David Jason: My Life (29 page)

Brilliant. My big breakthrough into the movies – and I was essentially making a soft-porn film.

Worse than that, I was making a soft-porn film without even knowing it.

Even worse than that, I was making a soft-porn film without being in any of the soft-porn bits.

Imogen and I made our feelings known to the director and to the cameraman and to anyone else who would listen. We received only shrugs. By this time we were seven-eighths through filming, and also tied to a contract, as tightly as those girls had been tied to the slave-trader’s rope. So we finished up.

Reader, it was a dreadful film: please spare yourself the trouble of looking for it on Netflix, where you probably won’t find it anyway. The finished article, my shining shot at big-screen superstardom, was a patchwork of disasters. Some of the takes used in the movie were actually camera run-throughs – rehearsals, in other words. At one moment, I am seen climbing over a wall at night-time and landing on the other side of that wall in daylight. To nobody’s surprise, the film duly bombed. It became one of those films where you can fairly confidently say that more people were in it than went to see it. And there weren’t that many people in it. Sex sells, people will tell you. Not always it doesn’t.

Why did I go through with it? Because all I could see at the time was Hollywood, of course. You have to have been in a film to be considered for a film. It’s catch-22 and Equity all over again. So if you somehow do break through and get to make a film, you’re off and running. That’s how it works, isn’t it?

How far from the truth can you get?

Mind you, in fairness, I should point out that also in
Albert’s Follies/White Cargo
was a Welsh actor whom I had known since I played that part in
Softly Softly
right at the beginning of my television career. It was this particular actor who had the mixed privilege of attending a Westminster hotel, after the three weeks of principal filming at Twickenham had ended, to romp around on a bed with the actress Sue Bond for the added-on sex scene belatedly deemed necessary by the producers. His name was Dave Prowse and clearly Dave managed to put this embarrassment behind him very efficiently: he later went on to play Darth Vader in the
Star Wars
movies. What had he got that I hadn’t? Well, let’s put it this way: he didn’t have to wear lifts.

* * *

A
S THIS IS
an autobiography, it had better be warts and all. So my other less-than-successful attempt to storm the world’s cinemas in the early 1970s had me trying to use, as my Trojan Horse, the British film adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s
Under Milk Wood
, directed by Andrew Sinclair. Word had got out that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had signed up to appear. Accordingly, thousands of actors went along to the London auditions, lured, I’m sure, by the enticing prospect of being able to say they had worked with Liz and Dicky. In fact, I think almost anyone who could do a Welsh accent and who was in London that day showed up, irrespective of whether they were an actor or not.

My trump card, though, and the thing that made me stand out from the crowd, was that I had been in Malcolm Taylor’s stage production of
Under Milk Wood
, both at the Vanbrugh Theatre and then, later, in its six-month transfer to the Mayfair Theatre. This helped swing me a part. (Incidentally, Dylan Thomas’s daughter, Aeronwy, came to see that Mayfair Theatre production and said nice things about it, which made us proud.)

I got cast as Nogood Boyo, and off I went on the train, all expenses paid, to Wales for four days, thinking, yet again, ‘Next step, Hollywood.’ We were billeted in an old-fashioned, badly faded but still rather grand hotel on the west coast, which made a change from the fusty bed and breakfasts of the touring theatre scene, and many was the night that Dicky Burton and I sat at the hotel bar, drinking and yarning and putting the industry to rights until the small hours.

OK, not really. Burton played the narrator, so he wasn’t around at all while I was there. As for Elizabeth Taylor, she was Rosie Probert, the tart with the heart, and none of my scenes put me opposite her. However, on one of the days that I was there, a buzz started to go around the place: ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s on the set!’ I took care to inveigle myself into the room where they were filming and observed from a distance.

And lo and behold, eventually there she was, radiating starriness. She was in a long nightdress and filming a scene where she had to lie down on a bed. There was a lot of pampering and fussing of her and ensuring that she was comfortable where she lay. Once she was settled, the director led in an extra in a grubby costume and brought him to the bedside. This extra was clearly more nervous than he had ever been in his life.

