David Jason: My Life (27 page)

By opening night, I was fully rehearsed and raring to go. It was a huge moment for me, obviously, and I was abuzz with nerves and excitement – to the point, in fact, where you could probably have used me as a generator to illuminate the marquee outside the Strand. On which, incidentally (and I’m sure you’ll understand my thrill about this), stood my name in red lights above the title of the play. I truly felt I had arrived. Remember Mystic Mavis, the Birmingham psychic, and the prediction she made for me in her sitting room all those months and chapters previously? Well, reader, it all came true, exactly as she foretold, right down to the colour of the lights. It’s why I’m someone who won’t hear a word said against psychics. (They know that about me already, obviously.)

That first night was going well. Most of my nerves had tamed themselves the moment I stepped onto the stage and quickly started to get laughs, which soon banished the rest of them. But then came a bad moment with Simon.

It was at the clinching moment for a scene, right before the interval. Simon’s bank manager had to hold his arms out wide in a gesture of resignation and say, ‘What are we going to do?’

Standing opposite him, I found myself making the same gesture with my own arms, exactly mirroring it.

When we came off, Simon stormed up to me, right up close.
Simon is six feet tall, so he was able to impose himself upon me from a relatively great height. He said, ‘Don’t you
dare
ape me.’

He had thought I was copying the gesture to take the piss out of it.

I said, ‘I wasn’t aping you. I was responding to you in the way I thought my character would.’

I went to my dressing room and shut the door, feeling shaken and a bit sick. I’d never had an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with another actor offstage in the middle of a play before. I was thinking, ‘Is this how it is in the West End? How am I going to last three months?’

We battled on through the rest of the play, got an ovation and took our bows. I still felt a bit tense about what had gone on earlier, though. However, in due course there was a tap at my dressing-room door and in came Simon. He apologised profusely for going off on one. The way I understood it, he had felt very tightly controlled while playing opposite Crawford and, in that little misunderstood moment between us on the stage, he had had a vision of it all happening again with me. Anyway, from that moment on, the two of us started to have fun without even a flicker of a cross word. Which is just as well, really. When someone much bigger than you is in charge of chucking you through a door every night, you want to get on with them.

Of course, all the throwing and diving made the role very athletically demanding. Fortunately, the show had its own osteopath – a man called Paul Johnson, one of life’s good people, who used a room in the theatre as a surgery for the cast and crew and for a lot of the West End theatre dancers in particular. He used to pay the production a visit on Wednesdays between the matinee and the evening performance and sometimes he’d be there on a Saturday afternoon as well. I was quite often in with him, asking him to see off the worst of the physical damage inflicted on my frame by chucking it through a closed serving
hatch on a nightly basis. Paul was a big man, in all directions, who could massage pulled muscles back into life – a saviour for dancers but also, as I frequently discovered during this period, a saviour for a knockabout comic actor.

I remember one period where, every time I finished the show, I would be in agony with my foot. The pain would subside completely overnight, only to climb back to agony-pitch again the following night. Paul took a look at me and said, ‘I’m not surprised. You’ve dislocated your big toe.’ Click – back it went. Did this ever happen to Gielgud? I ask myself. He didn’t make much fuss about it, if it did. Mind you, I do believe, in his younger days, Laurence Olivier was asked to name the best attribute an actor could have. He replied, ‘Stamina.’ That was certainly the best attribute an actor in
No Sex Please – We’re British
could have had. You and me both, Lozzer.

After a year in the role, I was presented with a very nice lighter and an engraved brick with a hole hollowed out of the middle of it, which sits on my desk to this day with my pens in it. I was in
No Sex Please
for eighteen months, and I think I only had two nights off for illness in that whole period. (I was laid low by a throat infection, the traditional occupational hazard for the theatre actor. All the dust and germs of a thousand nights gather up high in the flats and then, when someone slams a door in the set, the spores of ages shower gently down around you and into your vulnerable passages.) For sixteen of those months, I had the greatest time, but as the end of my contract loomed, when I was asked if I wanted to sign up again and continue, I realised that it was time to move on. I had done as much with the role as I was ever going to do with it. I couldn’t see it developing in a different direction if I stayed in it, so, much as I loved it, I decided to opt for change. To my relief, the box office didn’t go down on my watch. In fact, it started to go up. John Gale saved himself a stack of money by having me in the role. After six months, we were packed out
and he was paying me peanuts, relatively speaking, so he got to go laughing all the way to the bank. Did I burn with resentment about it, though? I can’t say I did. I was having too good a time.

