David Jason: My Life (25 page)

I did need a new agent, though. On the set of
Hark at Barker
, I met a very attractive actress called Moira Foot, who was playing Lord Rustless’s maid, Effie. (She went on to feature in
Are You Being Served?
and, perhaps most famously, to play Denise Laroque in
’Allo ’Allo
.) Moira and I went out together for a while. Her father, Alistair Foot, was the co-author, with Anthony Marriott, of the play that was about to do big things in the West End, called
No Sex Please – We’re British
. (We’ll have cause to come back to that play.) Before he turned his hand to writing, Alistair had been a civil engineer who had worked on the construction of the M1, Britain’s first motorway. Not a lot of playwrights can say that, nor that they have a bridge named after them. (The engineers used to take the liberty of loaning their surnames to the bridges they were planning. So Alistair’s allotted bridge – either fortunately or unfortunately, depending how you look at it – was the Foot Bridge.) Alistair and I got chatting one day and I told him about the situation with my agent, and he said he thought he might be able to get me a meeting with someone called Richard Stone, who handled a lot of the top comedy talent at the time – Terry Scott, Hugh Lloyd, Dave Allen, Bill Maynard, Jon Pertwee and a host of people way bigger than I was.

Alistair was indeed able to get me that meeting, and I did indeed meet Richard Stone, and, 4,013 years later, the Richard Stone Partnership still represents me today.

I remember that first meeting with Richard. I was shown into his office and he sat behind his desk where – for carefully calculated psychological purposes, I don’t doubt – his chair was higher than the guest’s. He asked me what I wanted to achieve most. I said to him, ‘I want to work.’ Which was the right answer; some time after, Richard told me that if I had said I wanted to be rich, or I wanted to be famous, he probably wouldn’t have taken me on. As it was, he put me on contract as his client for a year. I never signed another contract with him after that, because I never needed to. Our relationship was understood.

With a new agent looking after me, it seemed a pretty good moment for me to take stock. In 1970, I was thirty years old and I had been an actor for five years. Five years was the period I had set myself when I took the decision to give up electrics. I had told Bob Bevil, my partner, I would give it five years, and if it still wasn’t working out, I’d jack it in and come back to the tools. I didn’t mean I’d give myself five years to become a big star; I meant I’d give myself five years to see if I could get regular enough work as a paid actor. That was the full extent of the master plan. It’s so tempting, when you look back over careers that have worked out OK, to assume that every twist and turn was shrewdly calculated to bring about the desired end. I wonder whether that’s ever really true. It certainly wasn’t true in my case, where things owed so much more to happenstance – to one thing turning up after another. There was no strategy, no graph, no sheet of paper with a carefully thought-through mathematical equation on it. The idea, as I saw it, was to get work, lose myself in it and enjoy it while it was there, and then, when it was over, look for the next thing.

In those first five years, I ended up surprising myself. There
had been a couple of months early on when I’d been twiddling my thumbs. But apart from that, I seemed to have done a fair old amount of stuff. There was the year with Bromley Rep, the production of
Under Milk Wood
, the BBC panto with Terry Scott,
Crossroads
,
Peter Pan
in the West End, the summer season with Dick Emery, a couple of appearances in
Doctor in the House
, the two series of
Do Not Adjust Your Set
,
Week Ending
,
Hark at Barker
… And that’s before we even mention the crowning career glory of the children’s series with the Dulux dog. If you had offered me all that on day one … well, I think I would have bitten your hand off faster than the Dulux dog would have done.

One thing slightly nagged at me, however. All the work I was getting – with the exception of
Week Ending
on the radio, obviously – was very much of a specific kind: physical comedy. In the theatre and the television work that I was being offered, I was doing a fair amount of swinging from wires, and an awful lot of falling over, not to say quite a bit of jumping across soft furnishings. Now, don’t get me wrong, swinging from wires, falling over and jumping across soft furnishings were things I very much enjoyed doing. At the same time, though, swinging from wires, falling over and jumping across soft furnishings hadn’t necessarily been – how shall I put this? – they hadn’t necessarily been the dream at the outset. When I had started out along this road, the dream, really and in all honesty, had been acting: the proper stuff. Five years in, looking back over what I’d been up to, there wasn’t much sign of that. Shouldn’t I now be thinking about changing it up a little bit, and getting involved in a bit of … acting?