‘Miss Taylor,’ the director said, hesitantly and subserviently, with the manner befitting conversation with a megastar, ‘may I introduce you to Darren? He’s going to play the part of the sailor.’

What Darren had to do, following this scanty introduction, was to get into bed with Elizabeth Taylor. Then he had to lie there, on top of her, not moving. This, I have to say, Darren duly did. I’m not sure she even looked at him at any point. The camera was above them, so, in the shot, all you saw was the back of Darren’s head and one of his ears, filling maybe a third of the frame, and then, more predominantly, Liz Taylor’s face, looking up into the camera from the pillow.

Taylor spoke her line: ‘Quack twice and ask for Rosie.’

That was it. Darren then climbed off Britain’s most famous film actress and walked away. But presumably that was his story forever more: ‘I got into bed with Elizabeth Taylor once.’ And I bet nobody ever believed him. Apart from, of course, those who were on the set that day, and the very small number of people who saw the film.

I was so impressed by my surroundings on that shoot: the huge lights, the giant 35mm camera on tracks … this seemed like the full monty to me, the big time. That said, I had my own embarrassing moment. As Nogood Boyo, I had to be, as the Dylan Thomas line put it, ‘up to no good in the wash-house’ with Lily Smalls – a brief cameo moment which required me to come up behind Lily, who was played by Meg Wynn Owen, and reach round to grab her breasts. Maybe less of a cameo moment, then, and more of a camisole moment. Either way, I was consumed with self-consciousness. It was as awkward as I have ever felt in front of a camera – a terribly clinical moment in front of about twelve gawpers.

On reflection, this was one of only two occasions in my acting life when I found myself doing anything that could remotely be described as a sex scene. The other one occurred in a production of
Micawber
when I was playing opposite Jan Francis – and that, too, was surprisingly mortifying.
Micawber
was a four-part comedy drama written by John Sullivan, the writer of
Only Fools and Horses
, who had borrowed the character of Wilkins Micawber from Charles Dickens’s
David Copperfield
. Episode one aired on ITV on Boxing Day, 2001 – when it went up against the Christmas Special of
Only Fools
over on the BBC. So, that Christmas, on one channel was a production starring me and written by John Sullivan, and on another channel was a production starring me and written by John Sullivan. It’s all about viewer-choice in the end, isn’t it?

Anyway, Jan was portraying this rather evil woman, Lady
Charlotte, who gets Mr Micawber into the bedroom and starts to seduce him. During the course of the action, which requires her to be fairly unsubtle about things, she pulls him down on top of her very hard, essentially planting his nose in her cleavage.

We did a run-through, and Jan yanked my head down to her neckline, as per instruction. At which point, I heard a voice above us say, ‘Hold on, David – stay there while we relight this.’

So, there I was, with my head stuck between the breasts of a woman whom I knew well, but whose husband I knew weller. (He was Martin Thurley, the writer of
March in Windy City
.) And there I stayed, waiting for a couple of technical hitches to be sorted out. And waiting. And waiting … Jan and I became quite hysterical as these long minutes ticked by, but, on my part, the hysteria was entirely to cover the embarrassment.

Obviously, when you go to the pub after a day like that, and you tell someone with a proper job that this is how you spent your working day, they tend to look at you slightly askance. But what you’ve got to remember about experiences like these is that they take place in excruciating circumstances: witheringly, belittlingly, in a roomful of people and with someone popping up every minute or so with a bit of powder on a puff. (‘You’re sweating, David.’ ‘Yes, I know I am.’) It’s not uncomplicated, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, my other key memory of the
Under Milk Wood
filming, beyond the embarrassment of the breast-grab, was having to wade out into the sea to film a scene with Mrs Dai Bread, who was played by Ruth Madoc. I had known Ruth since that Malcolm Taylor production. She was now married to the actor Philip Madoc and was three or four months pregnant with their first child at this time. And here we were, dipping in the sea, in March, in Wales, which doesn’t tend to resemble the Caribbean at that time of year – nor, really, at many other times of the year. It was stunningly freezing. I was fully clothed, but
Ruth wasn’t wearing all that much. This was some kind of dream sequence and Ruth had to be in the water, topless, and summon me in after her. We were in the water for about twenty minutes and did the scene about three times over. All the time, I was worrying, saying to myself, ‘This can’t be a good idea for a pregnant woman.’ When I think of that scene, I still shiver. I shot a documentary in Norway in winter once upon a time, and even there it wasn’t as freezing.

