David Jason: My Life (15 page)

My agent, Ann, came along on one night of the run with her husband, a television producer, director and writer – a certain David Croft, later associated with
Dad’s Army
,
Are You Being Served?
,
It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
,
Hi-de-Hi!
and
’Allo ’Allo
or, to put it another way, more than three-quarters of the most successful sitcoms made for British television in the seventies and eighties and an extraordinarily high proportion of the greatest comedy hits of all time. David saw me in
Diplomatic Baggage
and that piece of business with the trolley chimed with him. He bore it in mind for later, as we’ll see.

* * *

A
S
H
ER
M
AJESTY
the Queen so rightly put it, in her Christmas broadcast to the nation in 1965: ‘Every year the familiar pattern of Christmas unfolds. The sights and the customs and festivities may seem very much the same from one year to another, and yet to families and individuals each Christmas is slightly different.’

That was certainly true for my family that year. All the usual sights, customs and festivities were in place: the chicken (cheaper than turkey), the tree, the decorations. But it was the first Yuletide season when, in addition to all that, they had been able to gather together and see one of their own kith and kin on the television, dressed in a policeman’s outfit, hanging from the ceiling. Slightly different, or what?

The location for this once-in-a-lifetime Christmas scene
was the BBC pantomime – my first ever appearance on the small screen, and clinched while I was still a nobody, just eight months after my professional stage debut, a turn-up which must have been down to some pretty smart work by my agent. She must have really upped her game since getting me the part as an extra in the advertisement at the racetrack. It was the habit of the BBC in those days to organise a pantomime for Christmas – in this case,
Mother Goose
. They would sprinkle the cast with TV favourites, and film it, as live, in a traditional theatre, in front of an audience, and then broadcast it on Boxing Day, so that viewers at home could feel they were getting the full panto experience without leaving their armchairs. In the mid-sixties, the BBC panto could expect to get an audience well in excess of 15 million people. (You’re going to tell me, perhaps, that there wasn’t a lot else on. I’m not here to argue. I’m simply setting down the figures.) Accordingly, I was pretty thrilled to get the nod – and still thrilled on the morning of 17 December as I headed for the Golders Green Hippodrome (very handy for those of us who lived just up the road in Lodge Lane).

The big stars of the show that year were Terry Scott and Norman Vaughan. Vaughan had taken over from Bruce Forsyth as the host of
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
– just about the biggest show on television at that point in time – and would later have a stint as the presenter of
The Golden Shot
. His catchphrases at the time were ‘Swinging!’ and, its opposite, ‘Dodgy!’ It was still the case, in the mid-sixties, that a comedian had to have a catchphrase, just as it had been in earlier times for Tommy Trinder (‘You lucky people’), for Arthur Askey (‘Hello, playmates!’), for Arthur English, (‘Mum, Mum – they’re laughing at me again’) and countless others.

Terry Scott was a giant star at this point – and, bless him, a fairly sizeable pain in the … well, let me put it another way: he didn’t suffer fools. It seemed to me that fame had temporarily
exhausted his patience with lesser mortals, as fame sometimes will. He was certainly way above little people like me.

Someone I warmed to straight away, though, was Jon Pertwee – later, of course, one of the greatest of the Doctor Whos, but then most famous for his part in the BBC radio series
The Navy Lark
. We chatted and he gave me some very sage advice about avoiding productions with too many comedians in them. Jon had been in the 1963 London stage production of the musical farce
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, with Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Connor. Apparently, partway through rehearsals the director had called the cast together and told them, ‘If you carry on at this rate, you’ll be acting in the theatre next door.’ Members of the cast were constantly moving themselves into a position just behind the shoulder of the last person to speak – it being the comic’s instinct to take the dominant position upstage. Eventually all the action was taking place against the backcloth. I filed this away as something to watch out for.

Jon also ended up showing me some photographs he had of himself in the swimming pool at his place in Spain. I remember thinking that was pretty swish – having a place in Spain. On Jon’s shoulders in one of these photos of sun-drenched bliss was his young son, Sean. The next time I saw that little chap he was a full-grown man, standing on no one’s shoulders, playing a villain opposite me in
A Touch of Frost
. Sean Pertwee turned out to be a very fine actor.

