David Jason: My Life (42 page)

Of course, then we had to film it. What a bleak day that was. The weather matched our moods and it fed into the scene: the drama of the dark glasses at the graveside; the turning to the gravedigger, as he begins to shovel soil onto the coffin, and saying, in a fiercely protective way, ‘Gently!’ It was all very hard to do, with Lennard’s memory so fresh. I know we were just playing around in front of cameras, but trust me: it didn’t feel like that. I was very emotional. It was an episode written by John out of respect for Lennard. So I wanted to get it right for Lennard, and, at the same time, I wanted to get it right for John. He just wouldn’t let television dismiss Lennard’s passing, in the way that television might have done, if television had been left to its own frequently fickle devices. It was a wonderful thing – and something that nobody had done in situation comedy.

Out of adversity, of course, grew something really positive. The arrival of Buster led John Sullivan into a new rich vein – all these stories of Uncle Albert’s naval derring-do, none of
which you ever quite trusted, and all of which seemed to terminate in disaster and destruction. One of my favourite lines was when Buster was telling a story about being in the crow’s nest, on lookout, and crashing into an aircraft carrier. ‘Blimey, they would have been better off with Ray Charles in the crow’s nest.’ But there were hundreds like it.

The slightly tricky thing was that Buster had no experience whatsoever of television. During the first recording sessions, in an environment that was completely new to him, he wound himself up more and more with nerves. The pressure on you in front of an audience and cameras is very high and if you’ve never done it before it can really get to you. He kept crashing into the audience – delivering his lines without waiting for the laughter to die down, so that they were lost, which meant we kept having to stop and go back. It got to Buster badly. He was drying and losing his words, and the more he dried, the worse it got for him. The situation was becoming more and more tense. Buster was in danger of breaking down altogether and not being able to cope. So I stopped the recording. I told the audience, ‘We’re just going to take a little break.’ I think I blamed it on the lighting crew, or the director, or one of ‘them’, in a conspiratorial way to keep the audience onside. Nick and I then took Buster behind the set and we had quite a long talk. He was very upset. He was saying, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t know how.’ I explained to him that it was only a lump of tape. It didn’t matter. ‘Look at me,’ I said. ‘The number of mistakes
I
make. But every time I do, I blame someone and make it into a joke. If you can make the audience think you don’t care, the audience relax and they like you and they feel part of it.’ Buster, bless him, listened very intently, and he came back out and I think that cracked it. It took a lot of the pressure off and he got better and better and relaxed more and more into the part. And we forged a new partnership and he became the lovable Uncle Albert that we know.

The audiences continued to climb. The fourth series, in 1985, averaged nearly 15 million viewers. Late in that series, there was a scene where Del did some fly-pitching in the local market – flogging super-deluxe trimming combs and urging people to save a fortune by cutting their own hair at home. Such scenes were surprisingly rare, given that fly-pitching was ostensibly Del’s core business. I loved doing them – the patter, the banter, the rhythm. The time I had spent watching the illegal street traders on Oxford Street, while walking from my flat to whichever theatre I was playing in, finally paid off as research in those moments: ‘Come round a bit closer, would ya? At these prices, I can’t afford to deliver.’ ‘I haven’t come here to be laughed at, charffed at or generally mucked about. I’ve come to sell my wares. They’re guaranteed to cure hardcore, softcore and pimples on the tongue.’ These were the sort of lines I’d picked up on the street and filed away, for some reason, and now I could throw them into my ad-libbed sales pitch.

That year saw the annual and now traditional
Only Fools and Horses
Christmas Special pitched deliberately against ITV’s
Minder
, with George Cole and Dennis Waterman – a show which, of course, was also a comedy-drama about the black market in London, so a kind of rivalry between the two programmes was easy to confect by the press.
Minder
was a show I loved to watch, so the rivalry didn’t feel particularly hostile to me, but I guess it was a good story for the papers. For what it’s worth, we won the ‘battle of the ratings’, as it was billed, with an audience of nearly 17 million – a number I simply couldn’t get my head around when I tried to think about it. What those nearly 17 million people saw was a feature-length escapade about a dodgy diamond deal involving a rogue trader in Amsterdam, although, to be perfectly frank, my most vivid memory from that show is of Nick and me following Ray Butt out of the chuck wagon one night after a location shoot. It was cold and Ray was wrapped in an anorak the size of a
duvet, the hood of which made him look from behind like some kind of gnome in a horror film. This was funny itself, but what more particularly caught our attention was the noise of chinking as he walked. Nick and I caught up with him and I said, ‘Ray – what
is
that noise?’ He stopped and showed us his pockets, crammed full of little miniature bottles of gin and tonic. Ray had loaded himself up with supplies for the night. He did love a gin and tonic, that man. Purely recreationally, of course.