I expressed this little doubt to Richard Stone. I explained how it had entered my mind that, just once in a while, it might be nice to be in a play where there was a sofa on the stage and I didn’t necessarily have to jump over it or end up under its cushions. Or (and here was one from left field) perhaps every now and again I could be in a play that didn’t have a sofa in
it at all. You know – something like
King Lear
. (
King Lear
doesn’t have a sofa in it. I just checked.)

I suppose what I was saying, in a roundabout kind of way, was that I was wondering about broadening myself, pushing for some serious roles. Richard thought very hard about this. Or if he didn’t actually think very hard about it, he did a very good impression of someone who was thinking very hard about it. Then, his ruminations complete, he told me, ‘Don’t swim against the tide. Go with the current. If this is the work that’s coming your way, accept it and go with it. Later, there may come a time when you have established yourself and you can change direction. But don’t start heading upstream when you’ve got something going for you.’

He also, in a manner of speaking, stood up for falling down. ‘People want you because you can do comedy,’ Richard said, ‘and that’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. Actually, it’s probably one of the hardest.’

I took his advice. I haven’t lived to regret doing so.

So, I again set aside those National Theatre aspirations, girded my loins, bolstered my nethers and, with a spring in my eye and a twinkle in my step, went back to comedy in the theatre – farcing around, I guess you could call it. In 1971, Richard got me an audition for a part in a play called
She’s Done It Again!
, originally written for Brian Rix’s company by Michael Pertwee, Jon Pertwee’s brother, and due to be staged at the Playhouse in Weston-super-Mare. The star of the show was to be Bob Monkhouse. It was a piece about a vicar whose wife has sextuplets, delivered one by one over the course of the play. I appeared as a daft old seventy-year-old professor with a white wig and a white moustache, who becomes involved in the delivery of the babies. It was quite demanding, I suppose, although, after Dithers the hundred-year-old gardener, this character was a veritable spring chicken. The part involved lots of throwing myself around and a nice bit of business with (of course, and why the hell
not?) the sofa, where I jumped on it and got a foot trapped between its cushions. In the process of disengaging the trapped foot, I would normally manage to get the other foot stuck and draw the action out as long as I dared.

One time, somewhere in the middle of the action, I sat down on the sofa with one leg tucked under myself, and I noticed that this made the leg appear to stop at the knee. So I converted this into another demonstration of the professor’s general ditziness: he now became confused about the whereabouts of the rest of his leg, and made a great show of believing he had lost it somewhere. Then I rolled up a sofa cushion to use as an artificial leg. The play, of course, had to wait while I got up to all this. To put it briefly, I was getting away with murder. But hey: it was a summer season in Weston. The audience didn’t seem to be complaining.

Bob Monkhouse and I became good friends in those weeks. We enjoyed each other’s company enormously. I was very impressed by him: by his professionalism, by his knowledge of comedy, which was vast. Eventually, he and his wife Jackie started inviting me over for dinner at their place near Luton. Bob’s house was even more vast than his knowledge of comedy, and beautifully decorated, hung with an amazing array of paintings. Bob had a cinema in the basement where he screened silent-movie reels from his collection. He had a deep respect for the physical comedy of the silent stars and it was a source of frustration to him that he couldn’t do physical comedy himself.

Our friendship grew out of our attempts to wind each other up and make each other corpse during that absurd farce in Weston-super-Mare. I would have to rush in with the sixth and final newborn baby in a blanket and present it to Bob, who was playing the vicar. The part of the newborn was, of course, played by a doll but because the contents of the blanket weren’t strictly visible to the audience, I was able to make little additions to
its burden offstage. One night, Bob found himself staring down at a baby that had been rather rudely adorned with a sausage. Another night, it was wearing a fright mask. A third night, I thrust Bob a blanket containing no baby at all, but just his pants, which I had retrieved from his dressing room.

