David Jason: My Life (41 page)

I didn’t really know where in the countryside to go, though. I’d been heading south, from Newman Street, across London, to get to Crowborough and that was always a bit of a chore. So I decided to look north instead. I got a map and a compass and drew circles with gradually increasing radiuses – five miles, ten, twenty, thirty … forty miles was where I set the limit. I eliminated the east, because it was so tricky to get out of London in that direction, and I concentrated on the north and the west, round as far as Reading.

Obviously, generally speaking, the closer to London, the more expensive the house. I decided that twenty-five miles was really as far as I wanted to be travelling – but forget it. That was totally outside the financial bracket. There was, however, a property in Wendover in Buckinghamshire that was thirty-five miles out. I thought that was probably too far, but we went to look at it anyway.

It was a lovely place: a little house with a workshop, backing on to a hill and with a big field next door to it. The garden was lovely and the hill was National Trust property, making it that much less likely, I felt, that we would wake up one morning, draw the curtains and discover that we lived next door to a brand-new chemical factory. On the day of our viewing, which was cloudless and sunny with the birds in full song, the couple selling the house gave us tea in the garden, which was a good tactic. In the car driving away, Myfanwy said, ‘That’s the place.’

I had to push the boat out slightly, financially speaking, to get it. When the sale process was under way, I began to waver
a little. Was it too far out? What about the price? I think, even then, the prospect of commitment, solid commitment, troubled me.

But we did it. I sold the cottage to fund it and took out another mortgage. Of course, I had the traditional paranoid actor’s frame of mind at this moment: ‘Will I ever work again and pay for this?’ But we moved in and were very happy and promptly acquired, from a rescue home, a three-legged dog called Peg, named after Jake the Peg, of course, in the Rolf Harris song.

I was working an awful lot at this time; I have always been very driven and determined to fill the hours that way, but this was a period in which I really seemed to be going for it. I was doing
Open All Hours
and
Only Fools and Horses
at the same time, for the couple of years in the early 1980s in which those shows overlapped. When the shooting schedules allowed, I was still working in the theatre as well. In 1985, I started appearing at the Strand Theatre in a farce called
Look No Hans!
with the great and lovely Lynda Bellingham. It was not the best play, perhaps, though it did have one memorable scene when a helicopter was supposed to land on a lawn, offstage, and we had a huge fan blowing and amazing lights flickering and a thunderous sound effect, so there was all this noise and an extraordinary downdraught on the set. We beat
Miss Saigon
to the onstage helicopter by a full four years.

John Junkin, who lived nearby in Buckinghamshire, was in a play in the West End at the same time, and he and I would travel up and down to London together by train. He was always good company. I had met him hanging about in Gerry’s club, where I invariably had to do my impression of John Wayne for him, which amused him greatly. After our performances, we used to meet in the pub at Marylebone Station, throw a couple of drinks down our necks and then run for the train. I would get home about midnight, have something to eat with Myfanwy,
who would wait up, stay up until about 2 a.m. and then sleep through until mid-morning. So life was a bit topsy-turvy but no less enjoyable for that. I was very busy and very content.

* * *

T
HERE
’
S A MOMENT
in series three of
Only Fools and Horses
where Del and Rodney are squabbling about the viability of Rodney’s plans to go it alone in business and invest his £200 of start-up capital in the self-catering holiday trade. Lennard, as Grandad, has had almost no lines in this scene – he’s just been a silent presence in his armchair in the sitting room. But now, at the mention of Rodney’s proposed £200 holiday property investment, he suddenly pipes up and says, ‘What you got, Rodney – a Wendy house?’

It’s hard, even now, to summon words that adequately account for the volume of the laughter this line got from the studio audience. The laugh went on so long, it threatened to run into the next episode – and all Nick and I could do was stand there and ride it, while trying not to join in. When we had completed the filming, I stepped forward to say a few words of thanks to the audience, which I always liked to do. This time, just to tease Lennard, I said, ‘That’s it. I’m resigning. Nick Lyndhurst and myself have worked our socks off all evening for this show. Lennard Pearce hasn’t said a bloody word – and then he just says “Wendy house” and he gets the biggest laugh I’ve ever heard in my life.’

