set
– thirteen more half-hour episodes – went out in February 1969 and finished in May. Where the first series had been thrown together in a by and large cheerful and liberated spirit, the mood changed during the making of the follow-up. Terry, Mike and Eric started getting a little frustrated that some of their material was getting edited. There were tremendously strict rules in those days about what was acceptable for children’s TV and it put a very tight straitjacket on the writers. They put up with it at first, but then they began to find their humour expanding – getting, perhaps, a little more adult.

I could see where they were coming from. You couldn’t, for example, show a couple in bed – by which I don’t mean you weren’t allowed to attempt portrayals of sexual activity, though, of course, you weren’t. But you couldn’t show a couple in bed at all, even if they were just reading or having a conversation. That, despite its innocence, was considered inappropriate. The lads were beginning to find that a lot of the stuff they were submitting for the show was getting the red pencil – being cut out by the censors. Society seemed to have liberated itself but television hadn’t, and Eric, Mike and Terry really chafed against that and felt very thwarted by it. It didn’t affect me and Denise Coffey so much, because we weren’t really major parties in the writing and were, in any case, mostly off on our own doing Captain Fantastic. But for Eric, Mike and Terry, the Three Musketeers, this was a constant battle and an increasing source of conflict with the powers that be.

In the course of fighting that battle, they began to wonder about the nature of the show. Mike and Terry in particular were
thinking that perhaps inside
Do Not Adjust Your Set
there was a grown-up programme waiting to get out. They talked about proposing a late-night version of the show, one in which their adult material would have a chance. In the end they said they wanted to go late night, get out of children’s television altogether. They went to see Lewis Rudd, the head of comedy. They asked him if they could take the show late night so they could open up the script content. Rudd absolutely put his foot down. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘You’re the most successful show we’ve ever had on children’s television, so why would I put you anywhere else? We want more of the same – the same being
Do Not Adjust Your Set
.’

Mike, Terry and Eric then decided to throw down the gauntlet: if you don’t let us do the show late night, we won’t do the show at all. Rudd still said no. So, when the contract came up for renewal, they didn’t sign it. That meant Denise and I were out, too. To say we were disappointed about that is an understatement. I was also disappointed about the way the others went about it. Mike, Terry and Eric didn’t discuss it with us; they just told us that this was what was happening. They weren’t going to pick up their contracts. The next thing we knew, they were gone, and so were we, because without them, clearly, there was no show. I minded that.

What happened after that, of course, is a matter of historical record. Mike, Terry and Eric went away and continued to plot their move into adult television, and a year later they regrouped with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and brought Terry Gilliam back on board to do animations, and
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
was born. Basically it was a more grown-up version of
Do Not Adjust Your Set
– but without me and Denise.

‘Did that rankle?’ I hear you ask. ‘Yes,’ I hear myself answer. It rankled a lot. I can’t speak for Denise but I know my nose was out of joint. Dear reader, the chances are you will have come across
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
at some point in your
life and will be aware how big that show became and how important in the history of comedy. It was as though the band had broken up and then re-formed without us. Denise and I were part of the original group, but we got sidelined. Or that’s how it felt to me.

After Mike, Terry and Eric left, Rediffusion did talk to me about possibly developing Captain Fantastic into a series of his own. They thought the character had enough life in him to stand up separately. I agreed with them about that, but I wanted to know how the show would be shot. For me, it was obvious that it would only work if film was used, as we did in the original inserts – with the speeding-up and the silent-era trickery. If you tried shooting it on tape, in a studio, without the filmed stunts … well, I couldn’t really see where that would go. But, of course, shooting an entire series on film would have been expensive. Rediffusion said they wouldn’t run to that. If there was going to be a Captain Fantastic series, it would have to come indoors and be made on tape. But the whole point of Captain Fantastic, it seemed to me, was that it was a fond parody of the silent era. If you lost that, you lost everything about it. It had to be made on film, or it was nothing. So I walked away from the idea.

What an extraordinary little phase that was, though. A brush with
Monty Python
, a brush with
Dad’s Army
… it was as though everything I touched turned to gold – but only after I’d stopped touching it and gone to another room. It was Clive Dunn, of course, who got the role of Corporal Jones – and what a superb job he made of it. Would I have been anywhere near as good in the role? Who knows? But also, if I had ended up in
Dad’s Army
, would I have been able to do
Open All Hours
and
Only Fools and Horses
and
Frost
and all the other things that my career opened out into?

Afterwards, of course, and all these years later, it doesn’t matter: I went on to do other things and to be extremely happy
doing what I was doing. At the time, though, when you’re out of work, and unsure where you’re headed, or even if you’re headed anywhere at all, and you’re looking at the success that people are having without you … well, I was pretty bitter about it.

I had to sit back and watch
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
and
Dad’s Army
ascend to the skies without me. It was like the Beatles all over again, and I was Pete Best. Twice.

Incidentally, I bumped into Eric Idle many years later. It was after I had done
Only Fools and Horses
, so all the dust had long since settled. He must have been over from Los Angeles, where he had gone to live. I had a lunch arranged with someone in London, and when I walked into the restaurant, there was Eric at a table. We greeted each other warmly and did the usual how-are-yous, it’s-been-ages and how’s-it-goings. I was struck by how transatlantic his accent had become.

‘I see you’re still fucking about on television,’ he said, brightly.

‘Er, yes,’ I said, less brightly.

And then we said our fond farewells and got on with our respective lunches.

CHAPTER NINE

A shaggy dog story. How I delivered Bob Monkhouse’s babies. And the West End finally beckons properly.

