David Jason: My Life (26 page)

Actually, Bob was a bit of an early adopter of new technology all round. We once stepped out of the theatre together and he said to me, ‘Look at my glasses.’

I said, ‘What about them?’

He said, ‘They’re tinted, right?’

I said, ‘Er … yes, they are.’

He said, ‘But when we were inside, just now, they were clear.’

I said, ‘Were they?’

‘Yes. They’re these new reactolites. Indoors, they’re clear, so you can see. But when you go out in the daylight, they automatically darken to protect your eyes. They react to the light.’

‘They don’t, do they?’

Honestly, what would they think of next? I didn’t know. But I was pretty sure Bob Monkhouse would buy it before anyone else did.

For me, the best of Bob never came across on television. Some part of him just didn’t travel down the camera and into
the living room. In the flesh, though, he was just superbly, supremely funny. You had to be there, and I consider myself fantastically fortunate that I was. We had this fond scheme that one day we would make a silent movie together. We walked round and round his garden one summer evening, hatching plans for it. I wish those plans had come to something because I think the film could have been funny. But Bob’s workload as a comic was enormous. He was constantly on the road, and he wasn’t hungry to do other things.

While I was delivering babies in Weston-super-Mare, my pal Malcolm Taylor was continuing to plot and scheme, as ever. Somehow, in the course of this plotting and scheming, he had convinced the powers to let him put on a play at Sadler’s Wells. It was Sheridan’s
The Rivals
, which I had already appeared in, five years earlier, while starting out at Bromley Rep. Again, I played Bob Acres, the country bumpkin who comes into some money and is then thrown right out of his depth into the middle of high society – a bit like me at Eric Idle’s birthday party. This time, though, rather than Bromley, I was in the somewhat more salubrious surroundings of the legendary Sadler’s Wells Theatre. They were trying to resurrect Sadler’s Wells as a place for plays. Joseph Grimaldi – the greatest comedy actor of his time and possibly the most famous man of his age – trod the boards there, back in seventeen-hundred-and-frozen-to-death. But, by the beginning of the 1970s, it had long since gone dark, theatre-wise, and had become mostly famous for ballet and dance.

The Rivals
worked well there, and I got some really good notices. One night, Richard, my agent, turned up in the audience with a theatre producer called John Gale – a typical, larger-and-louder-than-life producer figure. I don’t think he was actually wielding a fat cigar and wearing a fur coat the size of a car, but you felt he ought to have been. Gale was the producer of
No Sex Please – We’re British
, the aforementioned comedy by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott, which had opened at the
Strand Theatre in 1971, with Michael Crawford in the lead. This was just before Crawford really became a household name with the British public as Frank Spencer in
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
.

Now, the critics had torn
No Sex Please
to shreds. They thought it was terrible and gave it an absolutely filthy time – quite unfairly, really. The play wasn’t Shakespeare, or Ibsen, it’s true, but it was a very funny play and a very funny piece of entertainment. Not for the first time in history, the critics and the people who actually pay for their own tickets had to agree to differ. People were flooding to the play and stuffing it full nearly every night. It had become the West End’s must-see show – a massive success, albeit by no means an overnight one. The cast had toured it around the country for three months beforehand, doing the spadework and getting it right.

Still, Crawford had now done a year in the West End in what was an incredibly physical role, involving all sorts of knockabout stuff, and he had decided to move on – leaving John Gale with a bit of a dilemma. The success of
No Sex Please
had been significantly down to Crawford: much of what was truly funny about the play only existed in the bits of physical business he was doing. When people came out of the theatre, they weren’t talking about how wonderful the play was, they were talking about how wonderful Michael Crawford was. The obvious fear was that, without him, the show would go limp and the gold mine would dry up.

The producers wanted a name, really, to replace him – an established star. But they couldn’t find anyone famous who could do what Michael Crawford was doing. Which was why Richard had persuaded Gale – with some difficulty, as I understand it – to come and have a look at me in
The Rivals
that night. I met him briefly after the show and let him run an appraising eye over me. He was very non-committal, although he said he liked the production. I didn’t hear anything more for a few weeks.

