David Jason: My Life (21 page)

However, I had the stage to myself. And, as the production went on, I sensed an opportunity and started to pad this little moment out. I’d taken to casting a good look around the place to ascertain that there was nobody around – I’d go from one side of the stage to the other, catch sight of this bell, move on, go back to it, gradually growing more interested in the bell, developing a longing to ring it, but behaving as if I didn’t quite have the nerve … And I found I could take the audience right along with me, have them cracking up at my indecision and get them willing me to ring the bell – to the point where people would actually start shouting out from the stalls, ‘Ring the bell! Ring the bell!’

It was like that business with the bongo drums, back in that Noël Coward production, my professional debut – the old Laurel and Hardy principle again, of knowing what’s going to happen, but not knowing when. But it wasn’t like that first time in Bromley, when I built my part up with the full blessing and collaboration of the director, Simon Oates. This was a hijack, pure and simple – the equivalent of an air steward wrestling the pilot aside and taking over the aeroplane.

The cast would all be in the wings, waiting for their cue, and I would be drawing this piece of business out for ages – not amusing all of those backstage, I have to admit. A couple made their displeasure known to me. Even the director asked me if I wouldn’t mind reining it in a bit. And for the one and only time in my career, I flagrantly disobeyed the director’s orders. If it hadn’t been working, I’d have seen his point. But it
was
working, gloriously. In other words, I was doing what I enjoyed doing best, and that was making people laugh. And perhaps that business never worked more gloriously than the night Humphrey came to see me, when I pushed it as far as I’d ever dared to push it, working the crowd into a noisy frenzy of frustration.

And among those shouting ‘Ring the bell!’ that night? Cambridge classics graduate and reluctant end-of-the-pier show attendee Humphrey Barclay. (He admitted this to me afterwards.)

Which is how I came by a part in
Do Not Adjust Your Set
.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Children’s entertainment beckons. I become a superhero. And a couple of little things that got away.

IT AMUSES ME
that the conversation which gave rise to so much of my career in television took place in the tiny, rundown bar of the Bournemouth Pier Theatre – not the world’s ritziest watering hole, nor a venue that seemed to have much connection with the glamorous world of major broadcasting deals. Indeed, it was somewhere you would only have gone for a drink if you had been … well, marooned at the end of a pier with no other options.

Nevertheless, this was the place where Humphrey Barclay waited for me after the show, and we spoke for a while over a drink or two before he drove back to London. He was an impressive guy – clearly very bright. He was actually a year younger than me – twenty-six to my twenty-seven – yet I felt very much the junior party in the conversation. He was terribly well spoken and socially way above me, in class terms. And, as I mentioned, he had gone to Cambridge, where he had been in the Cambridge Footlights. He was part of that 1964 gang – with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, among others – who put on the revue show
Cambridge Circus
and ended
up taking it not just to the Edinburgh Festival but also to New Zealand and then, triumphantly, to Broadway. When he worked at the BBC, he was one of the founders of the comedy show
I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again
. Now he had been given this brief to put together a children’s sketch show for Rediffusion.

Humphrey told me how much he’d enjoyed what I did that night on the stage and how he thought I would be perfect for this new project. He said, ‘When you get back to London I’d like to put you together with the others I’ve got lined up.’ He mentioned these three hotshot writer-performers that had come out of Cambridge and Oxford. He said he wanted to add another actor and an actress to give the team a bit more comic breadth. He said, ‘I’d love it if the actor was you.’

This sounded interesting to me, although it struck me as strange that Humphrey didn’t want to use Bill Oddie, whom he obviously knew well and who was my age, small like I was, and a bit of a knockabout comic, the same as me. I never got to the bottom of why Humphrey passed over him, and I didn’t trouble to ask. I simply agreed to meet up with everyone when the season was finished in Bournemouth.

Back in London, Humphrey brought us all together. The actress he had invited along was Denise Coffey. Denise was intelligent, friendly, eccentric and very funny. She would have been about thirty years old at this point, and had cut her teeth in repertory theatre and had worked as an interviewer on BBC radio. She was a good theatre actress, too. I remember, some time after this, going along to see her when she was in a production at the Young Vic and being really impressed by what she could do.

