David Jason: My Life (19 page)

Result: I was caught smack on the eyebrow by a big lump of brass trumpet.

A wound immediately opened and began to bleed copiously
down the side of my face. The pirate was stricken with remorse. Someone grabbed a cloth, which I wadded up and pressed to my eye before heading off to the stage to complete the scene I was due to play, with one hand held to my eyebrow. After curtain-down, I was straight off to hospital for stitches – and not for the first time in my life, as you may recall. I thought the plaster might present a problem. You don’t see too many pirates with Elastoplast on their faces. Conveniently, however, I found I could draw an eyebrow on the plaster in make-up and nobody was any the wiser.

Lesson: the show goes on, even if someone has just brained you with a musical instrument.

Call us opportunistic, but a number of us pirates, looking ahead in the schedule, noticed that our production of
Peter Pan
was due to perform onstage at Stratford – the home, of course, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the very pinnacle of acting excellence. Well, here was a chance which a young pirate with ambition in his heart and an Elastoplast on his eyebrow could surely not miss. Four or five of us duly hatched a plan to call the RSC, mention we were going to be in town, and ask if we could come in and see someone about the possibility of joining the company.

Flaming brass neck, I think you would have to call this. But it’s always been true that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. So one of us rang up – I can’t remember who, but we were all in on it, and very much a team in this respect. To our surprise, the RSC’s response was not ‘Go away and stop wasting our time, you horrible little pirates’; it was ‘OK, then, come in and see us one afternoon when you’re in town’.

General excitement plus much back-slapping ensued. So, come the appointed hour, each of us was seen in turn in a room at the RSC by a kindly young casting director who had taken the time out of her afternoon to meet us. And I, of course, was immediately offered Hamlet, starting that night.

All right, I wasn’t. I couldn’t have done it anyway because I was otherwise disposed, giving my Gentleman Starkey to Ron Moody’s Captain Hook. After a bit of a chat, I was gently sent on my way with the casting director’s very best wishes. All of us were. And fair enough: we were just pirates. But I think we were heartened that the RSC, of all places, had taken the trouble to see us and at least give us a chance. We were all taught an important lesson: big doors aren’t always as locked as they appear to be, not even to pirates. You might as well give them a rattle and see what happens.

The name of that casting director, incidentally, was Meg Poole. There’s an old saying: ‘Be nice to people on the way up because you never know whether you’re going to meet them on the way down.’ And it almost applies in this case. Meg eventually left the RSC, became an agent, joined the Richard Stone agency and, many years after this, ascended to a partnership in the company, where she ended up very skilfully and very patiently looking after the career of … me. Which she continues to do today. It’s a small world, piracy.

Anyway, even if the RSC had turned me down, the future was bright. I knew as much because a psychic told me. Another little on-tour excursion found me in the front room of a council house in Birmingham, having my destiny foretold for the price of a few pieces of silver – or probably a note, actually, allowing for the effects of inflation. I was led this way in a taxi one morning by two excited actresses who swore by the prescience of this famous psychic and insisted I go along with them for a visit.

I regret to say that memory, and the Random House legal team, have erased this august seer’s professional name from my recollection. Let’s be content to call her Mystic Mavis.

To be honest, this kind of thing was more my dear sister June’s area than mine. Nevertheless, when it was my turn, Mystic Mavis ushered me into her humble parlour and, while
the girls waited out in the hall, I sat opposite her at a small table. She was a neat, middle-aged woman in civvies – no headscarf or spangled shawl, or any of that nonsense. She didn’t use a crystal ball or cards, either. She simply worked from your presence – which is a good trick if you can do it, and very much cheaper on props.

‘You’re in the theatre,’ Mystic Mavis told me.

‘I am,’ I said, because she was right: I was. At the same time, she wouldn’t have needed to be a genius to work that out, would she, with the three of us trooping in, all with London accents? One of us could have let something slip, even if our appearance, manner, underslept demeanour and perhaps even vague but persistent smell didn’t betray us straight away as travelling players.

‘I see sparks around you,’ Mavis went on. ‘Are you possibly an electrician?’ She paused. ‘In the theatre?’