The problem that Gale had was that I was virtually unknown. I had a bit of a reputation in the business, maybe, but there was no way that I was a name you could put up outside a theatre and expect it to bring in the crowds. At the same time, I think Gale had reached the point where he was running very low on other choices. The bigger names they had in mind for the role had gone to see the play and, perhaps feeling a bit overawed by Crawford, decided it wasn’t for them. So, when all the other options had run dry, it came down to me.

Finally, long after I had given up expecting to hear anything, Gale got in touch and invited me and Richard to meet him at his office in the Strand, where we had a long discussion. I got the feeling that Richard had been doing a big persuasion number on Gale – but that Gale still wasn’t completely persuaded. Eventually the deal was that he would put me in the show for three months, while he continued to hunt for someone else. At any time within that three months, if someone better turned up, he could replace me and I would just have to sling my hook. As for pay, word had it that Crawford was on 12 per cent of the box office, which meant he was earning very nicely, thank you. By contrast, I was to be given a flat rate of £100 per week, for the first three months, and £150 after that, as long as the box office didn’t go down.

Scaled-down money, replaceable at any time … you will appreciate that these weren’t the most flattering of terms for me to be entering the show on. But I wasn’t arguing. In fact, I was delighted. For one thing, £100 a week might not sound a lot today, but in 2013 terms, that was about £1,000 a week – a more than handsome enough wage, it seemed to me. For another thing, I was going to be the lead in a major West End show. (As long as I didn’t cock it up, obviously.) This was a huge result for me.

In due course, Richard said, ‘You must go and see the show.’ And I, in some entirely misguided, fancy and highfalutin way,
said something along the lines of, ‘No, no – I don’t want to be influenced. I want to make the role my own – come at it afresh, make it my own creation.’

What a plonker.

Fortunately, I was persuaded to see sense: I went to the show. Strangely, I had met Michael Crawford fleetingly, just to shake his hand, a year or so prior to this. I went out with a dancer called Melanie Parr, who had a close friend in the dance troupe Pan’s People, whose weekly chiffon-clad appearances on
Top of the Pops
, interpreting the chart hits of the day, made them the object of much wistful reflection among male adolescents and beyond. Crawford had been persuaded to open a summer show with Pan’s People in Sussex, quite near Melanie’s parents’ house, which is how Melanie and I ended up going along. Crawford was quite the ladies’ man and I think the opportunity to spend a little quality time with the country’s leading all-female dance troupe might have influenced his decision to say yes to this particular gig. And why not? He was a good-looking, highly talented actor – a bit like me, only taller.

Anyway, now here I was in a box during a matinee at the Strand watching him in
No Sex Please
. And my God, he was good. Intimidatingly so. He had been in the show for a year and he had worked this stuff until it was absolutely honed, and very, very funny. As I sat there, listening to the reaction he was getting from the audience, my plan to begin anew with the play and style it entirely according to my own whim (whatever that was) began to recede. And in its place came a far better plan: to copy as much of Crawford’s performance as, in my opinion, worked – which was all of it – and to introduce a way of playing the character that suited my height.

A brief run-through of the plot of
No Sex Please
, lest you were unfortunate enough to have missed it: the play is basically about a bank manager who starts to receive, unexplained, vast shipments of sex books, all of which, to spare him embarrassment,
have to be hidden upstairs in the flat above the bank where he lives. The area manager of the bank is coming to take out the bank manager’s mother – which might sound a bit contrived but, of course, it enables the bank manager to be at risk of embarrassment in front of not just one but two rich sources of mortification: his boss and his mum. Crawford’s character was one Brian Runnicles, the hapless, put-upon bank clerk, who gets lumbered with the task of getting rid of the dirty books on the bank manager’s behalf, and sparing his boss’s wrongful and potentially ruinous exposure as a pornographer.

I did say it wasn’t Ibsen, didn’t I? But I did also say it was very funny. And it was funny because of what Crawford was doing. For example, the set incorporated a serving hatch. This got used on and off, as the play developed. At one point, for example, unnoticed by the characters onstage, Runnicles got his arm trapped under the hatch, from the offstage side, and then drew attention to his plight by twisting his fist around and knocking on it. The hatch was used several more times for bits and pieces, building to the climactic moment where Runnicles, now trouserless (obviously), had to go running across the stage and take a flying leap right through the open hatch. And as he committed himself to the dive, the hatch broke and dropped, so that he ended up crashing through it. These were pieces of business that Crawford had perfected and was pulling off with, it seemed to me, military timing.