Thus, in 1983, was born the laughter ratings system that everyone on the show used from that day forward. Laughs would be ranked according to their perceived Wendy-ness. A decent line might be scored as a ‘mini-Wendy’. A good line would get a ‘sub-Wendy’. What you were hoping for, of course, was an ‘all-out Wendy’, or a ‘full-blown Wendy’. The ‘full-blown Wendy’ was the holy grail. I have to say, very often, when the
Wendy came, it was Lennard’s line. Nick and I used to tease him, saying he was a lazy sod and that we were basically a twenty-minute warm-up act for his one killer gag. Lennard would just say, ‘I’m old – I’m allowed.’

Series three was also when Jim Broadbent came into the series as Roy Slater, Del’s old enemy from school who has turned into a particularly lizard-like copper. Who would have thought that Jim would go on from here to make
The Borrowers
and then on to Hollywood? I could never work out why he didn’t take me with him.

The ratings were on the rise and the show was finally getting noticed by the critics, who had done a pretty good job of turning a blind eye to it up to this point. I was, according to
The Times
of London, no less, ‘a comic player of previously unexploited substance’. Well, as painful as it sounds, I was happy to have my substance exploited. We went into series four off the back of a BAFTA nomination for best comedy series, the first time the programme had been considered for such a prestigious award. We all went along to represent the show. In the end, the BAFTA went to
Yes Minister
. We were the nearlys, but not quites. We were stoic enough about it, though. And also, by that time of the night, thoroughly refreshed.

Still, in every respect,
Only Fools and Horses
seemed set fair and sailing steadily in the right direction. We could have no idea of the scale of the setback the show was about to endure.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The passing of Lennard. The arrival of Buster. And a wave from the Queen mother.

IN THE FEBRUARY
of 1984, we started to make series four of
Only Fools
. We were a few days into external shooting, in cold and miserable sleeting weather, and we’d taken a much-needed break for the weekend. It was Monday morning, and Nick and I were in make-up, trying to get warm and preparing for the day’s filming. Ray Butt tapped on the door and came in very slowly. He was grey-faced and distraught in a way that I had never seen him looking. He said he had some bad news and that we should sit down. And then he told us what he had just learned. Over the weekend, Lennard Pearce’s landlady, who lived in the flat below him, had found Lennard’s body at the foot of a flight of stairs.

The best that Ray could piece together about what had happened was that Lennard had had a heart attack, and that the heart attack had caused him to fall. Nick and I didn’t know what to do or say. Obviously, filming was immediately cancelled. We all went home in a state of utter shock. Lennard was not, essentially, a well man – and I guess we knew that. He had smoked heavily all his life, and was still smoking when we
worked together. Yet the thought that he was gone produced only disbelief. That disbelief was stubborn. It stayed with us and wasn’t dispelled even by the reality of Lennard’s funeral, several days later. The funeral was a small and humble affair. Lennard seemed to have very little in the way of family. His landlady and her daughter seemed to be the closest people to him. Those of us on the show had grown to think of him as family too, though. We mourned his loss as you would mourn the loss of a family member.

In due course, we had to turn our minds to the question of what to do about
Only Fools and Horses
. Gareth Gwenlan, who had recently been appointed the head of comedy at the BBC, called a meeting with Ray Butt, John Sullivan, me, Nick and a couple of others connected with the show. The episode that we’d been working on had, of course, been cancelled. What we now had to discuss was how – if at all – to proceed in the future.

We started to talk about it. John, who was still shaken up by mourning and clearly upset about having to have these discussions so soon, made it clear very early in the meeting that he couldn’t write for just Nick and me because the whole mechanics of the piece demanded the interplay between the generations. He didn’t think we really had a show without that.

Somebody then tentatively floated the idea of getting in another actor who looked like Lennard and simply carrying on with the Grandad character as if nothing had happened. This was absolutely the wrong thing to suggest. John, in particular, was horrified. Both Nick and I joined in the chorus: we couldn’t do that to Lennard’s memory.

Somebody else then said, ‘I know – let’s introduce a female character. We could make an old aunt arrive, or something, and she could become the third member.’