Blimey. Now, hold on. That wasn’t bad. That was quite impressive. I mean, wrong about me being an electrician in the theatre, but right about me being an electrician. Maybe I still bore the aura from that time I got electrocuted while rewiring the girls’ school in Highgate. Mavis then moved on from telling me things about my present that I already knew and began to explore the bigger topic, from my point of view: my future.

‘I can see your name in big red letters,’ she intoned, ‘above the title of a play in the West End of London.’

Yeah, well, nice idea, obviously, and thanks for your time. But dream on, Mavis.

* * *

I
N THE
L
ONDON
cast of
Peter Pan
, playing a squaw, was Carol Collins, a dancer and a skater who also worked on ice shows. She was very attractive, a great girl, and eventually she and I started going out – in as much as people working in the theatre
could be said to ‘go out’. The hours you worked didn’t make that easy. You really only had Sundays to spend together.

Carol lived with her mother just off the North Circular, near the Hanger Lane gyratory, one of London’s premier congested junctions, made eternally famous by radio traffic reports. Carol had a brother called Phil, I remember, who fancied himself as a bit of a drummer. When I went round to the house to pick her up, he would often be in his bedroom, thundering away like a loony. I don’t think he particularly took to me at first – but then I was the idiot walking out with his sister. However, one day, when he was coerced down from his eyrie, maybe to partake in food, he took a shine to the leather jacket I used to wear. I let him put it on and he had his photograph taken wearing it.

Nice lad. I wonder what happened to Phil Collins. It would be good to think that it had worked out for him and that he’d had some success somewhere down the line.

Carol and I went out together for two years and then we broke up. There was no particular reason; it just happens like that sometimes. Then one afternoon in 1972, when I was working in the West End in
No Sex Please – We’re British
, I bumped into her. I was walking to the Strand Theatre – something I loved to do in those days, ambling through the London streets, anticipating the show ahead and feeling generally glad to be alive – and there she was. We hadn’t seen each other in ages and I invited her to see the show. We talked afterwards and almost straight away I was right back where I used to be with her and we were off again. I was on my own at the time, and she was as well – two lost souls.

And, actually, I do know what became of Phil. Carol took me to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to see Genesis. I had never been to a rock concert. But Carol was the squeeze and this was her brother, so along I went. It was an eye-opening experience – and very theatrical, actually. Tremendous lighting, deafening sound, high production values. In one of the numbers,
they had the singer, Peter Gabriel, strapped to a cross and, with smoke billowing and lights flashing, they slowly flew him out to the flies and away. I thought, ‘How do they get away with that?’ Everybody in the audience went potty. I’d never seen anything like it. The ringing in my ears took forty-eight hours to clear.

Soon after this, Carol and I separated again. Nothing to do with Genesis, I hasten to add, or the night they crucified Peter Gabriel. The split was my fault. I began to feel I was getting in too deep. I was immature and once again I got frightened about going down a road that would lead to responsibilities – responsibilities that might, in turn, take me away from the theatre. I think that was what drove the wedge. There could have been no other reason.

It happened a number of times. It happened with Fanny Barlow, who wanted us to shack up together. It happened before that, with Sylvia. When the person I was with got too close or I felt that I was getting too involved, I drew away. I was very adept at snuffing out the spark, I’m sorry to say. An absolute expert at it.

I don’t suppose it exactly helped me to develop long-term relationships in those days I was away from home so much, on the road with touring plays. Touring was a peculiarly Victorian experience in that period – the late 1960s and early 1970s. You travelled on Sunday, when any journey of any length took all day because there would be work on the railway line and a replacement bus service would be in operation much of the way. All routes passed through Crewe, and on Sunday at Crewe station, everything was closed, so you couldn’t get anything to eat. You would have to leave the station and try and find a bun somewhere. Sometimes at the station you would run into other little groups of actors heading off in another direction, and exchange a grudging nod of sympathy.

