David Jason: My Life (11 page)

After the festival, the Muswell Hill Players returned in glory to the town hall at Friern Barnet for a reception in our honour – a cup of tea and a piece of warm cheese on a stick. And there, as I stood about, rather self-consciously cradling a saucer and trying to look as though receptions in my honour were given
at town halls most weeks, a tall, neatly suited woman who was among the occasion’s hosts introduced herself.

She explained that she had a prominent job on the local council, and asked me what I did. I told her I was an electrician. She then asked me if I had ever considered going to drama school to study. I told her I hadn’t given it much thought, principally because it wasn’t something I ever imagined being able to afford. She said that money didn’t necessarily have to be a barrier. There were such things as grants. If I ever applied, she felt very sure that, in the circumstances, the council would be able to provide me with one.

Now, this set my brain whirring. I had been getting all these nudges that I should take acting seriously – and it could hardly get more serious than going to drama school, could it? No doubt many people would have prescribed this as the best way forward. An acting qualification would give me a proper grounding to lift off from.

So it was with much enthusiasm that I reported my conversation with the councillor to my mum and dad, back at home. ‘I think I should do that,’ I said. ‘I think I should apply for drama school.’

Their reaction? They couldn’t have been less enthusiastic if I’d just proposed setting up a commercial newt-breeding operation in the bathroom.

It wasn’t that my parents had anything against actors. They already had one of those in the family, remember – my older brother Arthur. Arthur had delighted Mum and Dad by settling into a respectable, steady job as a butcher – only to come home after his national service and declare that he fancied being a thespian instead. He had then duly won a scholarship to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and, to my parents’ gradual relief, his gamble had paid off. He was making a living as a professional actor. He was finding plenty of theatre work and, moreover, had played Caradoc Owen in
Mrs Dale’s Diary
, the long-running drama serial on BBC radio. I can remember the family crowding round excitedly at home to listen to his debut appearance. Shades of the scene in front of the television at Ronnie Prior’s house for the Coronation a few years earlier, although, of course, on this occasion, being personally involved, we were that much prouder.

Still, there was no question that my mum and dad had been made uneasy by the sight of their cherished firstborn swapping a steady trade for a wildly unpredictable one. And now here was their second son threatening to do exactly the same thing. It was déjà vu. (Not that that’s the expression my parents would have used.) By now they were used to having a bit of extra income on the table from the keep that I provided. If I jacked in work, I would once more become a financial burden to them – one they really couldn’t afford.

My parents weren’t unreasonable about it. My mum made it abundantly clear that, if this were my heart’s desire, I could apply to become a student, write off for a council grant, abandon my job as an electrician and head off for any drama school that would have me. But there was no way I would be able to live at home ‘sponging off us’, as my father might gently have put it. I’d be on my own. And as I was a person who rather liked his home comforts, that rather kiboshed my little plan.

So how did I respond? I was too old to go stamping up to my bedroom and slamming the door, of course, though I’m sure the thought occurred. I was extremely frustrated. I was trying to be young and thrusting and my young thrustingness had been thwarted. On the other hand, I knew my parents would have found the money if they could, but the money genuinely wasn’t there. So what could I do? Get on with being an electrician was probably the best idea, and come up with another plan for the acting.

Did I resent my brother? How could I? He got there first, seven years earlier – at a different time and in different
circumstances. And I would have cause to be extremely grateful that he did. As we’ll see in due course, it was my brother who got me my first proper break.

In the meantime, Bob and I got on with building our electrical business. For the first two years, it was quite a struggle. There were some periods when we couldn’t find work and were obliged to sit around at home, scratching ourselves and staring out the window. But we didn’t give up. We kept at it. We became very industrious about seeking jobs, going round to builders’ yards, and even builders’ houses, and knocking on the door and trying to beg, blag or charm a contract out of them. Eventually, through a bloke called Derek Hockley, we latched on to quite a bit of work with Ind Coope breweries, doing the electrics in refitted pubs. We also got a contract to do the Redbridge Hotel at Redbridge, and we found we could get quite a lot of business rewiring private houses.