And then there were the three lads: Eric Idle, Mike Palin and Terry Jones. They were three years younger than me – just twenty-four – and my initial reaction to them was that they seemed a bit posh. They were certainly very confident – absolutely sure of themselves in a way that I could never have
imagined being in those days. Eric had been to Cambridge, the same as Humphrey, but in the year below him; he had been president of the Footlights. Mike and Terry had known each other at Oxford and had written and acted for the Oxford Revue, which was Oxford’s equivalent of the Footlights. They were highly educated, very articulate and quite experienced – whereas I, of course, hadn’t been to university and hadn’t even been to drama school. They were very chummy with each other and, dare I say it, a bit cliquey. The one that immediately seemed the nicest – and also the most talented, to my mind – was Mike Palin. I felt that there was less of a boundary with him. Even so, I was a little short of self-esteem in their company. Also, as they’d known each other for a while, they were already, to some extent, a team, whereas Denise and I were the additions, in a sense – the ones drafted in by Humphrey. That probably set the dynamic between us from the beginning – created a slight division in the team that was always there. Not that there were ever any fallouts or major disagreements.

Over the eighteen months that we worked together, we didn’t socialise very much, and when we did, I was never entirely comfortable. I remember Eric inviting me to a party at his flat one weekend. It was on a Saturday afternoon, to celebrate his birthday. He was living with his girlfriend at the time in a first-floor apartment in Beauchamp Place in Chelsea. Dead posh: certainly posher than a flat above a hairdresser’s in Thornton Heath. I walked into this grand square of beautiful white stucco Georgian houses and looked around, thinking, ‘How can someone in our business afford to live here?’ I thought I must be in the wrong place until someone on a balcony spotted me and called down, ‘Are you looking for Eric’s?’

The voice came from a very attractive young woman. ‘Yes,’ I called up. ‘I’m one of his guests.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I recognise you. It’s the door on the right. I’ll buzz you in.’

I was thinking, ‘Blimey. This could be my lucky night.’ Wrong, though. She was Eric’s girlfriend.

The flat was beautifully decorated, with oil paintings on the walls, and soft velvet furniture. Champagne was served, which I hadn’t seen very much of before this point. Mike and Terry were there, and Terry Gilliam, too. The party was a rather bohemian scene – pretty hip people, pretty intellectual conversation. Everyone was very nice and very friendly, but I felt I fitted in like a pork chop in a Jewish salad. I was out of my depth.

Still, the five of us rubbed along perfectly well at that initial meeting and it was clear that we would be more than capable of working together – assuming this project ever got off the ground. Apparently there was someone at Rediffusion who still needed persuading of its value. Humphrey told us, at that first gathering, ‘We’ve got to go and sell this idea to Lewis Rudd.’ Rudd was the head of comedy at Rediffusion.

So, that was the next step. At this point, remember, the show really was just an idea in Humph’s head – and a fairly vague one at that. We had no scripts to read from, no sketches to show anyone. I don’t think we even had a title. We just had … us. On the way up to his office, Humphrey urgently told us, ‘When we go in, you’ve got to impress him with how funny you are.’

Which is, of course, just about the worst thing to tell anyone. Be funny! It’s a recipe for disaster and I was already gritting my teeth as I walked in. The others were too.

Our anxieties did not diminish when we got our first sighting of Lewis Rudd. He was not the kind of bloke whom you would have identified as the head of comedy at a broadcasting company. You would more likely have put him down as some terribly old-fashioned bank manager. When we walked into his office, he was behind his desk in a collar and tie – impeccably straitlaced. And now we were going to have to be funny. In a crazy, impromptu way. In front of a bank manager.

It was a disaster. There were chairs lined up in front of Rudd’s desk for us to sit on, so the first thing we did was to squabble like kids over those chairs, stealing them off each other, sitting on top of each other, pushing each other over. Eventually, when we were all seated in a line, Terry decided to fling himself off his chair, onto the floor. Then he got up and sat down again. Then he flung himself onto the floor again. Seeing this, the rest of us decided to fling ourselves off our chairs over and over again, too – except for Denise Coffey, who got up on Rudd’s desk and walked up and down it for a while. Denise was a very talented actress of the short and serious kind: a leggy, sex-bomb kind she was not, so to watch her try and vamp old Lewis was quite an experience.