Also present for the BBC panto was Lauri Lupino Lane, the son of the great music-hall actor Lupino Lane, and the undisputed living master of the legendary wallpaper routine – that eternal homage to DIY gone wrong, which could be shoehorned into almost any show, via some subtle line such as, ‘Ooh, I think the kitchen needs redecorating.’ Then out would come the wallpaper, the buckets of paste and the decorating table, and slapstick chaos would duly ensue. There’s a climactic
moment where Lauri Lupino Lane’s bowler hat gets filled with wallpaper paste and the hat has a hole in it, so that when he forces it down on his head, the paste fountains out of the top of it. Never fails.

And then there was Kay Lyell, who played Priscilla the Goose. Kay was, perhaps, the most celebrated panto goose of her generation. It was her speciality, and, indeed, the work of her lifetime. She had her own outfit, or ‘goose skin’, which was magnificent and came, of course, with full, top-of-the-range egg-laying capabilities, which I’m sure gave her the edge in this particular marketplace. Kay was said to live in a tiny top-floor flat in Covent Garden and to keep the goose skin in the bath – the only place big enough to store it unfolded. Every time she wanted a bath she had to whip the goose out and lay it somewhere else temporarily. And then, when she had finished, she would dry out the bath and return the goose to its rightful storage place. Personally, I think I might have found that rather tiresome after a while, but, I guess, if you work as a pantomime goose for long enough, you eventually acquire bombproof levels of patience, and Kay seemed to find the arrangement perfectly acceptable.

In rehearsal, she wore only the bottom half of the outfit, which rather let the light in on the magic, I suppose. She waddled about the place in what was essentially a pair of fluffy pyjama bottoms ending in rubber gaiters and big webbed feet. I have to say, she was very adept at walking in those feet without making them flap and smack the floor like a diver in flippers, which would have spoiled the effect. I have to say, also, that the work of the Goose Woman was of more than merely passing interest to me. Not many months before this, at the Incognito Theatre Group, I had had the rare distinction of playing the part of a raven – a role in which I had immersed myself by going to study the ravens in situ at the Tower of London. Executing a passable raven, you might be surprised to learn, is
actually quite complicated and physically demanding, particularly in the way they scuttle forwards. There’s more buttock-action than you might think.

Now, I have no wish to run down posthumously an undisputed legend of British pantomime. But, if I may be frank, her obvious skill with the feet aside, I was a little disappointed with Kay’s goose. From the legs up, she played it very straight, in my opinion – very much a no-frills, no-nonsense kind of goose. She did exactly what it said on the feathers. But I’m probably quibbling uncharitably. It obviously hadn’t hindered her career.

I, meanwhile, played the King of Gooseland, that marvellous, if quite negligible role. And, along with Terry Scott and Jon Pertwee, I ended up in a section of the show called ‘The Flying Policemen’. We were attached to harnesses in Kirby’s Flying Ballet, and we all swung about, hung from the grid, dressed as coppers, flying around and bumping into each other to a piece of music that was so well known at the time that I can’t remember it. Nothing more to it than that, really, but somehow the sight of fully uniformed police officers solemnly flying above a stage seemed to garner a big laugh.

Can I just mention the sheer agony of the Kirby harness? It featured two leather straps, which were passed under the groin area and up the sides of the legs, and, after a while, the weight of your body hanging from its wire would cause those straps to close in on one another, in a slow scissor-like motion. Pain of a rare and intimate order would be felt and, imperceptibly, your voice would begin to rise through the octaves. Words can’t express the joy and relief you felt when your feet touched earth again and the feeling began to return to your nether regions.

Reflect on it from my point of view, though: for those brief moments in-harness, plucked from the obscurity of a very early career in repertory theatre, I was quite literally rubbing shoulders with the greats. And also arms and knees. And even, in some of the more extreme collisions, thighs.

The fee I was paid for rendering these services over the course of three days, incidentally, was £74 2s 8d – an exponential leap from the £15 I had earned for a week’s theatre at Bromley. If I hadn’t already known that television was where the money was, I certainly did after that. If one could get by in the theatre on £15 a week, £74 was no slap in the face with a wet lettuce.