Then there was a wonderful sequence where the area manager was allegedly on his way up the stairs, and the flat was still crammed with piles of dirty books. Runnicles and the other two characters onstage at that time formed a kind of panicked chain gang, the other two picking the books up and throwing them along the line until they reached Runnicles, who hid them, one by one. And every time Runnicles turned back, the next book was already in the air, flying straight at him. It was like a circus routine. Yet somehow all the books got tidied away and exactly
as the last volume disappeared, the door opened and the area manager came in. I loved mastering that routine when the role was mine and we used to get a round for it every night, because it was so beautifully designed and performed.

The important lesson I learned that night, watching Crawford at the Strand, was this: don’t be such a fool as not to use things that work when they’re offered to you. If someone has blazed a trail, don’t muck about in the long grass: follow them up it. If it works, and has been proved to work, you’d be an idiot not to help yourself.

Soon, when I had settled into the role, I began to add a few things of my own, on top of Crawford’s stuff. I invented a piece of business with some brown wrapping paper. Having rid the flat of its burden of filthy books, Runnicles takes delivery of a box, again addressed to the manager. This, to his dismay, turns out to be full of filthy photos. There was some lovely business about being terribly offended by these pictures, but then picking them up and actually becoming rather interested in them. Imagine, if you can, an innocent character, obviously a virgin and likely to remain so, picking up individual photos and trying to decide which way up they’re meant to be. Anyway, after I had unwrapped the parcel, there was brown paper all over the floor. One night, charging about with the photos, I put my foot on the brown paper and realised that it moved beneath you. It was shiny on one side, like ice. So I thought, if I start treading on it, I could slip and fall flat on my face. The next night, I tried that, and it worked. Then I built it up further, so that I could walk away from the paper as if deep in thought, and then I could rush back, jump onto the paper and slide to the front of the stage, as if on a snowboard. With a slight and invisible motion of one foot, I perfected a braking motion so that I’d seem to be about to go flying into the front row, but then, just as people were readying themselves for the arrival of an actor in their lap, I would
turn my ankle and come to a dead stop, right at the lip of the stage. Business à la Jason.

There was also some nice à la Jason business with a Pakamac – that classic piece of cheap and cheerful rainwear which was essentially a plastic bag with buttons. Runnicles was in and out of this less than fetching garment claiming that it was a disguise he wore while getting rid of the books. The pakamac was a good visual gag in itself but I used to come in, take it off and park it on the single newel post at the foot of a little staircase that ran down onto the stage. Then, later on, in one of my numerous panics to hide, I would take the pakamac off the newel post, drape it over myself and pretend to be another newel post on the other side of the steps. And then I worked up a bit of business out of that, too. When the danger was clear, I would pretend to be trapped in the pakamac, and would breathe in so that the plastic got sucked tight to my face, then stagger around and pretend to be on the verge of fainting. (Adults: don’t try this at home – a) it’s dangerous, b) it’s copyright.)

Perhaps my favourite stunt, though (and this was one of Crawford’s), came at a point where Runnicles was at his lowest ebb, fed up with everything and saying, ‘I’m not doing this any more.’ At that moment, the area manager starts to come through the door and Runnicles isn’t meant to be there, so his boss, Peter, the bank manager, simply picks him up and throws him out through another door. The bank manager was played brilliantly by Simon Williams, who was already beginning to make it big on the television as James Bellamy in the drama series
Upstairs Downstairs
. We had to arrange it so that Simon grabbed me by the arm and I performed a kind of jump. But it looked exactly as though Simon had picked me up off the ground, tilted me through ninety degrees and thrown me off horizontally before crisply slamming the door. It was all in the bending of the legs, ladies and gentlemen, and the timing of it, and diving
while appearing to be thrown. I landed on a mattress on the other side of the door, carefully placed there at the right time by the stage crew, who were faultlessly brilliant in this area – thankfully, or I would probably have broken my arm the first time we did it. That moment was totally theatrical, in the sense of things happening physically in front of you. In a film you would think very little of it because you would know it had been tricked. Here, in the flesh, it was very imposing, and also a complete hoot. There were many moments in the play like that. It was related to the work of magicians, in a way: with them, it’s sleight of hand; with us, it was sleight of body.