It was excruciating. I still shiver with embarrassment to recall it. Did Rudd find it amusing? I couldn’t really tell you because I was on the carpet most of the time, completing my latest hilarious fall off my seat. But I guess all this forced anarchy showed that we were, to some extent, mad, or at any rate fearless – fearless enough to be the cast of a children’s sketch show. Lewis Rudd signed us up. Whether he did this purely in order to get us out of his office and end the nightmare, I simply don’t know. But the upshot was, by the time we left we had a commissioned show.

So that was the start of
Do Not Adjust Your Set
– a title which was one of Humph’s brainchildren. The phrase will mean almost nothing to modern generations but it was on a notice frequently screened on television in the fifties and sixties, whenever the signal failed, which it quite often did. Humph thought it would gain the show some free publicity. Now all we had to do was create the show. The writing fell chiefly to Mike, Eric and Terry. Mad or fearless ideas seemed to flow from them very easily. I guess we thought we were making a kind of visual
Goon Show
– unfettered and bonkers. An early skit featured government inspectors going to find out how the boffins are getting on with
building Concorde – and the boffins, who appear to have misunderstood the plans, turn out to be building a ship rather than an aeroplane. Pure, simple idiocy.

Or take the sketch that Eric came up with, in which he played a salesman in a home-appliances shop. A couple come in looking for a fridge and a heater. ‘Step this way,’ says Eric. First of all he shows them a fridge, opening the door and saying, ‘This is a lovely one – top of the range. Feel that? Loads of heat. You’ll certainly be able to warm your toes on this one of an evening.’ Then he shows them a radiator. ‘Very cold, this one – one of the coldest on the market. Keep everything lovely and chilled, this will.’ That was it. I didn’t think this would ever work. It just seemed so bluntly stupid. But it did work. Sometimes, just turning something on its head seemed to be enough.

As the first episodes came together, the director, Daphne Shadwell, who was experienced in putting the cameras on more traditional forms of children’s television, and possibly found aspects of this show a bit of a step sideways from her comfort zone, said that she wanted to have a character running through the show, done as a filmed insert. I think it was Eric who came up with the idea of Captain Fantastic – a greengrocer with superpowers, who didn’t do anything particularly fantastic. As it was obviously going to be a physical role, and as I was always the member of the team who got hit by the frying pan (or hit by whatever else a character needed to be hit by in order to get a laugh), it was always going to fall to me.

As superheroes go, Captain Fantastic was something of an everyman figure. No capes, tights or pants worn over trousers. His signature uniform was a long brown raincoat, buttoned to the neck, and a bowler hat, and he carried an umbrella (a token of normality), and boasted a large and more than faintly implausible black moustache. It was pretty quickly clear that he needed an arch-enemy – someone dastardly to do battle with and save
the world from. So Denise became the dreaded Mrs Black, the force of evil who was always trying to blow everything up, including the world. Eric and Mike wrote the first two or three adventures in the life of this new, patently inadequate superhero and Denise and I were sent off with Daffers (as we had come to know Daphne) to shoot them. We decided to film them at twenty frames per second. Film runs normally at twenty-four frames per second and taking those four frames out just gives it a slightly quickened edge when you play it back at the right speed – not sped-up, Benny Hill-style or to the extent of a Charlie Chaplin film, but just slightly off, enough to add an extra dash of oddness. (As it turned out later, Ronnie Barker was very fond of this method, too.)

So Captain Fantastic became a fixture in the show. Daffers, Denise and I used to go away in a coach for a couple of days and record a set of these little films. We normally worked from a rough storyline and improvised the rest. The production manager used to accompany us and bring along a big wad of cash. We’d have lunch somewhere – out would come the wad. We’d have an overnight in a hotel and need to settle up in the morning – out would come the wad. Everything seemed to get paid for by the wad. It was great. We were out, being paid to make films and behave like idiots, and wherever we went, the tab was being picked up. I couldn’t have been more blissfully happy, really. There was a wonderful freedom to it all as well. I was doing something I loved, but also doing it under no pressure. I was an unknown actor, so nobody had any expectations of me that I had to live up to. No one was expecting me to deliver. That kind of pressure came later. At this point I was simply free to bury myself in the work and enjoy it. I learned from this why so many people find solace in painting and drawing, such as my dear friend Brian Cosgrove, the animator, and my very talented wife, Gill.