That Christmas, at Lodge Lane, the family gathered around the box to witness my broadcast debut. There was my mum, my dad, my sister June, my mum’s sister Aunt Ede and my cousin Ken. I’m sure they were as made up as anyone could be to see a close relative of theirs swinging from a cable, in uniform. Mind you, you have to bear in mind that TV was very unsophisticated at the time, and that the only close-ups you saw were of the stars. The rest of us were in rather blurry long-shots. Afterwards, I gave my parents a relaxed, smiling look, designed to convey the message, ‘You see – it seemed like a big risk at the time, but I told you I’d be all right, career-wise.’ And they gave me a look back designed to conceal their probably still raging anxiety.

That wasn’t the only time in my career that I bumped into Terry Scott. Not long after this, thanks to David Croft and his memory of my trolley business in
Diplomatic Baggage
, I got a one-off part as a waiter in
Hugh and I
, the very popular comedy series that Scott starred in, along with Hugh Lloyd, before he went on to even greater sitcom glory in
Terry and June
. My part involved a couple of lines and some of the aforementioned funny business from the stage play. Before this piece of business there was some dialogue exchanged between my character and a couple in the restaurant. In rehearsal, the crew were clearly enjoying it – often the first sign you get that something is going to work. It was at that point that I noticed Scott taking the director aside and having a little whisper in his ear. And the next thing I knew the director was coming over to me and saying, ‘You know what? I’m not sure that line works particularly
well there. I think we’d better give it to Terry.’ Of course, I had to do as directed, and got on with it, like the diligent new boy that I was. But inside I was thinking, ‘Ah, so that’s how it works, is it?’ – and other much less charitable things.

* * *

M
EANWHILE, AT
B
ROMLEY
Rep, the Christmas pantomime was
Aladdin
– and once again a police uniform was called for. I played Flip, from Flip and Flop, the comedy policemen. Flop was Robert Fyfe, who much later played Howard Sibshaw, the funny old fart on the bike in
Last of the Summer Wine
. Fyfe was a Bromley regular who lived locally enough to walk into the theatre.

I’m not sure that the roles of Flip and Flop necessarily drove either Robert or me to our best or most complex work. Indeed, if there had been an award for least funny comedy policemen in a pantomime setting, my feeling is we would have stormed it that year. Then again, being so unfunny that you almost came back round the other side as funny was part of what panto was about and a big reason people bought tickets. I don’t think we sold anyone short.

Anyway, my happy reward for these efforts was that David Paulson (who ran Bromley Rep and was known, broadly across the company, as ‘Poofy Paulson’ on account of his fine head of wavy hair) put me on a year-long contract – one of the last such contracts that Bromley offered. Shortly after that the idea of contracts went out the window, because they realised it was more economical and flexible to recruit actors piecemeal.

Fortuitous timing, then – and wonderful training. I was playing a different character every two weeks and being met head-on by all sorts of different challenges. In
Murder at the Vicarage
, for example, adapted from the Agatha Christie whodunnit, I had to play the part of a haemophiliac vicar who, on his first
entrance, discovers a dead body slumped over his writing desk and utters the immortal line, ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ Every time I did this, the audience laughed. It didn’t matter what inflection I put on it, whether I shouted it or muttered it, whether I gave it the full Shakespearean welly or spoke it without a flinch in my finest stab at Eastern European minimalism – a titter ran through the auditorium. It drove me nuts. I ended up asking senior members of the cast, ‘What can I do to stop them laughing?’ The reply in each case was, ‘Nothing, love. You’re stuffed.’ For as long as the play had been staged, it seemed, that line had got a laugh.

But there wasn’t much time to dwell on it, of course. Soon after that I hung up the dog collar and pulled on a pair of cut-off trousers to play the lad Jack Hawkins in
Treasure Island
. The part of Long John Silver in that production was occupied in high style by the great Paul Bacon. Paul was a wonderful actor with a real, deep, actorly voice, a great fop of grey hair and a more gloriously theatrical manner in real life than you could have scripted. He had achieved a degree of fame in Australia, where he had been on television in a soap opera. But he had come to London to become famous globally, because, in those days, that was the route you took. And thus the trajectory of his career had brought him from Sydney to Bromley Rep – and made him quite the local star. Sometimes, in a break from rehearsals, I would pop up the road with Paul to a cheap tea room for a pot of tea and a bun, and every now and again he would be stopped on the street by Bromley theatregoers. He was the darling of the rep and elderly ladies would say to him, ‘Oh, Mr Bacon, I do enjoy your work.’ And he would say, ‘Oh, my dear, how very kind of you to say so …’ and courteously give them five minutes of his time. I was agog in his company.