CAPTAIN FANTASTIC AND
Mrs Black might have been out of work, after the demise of
Do Not Adjust Your Set
, but Denise Coffey and I were very quickly offered the chance to revive our partnership in a television show that featured a dog. Unfortunately for both of us, the show didn’t just feature a dog. It also was a dog. Indeed, if you’d been asked, at the time, which was the bigger dog – the show or the dog – I don’t think you’d have picked the dog.

I’m not sure where the finger of blame should ultimately point for this little pothole in the path of our careers. Maybe it should point at everyone involved, because we all, more or less cheerfully, went along with it. But my first connection with the project was a meeting at what was now Thames Television (formerly Rediffusion), with Daphne Shadwell, the former director of
Do Not Adjust Your Set
, with whom by now both Denise and I were quite close. Daffers referred to us as the ‘G’nommies’ – a contraction of ‘garden gnomes’. (Denise was even smaller than me, at five foot two.) It emerged that somebody had come up with an idea for a script
for Denise and me – and for a third party, of a canine nature.

At the time, just about the most famous dog in the world, after Lassie, was the Dulux sheepdog. He was certainly the most famous dog in Britain. His extremely fluffy work in widely broadcast advertisements for household paint had ensured him that status. Why, in the early 1970s, there was barely a person in the country who hadn’t been inspired by that dog’s example to paint their sitting room magnolia. He was really packing them in, down at the DIY shops.

So somebody came up with the idea of using the Dulux sheepdog in a television series for children. The theory was that the show was bound to be popular because almost everybody loved the Dulux sheepdog, or, at least, were prepared to give him the time of day. Therefore the people at Thames got in touch with the Dulux sheepdog – or, I should say, they got in touch with the Dulux sheepdog’s people. (When you’re as famous as the Dulux sheepdog was, you don’t pick up the phone yourself: you have handlers for that.) And the word from the Dulux sheepdog’s people was that the Dulux sheepdog was very keen on the idea – provided, obviously, that his personal terms could be met, regarding fee, basket, water bowl, supply of Boneo, etc., and, of course, provided no better offer came up in the meantime. (That’s always a risk with the really big names.)

Here’s the thing, though. The Dulux sheepdog (and I can say it now because he’s not likely to be reading this) wasn’t a trained dog. By which I don’t mean he wasn’t house-trained, because he was. I mean he wasn’t trained as a performing animal. He wasn’t a circus act. He didn’t have a set of tricks up his sleeve. He was just a dog that looked lovely and had an unusually keen interest in interior decorating.

Actually, thinking about it, even in the Dulux ads, the Dulux dog didn’t do much, did he? Not even decorating. You certainly didn’t see him paint the rooms, as I recall. Mostly he just walked through them, or sat in them with his tongue hanging out and
his hair over his eyes. Mind you, there are a lot of actors who have got away with less.

Anyway, in that meeting at Thames, we talked about the possibility of a set of stories involving a brother (me) and a sister (Denise) who would go about the place, solving mysteries and bringing criminals to justice, all the while accompanied by a dog (Dulux). There was no title for this show at first, until I rather brilliantly came up with one –
Two D’s and a Dog
.

Do you see what I did there? David and Denise both start with the letter ‘D’, you see, and so does the word ‘dog’, which means it sounds nice coming after ‘Two D’s’. Put the whole thing together and you get ‘Two D’s and a Dog’.

That blinding flash of inspiration on my part was greeted in the room with … well, almost no enthusiasm at all, actually, until it became clear that no one was going to come up with anything better. So, for better or worse,
Two D’s and a Dog
it was.

After that, some scripts were written and before long Denise and I found ourselves on-set in the actual presence of the Dulux dog – a huge moment for us, as you can imagine. I think we were both a little nervous, being around a star of that magnitude, and especially given the size of his jaw. If I could confess something, though (and it’s not an uncommon phenomenon, this), I thought he looked slightly smaller in the flesh. But then people often say the same about me.

However, when it came to working with the Dulux dog … well, I’m not going to beat around the bush here: he was a total nightmare. We had a lot of problems getting the dog to do anything that the script required – which wasn’t much, frankly, but we did at least need him to be along with us a lot of the time, if only in a vague ‘I’m here too’ kind of way, and even that proved problematic.

For instance: because I could drive a motorbike (and was now, unlike in 1958, legally entitled to carry a passenger without
attracting the raised eyebrows of the authorities), someone had the cute idea of putting the three mystery-busting stars of the show on a bike-and-sidecar set-up – me at the front, Denise riding pillion and the Dulux dog in the sidecar.

Thinking about it, me at the front, Denise in the sidecar and the Dulux dog riding pillion would have been funnier. And me in the sidecar, Denise riding pillion and the Dulux dog doing the driving would have been funnier still. Or maybe it should have been Denise driving, me and the dog riding pillion and no one in the sidecar. Or perhaps all of us should have been in the sidecar and nobody should have been driving. But you can see why we didn’t try it.

Now, it took forever to get the dog into the sidecar. He wasn’t keen on the idea at all and was, I felt, several times on the verge of storming back to his trailer, slamming the door and refusing to come out for the rest of the afternoon. Finally, though, after much soothing and enticing by his handler, he overcame his inner demons and agreed to go in there, on cue, when the door was opened for him. And then I had to spend a long time gently driving up and down until he got used to the motion and we could trust him not to fling himself from a moving motorbike in fear, which would have been embarrassing for all of us, and a nightmare for the insurers.