It was one of the friendliest casts I had ever been in, a proper team even as people came and went: people like Richard Caldicot, who was a brilliant foil; and Evelyn Laye and Jean Kent, who eventually took over from Evelyn – both big stars who knew the business inside out; and Simon Williams, of course, and Belinda Carroll, who was Simon’s wife in real life, and whom I could get corpsing like nobody’s business. Belinda eventually left, to be replaced by Liza Goddard, who was famous for being in the legendary kids’ TV show
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
. Before Liza’s arrival, the cast solemnly marked Belinda’s last night in the show by filling her knickers with shaving foam. During the play, that is. There was a moment when she had to come offstage, stay a beat or two in the wings, and then go straight back on. In that pause, fleeting though it was, her fellow thespians offstage nonetheless found time to squeeze a large helping of Gillette’s finest grooming product into the rear of Belinda’s underwear. Back out she went, of course, destined to play the rest of the scene and the rest of the play with a pair of silently frothing pants. A memorable final performance, I’m sure.

Belinda, Simon, Richard … these were bigger and better actors than I had earned a right to be moving among. I was completely energised by the experience. I had that fabulous, liberated feeling that only comes at the start of your career, when you don’t have a reputation to lose, you only have a reputation to make.

It wasn’t the greatest play in the world, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was a vehicle to make people laugh. It was a moment in the culture, too. Despite the sixties, sex was something most people couldn’t quite bring themselves to talk about, and here
was a play about exactly that reticence and awkwardness and shame. People recognised themselves in it. And you had to be there on a Friday or Saturday night, when the place was packed with people absolutely in fits. You’ll know, I’m sure, the expression ‘rolling in the aisles’. Up to that point, I’d always assumed it was figurative – an exaggeration. At
No Sex Please
, I saw it happen. People actually laughed so hard they fell out of the chairs and into the aisles.

Indeed, more than once we had people carted out with heart attacks. I’m not saying that’s something to be proud of – and all sympathies, of course, to the people concerned and their relatives. At the same time, it’s a sort of backhanded compliment.

In the audience one night: Ronnie Corbett. He was getting ready to play Brian Runnicles in the film version of the play that was made in 1973. ‘But why him and not you?’ I hear you loyally cry, your voice thick with affront and tremulous outrage on my behalf. ‘After all you had done for that production,’ I hear you loyally add, dabbing tears of hurt from your appalled eyes.

The answer is simple, actually. Ronnie was already a star. They couldn’t have raised the money for a film on my name. They could raise it on his. That’s how it works.

In the audience another night: a coach party from Leeds including a student called Gill Hinchcliffe. Not that I knew her, or knew she was there at the time. It was something I found out a couple of decades later when she told me – not all that long before I married her.

* * *

I
HAD BEEN
living all this time in the flat above my brother and sister-in-law’s hairdressing salon in Thornton Heath, still jostling past the free-standing hairdryers on my way in at night.
Then one day, Josephine Tewson, a brilliant actress I knew well from
Hark at Barker
and
Mostly Monkhouse
(she was later very successful in the nineties sitcom
Keeping Up Appearances
), told me she was moving out of her flat – a rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment in a Peabody Estate building on Newman Street, just behind Oxford Street and right in the middle of London. She asked me if I knew anyone who might want to take it over. I told her I definitely did know someone: me.

The day I moved in, I was fumbling in the doorway with my key and suitcases, when the door to the flat across the landing opened, exposing a man in a pinny, in the middle of doing the hoovering. This was Micky McCaul, a bookmaker turned estate agent, who with his wife Angie became firm friends and the best neighbours an actor in search of late-night drinking companions could wish to have.