Bob would have his revenge at the moment in the play where I was required to look offstage through a window in the set and remark on the weather. And there, meeting my gaze where the audience couldn’t see him, would be Bob waving … well, all sorts of things at me. Or I might see him bent over and scandalously in flagrante with the wind machine. Or there would be Bob with his flies open and the sausage would be … But enough. Silly and puerile these antics no doubt were – yet things like that kept up the energy of the show, and I’m sure that energy transferred to the audience, somewhere along the line.

Doing
She’s Done It Again!
with Bob was a happy experience altogether, and only slightly marred by what eventually happened to my toes. A few of us in the cast decided to fill some spare time in the day by taking riding lessons at a nearby riding school. We thought it would be fun, and also riding is no bad skill for an actor to have on the CV, especially if the makers of a cowboy film come calling. (Casting director: ‘Can ya ride a hoss, kid?’ Jason: ‘Yes, siree.’)

So my riding lesson went fine: I familiarised myself with the controls and fairly swiftly worked out such niceties as how to change gear and which end was the front and which was the back. Afterwards, I climbed out of the driving seat and my instructor showed me how to loosen the bridle and then told me to lead my horse to water to see if it wanted a drink. Well, there’s a famous old saying in this area, isn’t there, and I was about to appreciate the full force of it. The famous old saying is: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t stop it standing on your foot. As we moved towards the trough, I discovered what it felt like to have two tons of steaming animal passing
its entire weight through my size-seven toes. And what it feels like, in case you’re wondering, is painful.

So, I was straight off to A&E for, by my calculation, the 741st time in this book alone. Diagnosis: two dislocated toes. Remedy: a bit of exquisitely painful manipulation to get the toes back to roughly where they had started, followed by the binding of the affected area in a substantial white bandage. My foot now bore the size and approximate appearance of an adult Yorkshire terrier. I could only wear an extra-large slipper over the bruising and was afflicted with a heavy limp, both of which inconveniences seemed to threaten my continued participation in the play. But, of course, the farce must go on, so we had some lines written into the play giving my character the professor a touch of gout. I saw out the rest of the season in a carpet slipper, like the trouper I was and remain.

Bob was a cartoonist – a really rather good one – and every night you’d find another drawing of yourself pinned to your dressing-room door. After my upset at the riding school, I found a caricature captioned roughly as follows: ‘D. Jason, desperate for attention, has his foot broken by a horse to garner sympathy.’ I took the drawing inside and put it on the dressing-room wall with the others. By the end of the run I had two strips of Monkhouse cartoons, Sellotaped to the wall, from the ceiling down to the floor – and nearly all of them insulting.

Was it true that, on account of my capering, I often got a bigger round of applause from the Weston audiences at the end of the show than Bob, the star they had paid to see? Modesty forbids me from saying so.

Actually, hang on a minute … No, I’ve just been on the phone to modesty, and it appears that modesty doesn’t actually forbid me. So, yes, it was true. I did often get a bigger round of applause at the end of the show than Bob.

But here’s a measure of the man: was he bitter? No. Even though Bob was the lead, he decided to come down at the
curtain call before me, take his bow, and then gesture to me to come on and take my bow. Which was very generous of him. I can’t think of many big stars who would offer an unknown actor his moment like that. Then again, after the first week, Bob started staying on the stage after the rest of us had gone and giving the audience ten minutes of stand-up material. So note how he made sure he had the last word.

For the next three years, I worked on Bob’s radio show
Mostly Monkhouse
, appearing in sketches and doing voices. With regard to comedy, he was a student as much as anything else, and a collector of it. If any new comic came along, Bob would be in the audience with a notebook and pen, writing down anything new. That’s why he became known as the ‘Thief of Bad Gags’. He was the first person I knew who had satellite television, getting this ridiculously large dish installed on his property – presumably so that he could plunder the airwaves of the entire world for gags twenty-four hours a day.