Eventually you would arrive at your next location, for the
next week or two of work, and the search would begin for digs. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you would have a tip-off: ‘If you’re going to Birmingham, you must get in touch with Mrs So-and-So.’ There were a few famous landladies whom you tried to get to stay with because they had a reputation for being nicer and more tolerant than the others. They would give you a key to let yourself in with, for instance, whereas others would stick to a strict curfew and lock you out if you missed it. Or they might have a reputation for offering cotton sheets and pillowcases, as opposed to the usual cheap Bri-nylon bedding, which either caused you to slip out of bed altogether during the night, or sent a static surge through your system that left your hair standing on end for the next fourteen hours.

Even the nicest and most liberal establishments, though, operated a firm ‘no overnight guests’ rule. This, too, could be overcome, though only, one keenly felt, at the expense of grave personal risk to both parties. More than once was the occasion when I returned, extremely quietly, to the room of a female colleague, only to be woken in the morning by the inquisitive tapping on the door of the landlady. At which point I would be obliged to take cover by scrambling, partly clothed, into the wardrobe. Farcical, I suppose you might call it. Let no one say that life never imitated art, or vice versa.

I tremblingly recall staying in one establishment which offered not only a strictly enforced curfew, an unbreakable ‘no overnight guests’ rule and Bri-nylon sheets, but also the presence of the landlady’s four cats, meaning that most of the surfaces were lightly coated in moulted fur. I came down in the morning to a breakfast of bacon, egg and beans, and hungrily raised my knife and fork above the plate, only to look down and notice a cat’s hair floating on the yolk of the egg.

Didn’t mean I didn’t eat it, though. I picked the hair off and tucked in. Well, you had to, didn’t you? Otherwise you’d starve.

Indeed, the trick was to find out what the latest possible time
was for breakfast, and then to time your run so that you hit it exactly. Then, if you ate as much as you possibly could, it might mean that you didn’t have to spend any money at lunchtime. Smart thinking.

It was a terribly frugal existence, then – and also, from time to time, a properly depressing one. The conviviality of the cast and crew and the sense of being part of the travelling circus couldn’t always be relied upon to sustain you. Despondency would creep up and seize its moment to lay you low – often, in my case, during free hours and while availing myself of a brief opportunity for tourism. Up at Hadrian’s Wall was one such occasion. I remember staring at a section of that ancient monument one day and feeling bleaker than if you had asked me to rebuild it.

But, most memorably, I recall sitting on a bench one afternoon, looking up at the outside of Lincoln Cathedral, and feeling about as far from home and as unutterably lonely as I had ever felt. At that point, the thought uppermost in my mind was, roughly speaking, ‘Why am I doing this? What kind of way is this to spend your life?’

CHAPTER SEVEN

A problem with sugar lumps. A mess made with some yogurt. And a monumental coming-together at the end of a pier with Dick Emery.

IN THOSE EARLY
days, in the mid-to-late sixties, my agent sometimes rang me up and asked if I fancied appearing in a commercial for television or cinema. I invariably did fancy it. Anything that might lead to something else, was my general philosophy of employment back then. And, as a result, I am one of a very small number of actors who can say, in all honesty, that they have dived into a giant teacup in order to outline the unique merits of Tetley tea bags.

And don’t knock it: it sounds unlikely now, but that may actually have been one of the most dangerous professional appointments I ever took on. The reason I got the job was not just on account of my diminutive stature but also because, as my agent was well aware, I was one of a very small number of actors who was a trained diver. Now, you don’t get many of those in a tea bag.

(My diving experience at this point: I had some proper lessons with Wood Green Civil Defence Association, on the recommendation of a friend, at the age of about eighteen. We followed
up with some open-water diving sessions in a gravel pit in Hoddesdon. It was winter and you had to break the ice to get down. The water was so murky that, frankly, you might as well have been suspended in tea, so this was doubly good training.)

The set-up required me to squeeze into a white wetsuit and then plunge down into an enormous cup of tea. Then I had to swim to the surface to report that the flavour had, indeed, flowed out of the tea bag, via its cunning perforations, and into the enveloping water, and not got stuck inside, which I suppose could plausibly have been the concern of potential customers in the early days of the tea bag, when the magic was still new. And then, in the visual pay-off, having set everyone’s mind to rest, I had to look above me, say something to the effect of ‘Uh-oh’, go wide-eyed with panic, and then duck to spare myself getting clobbered from above by a pair of giant sugar lumps.