I loved that bachelor pad and I loved the neighbourhood, too, and the sense of being deep in the beating heart of the city, which was not a sensation that was always available in Thornton Heath. I liked the fact that everything was just a short walk away – Tottenham Court Road, the One Ton pub in Goodge Street, Macreadys, a private club at Seven Dials, run by Ray Cooney, among other people, where highly detaining graffiti covered the wall of the Gents. One day the landlord had it painted over. Within moments a solitary, neatly written line had appeared in the fresh paint: ‘Where has all the graffiti gone?’ Sometimes I would drift up Oxford Street to watch the street hawkers at work, flogging their dodgy watches and perfumes off the pavement, or doing cup-and-ball trick routines on milk crates – and bundling everything away and legging it at the first sight of a policeman. It all had a sort of edgy romance to me.

On Sundays, though, my only day off from
No Sex Please
, I would sometimes decide to get out of the city for a few hours and would drive out to Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire with
Carol Collins, park up and sit there watching the gliders float around in the sky. It was a wonderful way to relax and get away from the job. One day when we were there, Carol said, ‘You’re always on about flying, and how fabulous you think it is. Why don’t you go down and ask how much it costs?’

Always keen to look after the pennies, I said, ‘No, it’ll be far too expensive.’

But my curiosity was piqued, and eventually I did go and ask, and it turned out that learning to glide was not nearly as wallet-stripping as you might have imagined. Indeed, it was clearly the cheapest way to get into the air, and clearly within reach of an actor with a job in the West End. So I started going out to Dunstable every Sunday and learning to fly a glider, and in due course I was flying solo and studying towards my Silver C qualification. I loved it – to the extent that I ended up in partnership with a couple of guys at the airfield and bought myself a share in a glider. I was now the part-owner of an aircraft. Admittedly it was the cheapest kind of aircraft money could buy, and I only owned a third of it. Still, this would have seemed an entirely fantastical development in the days when I was a callow lad, acquiring my first second-hand motorbike.

Back on land in London, socialising after work was inherently complicated. In the early 1970s, the pubs closed at ten thirty, which meant no further service and that achingly familiar cry, ‘Ain’t you got no ’omes to go to?’ The cry was the same in any pub in the city. I sometimes used to wonder whether it was the same bloke, going round to them all on his bike and putting his head through the door to do the shout. Whatever, it meant an actor found it very hard to clock off in time to get a drink. Sometimes you would be in a position to rush in just before closing, order two pints and line them up, but then you only had ten minutes’ ‘drinking-up time’ to sink them, so that wasn’t much good. It just left you with an enlarged belly and a desperate urge to pee.

Fortunately, for those difficult, dry times in an actor’s life, there was Gerry’s.

Gerry’s was an underground cavern down a steep set of stairs between two shops on Shaftesbury Avenue. It had been opened by Gerald Campion, a short, rotund chap who, as a boy, got the part of Billy Bunter in a television series and became a bit of a child star. Like a lot of child stars, when he grew up and started seeking adult work, he found his former fame more of a hindrance than a help. Intimately understanding the profession and its needs, he opened a members-only after-dinner club for actors where you could drink and eat until two or three in the morning. So an awful lot of actors would end up at Gerry’s.

I used to be excited to spot Hywel Bennett in there, when he was at the top of his game. He had acted with Hayley Mills and had been in the movie
The Virgin Soldiers
– the DiCaprio of his time, you could say. James Villiers was often in there too, another great British film actor who made me feel a bit starstruck. Ronnie Fraser was in Gerry’s so much he had his own drink named after him – a tall vodka cocktail, mostly vodka. Mike Pratt from
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
actually ended up serving there. I would also bump into the great John Junkin, who became a good friend and ally.

You had to be buzzed in via the intercom, once your name had been checked on the list. Then you found yourself on a narrow downward flight of stairs which quickly turned to the right through ninety degrees. A few more steps and you were in the magic kingdom. Everybody who was already in the club would turn to see who was arriving, so people liked to make a bit of an entrance as they swept down those final steps to the floor. Before you lay a dimly lit cellar, illuminated mainly by candles, and to the right, stretching back about thirty feet, were a number of what can only be described as horseboxes – booths, I suppose, would be the flattering term. In front of you was the bar, always frequented by a few diehards. To the left, two more
horseboxes and the less than desirable Ladies and Gents toilets, also used as the storeroom.