That was often quite grubby and uncomfortable work. Getting wires from one side of a room to the other could require cutting two trap doors in the floor and then climbing down into the claustrophobic cavity under the floorboards and sliding across with the wire in your hand. Just to make it more complicated, you might have to cut a further hole through a dwarf wall along the way. You found all sorts down there: dust, spiderwebs, rat droppings, mice piss and, just occasionally, the rat who left the droppings and the mice who did the piss. You soon learned the key tricks: buttoning your overalls to the neck and tucking your trouser legs into your socks to keep out unwanted intruders. At the end of the day, I was quite often entirely blackened, like some poor Victorian kid who’d been sent up a chimney.

I had eventually traded my motorbike in for my first car – a second-hand Ford Zephyr 6 saloon with crimped fins and shiny chrome wing mirrors. I thought that was going to be the passport to international jet-set pleasure with members of the opposite sex. In fact, I mostly ended up playing taxi driver for all
my carless male mates, ferrying them around London and beyond. But the Ford soon had to go, anyway, because Bob and I needed a more practical vehicle for the business and for tool-carrying purposes. I swapped it for a Standard Companion, the magnificently named estate version of the Standard 10 and essentially a chunky van with windows. That served us well enough until some wally ploughed into the back of it at traffic lights on the North Circular at Ealing. I glimpsed this car, thundering towards us, in the rear-view mirror and just had time to say to Bob, ‘Brace yourself.’ A split second later there was an almighty crunch and a lurch and we were lying on our backs staring at the car’s ceiling. On impact, the Standard’s tubular metal seats had collapsed underneath us like deckchairs. I got out and went round to the other side to help Bob, whose head had taken a bit of a thump on the windscreen. He was able to clamber upright, and stood, dazed, on the road. He was wearing this wonderful cheapskate car coat at the time, far too tight for him, with four big leather football-style buttons on it. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ I said. Bob nodded gently and drew in a deep breath to compose himself. At which point, one by one, the buttons popped off the coat – pop, pop, pop, pop – like something in a cartoon. We laughed about that for years afterwards.

Goodbye, Standard Companion, however. The car was a write-off. Still, we got the money from the insurance and put it down on a pair of Mini Vans – one each, kind of ‘his and his’, if you like. Bob’s was black with a white roof, and mine was grey with a white roof. I loved that Mini Van. It was just the job for work, and just the job for whipping up to the Athenaeum Ballroom in Muswell Hill of a Saturday night, as was our wont. The Athenaeum was an old cinema which had been converted into a giant dance hall, spread over two floors with a huge bar. Only Colin Quinton, among our number, really knew how to chat up a girl. The rest of us just did a lot of
standing around, stretching out a pint and watching the girls dancing with each other. I do remember one monumentally bold occasion when the night wore on and Bob and I stepped towards a pair of dancers to make our move. ‘Can we break you up?’ said Bob. One of the girls looked at me, and then looked at Bob. ‘Nah,’ she said, flicking a dismissive thumb in my direction. ‘He’s too short.’ Bob, bless him, was most put out on my behalf. ‘You can’t say that in front of him!’ Frankly, my dear, comments about my height were water off a not very tall duck’s back by that point in my life.

On the nights when we did get lucky (and, reader, I profess that, despite our general lack of proficiency in this area, there were one or two of those), the Mini Van came in handy for lifts home and for moments of privacy, especially if halted by the kerb in the appealing, sylvan quietness of Gypsy Lane in Barnet.

My twenty-first birthday came and went during this busy period, marked by a zinging party at Lodge Lane – sandwiches, cake, a keg of beer and a soundtrack of Buddy Holly and Lonnie Donegan hits which I had painstakingly taped off the telly and the radio onto my valve-operated Grundig reel-to-reel tape machine (bought on the never-never, of course. If you played it for a long time, the rubbers got hot and stretched, and everything, even Lonnie Donegan, started sounding like Hawaiian guitar music).

Well, I say the party was zinging. It would have been a darned sight more zinging if my mother hadn’t come down in her dressing gown at midnight, crossly shut the music off and turned everyone out into the cold February street. The humiliation of that stung for a long time.