It all worked out well, though. With the birth, I mean; Ruth had a boy. The film, on the other hand, worked out less well. People around the production spoke very excitedly at the time about how
Under Milk Wood
had never been adapted into a movie, and it turned out, retrospectively, that there were very good reasons for that: like the fact that, by definition, it’s ‘a play for voices’. It’s all about the words, and the images created by the words, and making a picture out of it was, fundamentally, beside the point, or even self-defeating. I think the film was slightly below the standing of Burton and Taylor at the time. But Burton did it because he was Welsh and he was, as he never ceased telling people, ‘in love with the bard’. Well, we all were – and also, some of us, in love with the idea of making a movie.

Alas, barring a couple of other more or less regrettable excursions, that was pretty much the extent of my film career. In 1978, a half-hour comedy I’d made with Ronnie Barker a few years earlier, called
The Odd Job
, got expanded into an eighty-minute film, directed by Graham Chapman from
Monty Python
. Chapman also played the lead, a depressive who hires an odd-job man to bump him off. (Ronnie Barker had turned it down, which should have sounded more alarm bells with me than it did.) I played the unlikely hired killer, as I had for Ronnie, but I wasn’t Chapman’s first choice. He wanted to give the role to Keith Moon, which gives you an indication of the different direction in which he wanted to take the comedy – rather losing the essence of it in the process, I felt. Certainly this was the
only time in my life when I was ever considered a substitute for the drummer of the Who.

When they tried to revive the
Carry On
format in 1992, with
Carry On Columbus
, starring Julian Clary, I was sounded out about getting involved. But I read the script and found I wasn’t laughing very often. Not for me, Raymond. (I do, however, do a good Julian Clary impression. What a pity this is a book, or I would do it for you now.)

More recently, the producers of
Gnomeo & Juliet
, the children’s animation, offered me a part in a film (probably not for children and certainly not an animation) about the man who invented Viagra. Don’t ask me which part. Let’s just say I found I couldn’t get all that worked up about it.

So, that’s the story of me and Hollywood … so far. But you know the old saying: ‘This time next year …’

* * *

A
T LEAST ONE
good thing came out of that
Under Milk Wood
shoot in Wales, though. It was where I met an actress called Olwen Rees, who played Gwennie. She was a beautiful girl and a lovely singer, and I grew very friendly with her and her husband, Johnny Tudor, who was a cabaret artist who worked the shipping lines.

A couple of years later, in 1977, I was touring in a production of
The Norman Conquests
which, among other dates, went to Cardiff. Olwen came to see a performance and brought along her friend, a striking, red-headed girl called Myfanwy Talog. Myfanwy was a teacher turned actress and, though I didn’t know at the time, quite famous in Wales on account of her appearances on Welsh television with the comedy duo Rees and Ronnie. You could say they were the Welsh version of the Two Ronnies, and Myfanwy was the leading girl in the show.

Olwen was doing a bit of matchmaking, clearly – and a very
successful piece of matchmaking, as it happened. The three of us went out for dinner together and I was instantly taken with Myfanwy, and she with me. We started to go out together – which was quite tricky at first because she was in Wales and I was either in London or off on tour. You find a way, though, if you really want to do something. We made it last for eighteen years.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The noble art of raspberry-blowing. My apprenticeship as a shop assistant. And the bed that rocked in Billingham.

I CALLED RONNIE
Barker the ‘Guvnor’. It was a jokey nickname at first, but it grew to express exactly what I felt about him. The Guv’nor is what he was to me, and always will be. It wasn’t just the depth of his comic gift, the abilities he had as a writer and a performer and a composer and an artist (even his handwriting was a work of art), it was the way he conducted himself, the kind of man he was. I’ve always tried to emulate him a bit and to feel him on my shoulder.