At this point, I pitched in and said I wouldn’t want to go with that. I pointed out that there had been a lot of physical antagonism between Del and Grandad and that this had been
an important source of the comedy. Del could push and shove Grandad into the back of a van and tell him, ‘Shut up, you old twonk,’ and the audience allowed for it and found it funny. I said I didn’t think this would work if the person that Del was bullying in his irritation was an elderly woman.

John had been silent for quite a long time, and he now said, ‘Look, it does happen that people in a family die. It’s happened to us. What I want to do is to write a funeral for Lennard – a script in which we acknowledge that Lennard has died and take that on board in the show.’ I remember thinking, ‘Right: how the hell is he going to make that work, in a comedy series?’ But John said he would go away and write something we could look at, and with that, the meeting ended.

A while later, I got a call from Ray Butt, who wanted me to go in and see him. He said, ‘I’ve had this letter arrive, with a picture.’ I had a look at the letter. It was handwritten and it said, ‘I understand that Lennard Pearce has died and without wishing to be disrespectful to his memory, if you were thinking of replacing him I would like to offer myself as his replacement.’

And there, in the accompanying photograph, was this guy with bright eyes and pink cheeks and a bushy Captain Birdseye beard. He wasn’t actually wearing a sailor’s cap, but when you looked at him, you felt he ought to be. The letter was signed ‘Buster Merryfield’.

John Sullivan came in and we all sat in the office looking at this photograph and saying, ‘What do you think?’

John said, ‘He looks like a sailor. I could see him being a long-lost relative, who’s been at sea, maybe. I could get him to come to the funeral.’

I said, ‘Why don’t we interview him then, and see how it works?’ Deep down, I was pretty convinced it wouldn’t work at all, but I couldn’t see that we stood to lose anything by trying.

So Ray arranged for Buster Merryfield to come to the BBC. Buster had been a bank manager, formerly in charge of the
Thames Ditton branch of NatWest. He was now living with his wife in a bungalow in Byfleet. Much like me for a while, he had combined a day job with amateur dramatics and he became a bit of a leading light in his local group. He always lusted after turning professional and (again, like me) he had picked up a couple of bits and pieces by responding to ads at the back of the
Stage
. He didn’t have an agent, or anything sophisticated like that. He just had his enthusiasm.

He turned up at Ray’s office wearing a blazer and grey flannel trousers, a shirt and a neatly knotted tie. We asked him to read a passage from an old
Only Fools
script. Sure enough, he read extremely confidently, and very well. He was funny by instinct and he knew where the laugh was and how to get it. Plus, of course, he had that amazing look about him – an eccentric face, the face of someone whom you immediately wanted to like. He convinced us, and we convinced ourselves. So, without further ado, Buster was hired. It’s an incredible story, really. Buster must be just about the only person who wrote away for a role in an established television sitcom and got it.

In the happy years to come, we went after Buster relentlessly to try and get him to tell us what his real name was, and only after ages and ages of pressure did he eventually weaken and inform us: it was Harry. He would only ever answer to ‘Buster’, though. He had been a fit young man and a big boxer during his time in the army, which is when the nickname was bestowed upon him. The other thing we constantly tried to do was to get him to show us a picture of himself without his beard. In that area, alas, he never weakened.

John went ahead and wrote with Buster in mind to play Del and Rodney’s Uncle Albert, who was going to turn up at Grandad’s funeral as a long-lost relative and then never go away. The resulting episode was ‘Strained Relations’. I remember being very nervous when I read it for the first time. I desperately wanted John to get it right – and I could see how the whole
future of
Only Fools and Horses
depended on him doing so. Yet I just didn’t see how it was possible that he would.

I should have trusted him more. When I turned through those pages encompassing the funeral scene, I realised he had completely nailed it. I knew John wasn’t frightened of hitting things head on, but what I hadn’t realised before was just how extraordinarily adept he was at moving from comedy to drama and pathos. The scene was dark and sad and yet it was shot through with these bright shafts of humour, right from the beginning, with the flowers at the cemetery and the note from Del and Rodney, marked ‘Always in our foughts’, through to the superb kick at the end, when Del hands what he believes is Grandad’s hat to Rodney and encourages him to drop it into the grave in one final, moving tribute, only for it to emerge that the hat actually belongs to the vicar. When I read that, I collapsed. It was just so … Trotters.