By 1964, B. W. Installations was doing pretty well. We had taken Johnny Dingle on board as a permanent assistant. Joyce Dodd from down the road was coming in to type up our estimates. (Joyce had a crush on Bob, if the truth be known, but, alas,
much to my puzzlement, Bob wasn’t interested.) The work was flowing in, nice and steadily. But I knew, and Bob knew, that the real dream for me was acting. I felt time creeping on. I couldn’t bear the idea of getting to thirty-five and not having given it a shot – and then maybe living with the regret and the sense of ‘what if?’ for the rest of my life. And at least the electrical business was solid now, so it wouldn’t be like leaving Bob in the lurch. It was as good a moment as any. Late in 1964, I told him I was going to quit.

He couldn’t have been more magnanimous about it, nor more encouraging. We did a deal whereby, in exchange for giving Bob my share of the business, I could keep my prized Mini Van. He also promised me that if the acting didn’t come through, or there were periods of downtime with no money coming in, he’d give me work to do. It was a nice bit of security to fall back on.

And so performing what we might call a reverse Nelly, I unpacked my trunk, metaphorically speaking, and said hello to the circus.

* * *

I
HAD RESOLVED
to turn professional. Now all I needed to do was find someone who was prepared to pay me to act. How hard could it be?

Quite hard, as it happened.

I hadn’t been to drama school. I hadn’t been to university and acted there, which was another widely used route into the business. I had no relevant qualification behind me, unless you counted crawling under people’s floors, looking for electrics, which people tended not to. I mean, sure, if the lights fused, mid-production, I was always going to be another pair of hands. But that didn’t necessarily guarantee my ability to carry a play.

I had attended no classes on vocal projection and stage
positioning – no seminars, no workshops. I only had what I had learned two evenings a week in amateur dramatics. Otherwise I was running on instinct. And, no doubt, that absence of formal schooling not only troubled me in the early days, but planted a legacy which has stayed with me the whole of my life. All actors are a mix of confidence and doubt – of bulletproof self-belief one minute, and trembling insecurity the next. It’s what makes us such a joy to be around – albeit sometimes unsuitable as domestic pets.

But the self-taught among us have, I think, our own particularly strong strain of the common actors’ virus – and somehow no amount of success and acclaim ever quite squeezes it out of you. You know what you know – but, at the same time, you carry with you the shadowy sense that there might, unbeknown to you, be a
proper
way to be doing this. It’s as if you are waiting to be found out. It’s like a koala bear that sits on your back, its face alongside yours – endearing, in a way, and yet possibly a problem in the long term.

Whatever, it was certainly clear to me, at the very beginning, that I had a lot to learn – and, moreover, that I would have to learn it on the job. But that was assuming I could find a job to learn on. Like countless novices before me and since, I would pick up the
Stage
, the theatre and entertainment industry’s newspaper, every Friday – in my case from WH Smith the newsagent on Finchley High Road. (I had to get them to order it in specially for me because, funnily enough, there wasn’t a big call for the
Stage
in Finchley. Most copies probably went to Hampstead, or somewhere similar.) And I would take it home and intently comb the back pages where the adverts for upcoming auditions were. And then I would send off a simple letter (I couldn’t include a CV because I didn’t have one) and apply for absolutely anything and everything. Small plays by first-time writers, seaside entertainments, stunt extra in a piratical seaside entertainment involving jumping off diving boards
(seriously – we’ll come on to that), children’s shows, second spear carrier from the left in provincial Shakespeare productions – I wasn’t fussy. I just wanted to act.

Unfortunately, the people I applied to
were
fussy. The letters of rejection were soon flooding in. For one thing, many of the advertised jobs turned out to require prior membership of the actors’ union, Equity. But, of course, you couldn’t get into Equity without having a job as an actor. I was in the traditional catch-22 that traps so many performers when they first set out on their fumbling way towards a career: you can’t get any work unless you’ve acted before, and if you haven’t acted before, you can’t get any work.