* * *

I
T STANDS TO
reason, of course, that you can’t go on television over and over again in front of audiences of 16 million people and not get recognised on the street every now and again. Yet it hadn’t really occurred to me that fame would be the inevitable consequence of all this. At any rate, I didn’t realise how fame would operate to restrict my life.

The extent to which my life was changing in this area came right home to me one Sunday afternoon when I was on Dunstable Downs, doing some gliding. I was sitting there, in the glider, waiting in line to be towed up by the powered aircraft. People were walking round – it was a public right of way, so there was no reason why they shouldn’t – when suddenly somebody spotted me … and that was it: people were coming up with their cameras and their kids and, in a couple of cases, even their dogs, and posing beside the glider. And I was sitting, as we all did, with the canopy up, strapped in and unable to move (somewhat symbolically), and silently steaming with embarrassment and frustration. Here I was, preparing to throw myself into the air in what was basically a glorified Perspex tube, and then (hopefully) to bring myself safely back down. The whole deal was pretty risky, what with the absence of that reassuring item, an engine, and when you had people going
‘Look, here he is! What are
you
doing in there?’ it was a little hard, shall we say, to maintain focus.

‘That’s me finished with gliding,’ I thought. I never went back.

I spoke to Nick about being recognised. It was happening to him, too. He said that his solution was to wear a baseball cap with the brim pulled down. He could pass himself off as some bloke in a hat and go unnoticed. But, of course, when he was noticed, it would be ‘Rodney! You plonker!’ It wasn’t so bad for me. I would generally get ‘All right, Del Boy?’ – and only on very rare occasions ‘You wally!’ For Nick, it was far harder. He got beaten around the ears with a catchphrase. But both of us were beginning to learn some lessons about fame and beginning to make adjustments.

* * *

I
N
O
CTOBER
1986, an episode of
Only Fools and Horses
achieved an audience of 18.8 million. That episode was called ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’, and it’s the one where Del appears to be about to accept a friend’s offer to emigrate to Australia and go into business over there, only to have a change of heart and return to the bosom of the family, whereupon he reflects, in a classic Sullivan line: ‘If I’d taken that chance of a lifetime, it could’ve ruined me.’ 18.8 million people, though. The show was capturing the nation’s attention to an extent that none of us had conceived it would, even in our wildest and most optimistic imaginings.

On 24 November 1986,
Only Fools
was honoured with a slot at the Royal Variety Performance. We all got very excited about that. Fancy that – the Trotters on the Royal Variety. John, Nick and I sat around and had a chat. How should we play it? Should we do a piece out of a script, a bit of the current script? (We were busy on the Dorset coast shooting ‘A Royal Flush’, that year’s Christmas Special, at the time.) Eventually
John said, ‘I think we’ve got to have something original. Leave it with me.’

True to the Sullivan style, he came back with a really neat four-minute sketch. In it, Del and Rodney tip up in Drury Lane with Uncle Albert, looking for someone called Chunky Harris, for whom they have a consignment of knock-off whisky bottles in boxes. The idea was that they would slowly realise they were not, after all, in Chunky’s renovated nightclub but, in fact, on the stage of the Theatre Royal, in the presence of the Queen Mother. Between takes on the Dorset coast, Nick, Buster and I rehearsed this piece to within an inch of its life. Here was a scene we most definitely did not wish to screw up.

The tightness of the schedule forced us to drive up from Dorset on the day of the show. There were so many acts at the Royal Variety that the dressing rooms of the Theatre Royal alone could not contain them. Our facilities were round the corner in the Fortune Theatre, which had been commandeered for the night. We had a closed-circuit television screen that showed what was happening in the show and then, as we sat in the dressing room, watching the show on the screen, we worked out that we were the only people on the bill who were doing something original. Everybody else seemed to be doing a tried-and-tested item from their honed act – not a specially written piece which they had never performed publicly before and in which they didn’t really know where the laughs were. A sickly feeling entered our stomachs.

And then it was showtime, and we were called and taken up the road and in through the stage door and shown quietly into the wings. As we heard the little introductory film being played on tape to the audience, the nerves between the three of us would have powered a wind turbine. Still, the film got a laugh, and we went out there, and the laughs continued to come and the nerves magically evaporated, as they will when an audience is immediately responsive.

We reached the point in the sketch where Rodney suddenly notices the presence of royalty in the royal box and, in a frozen panic, tries to draw my attention to it. I head over to that side of the stage, peer up blindly through the lights at where the Queen Mother is sitting, and deliver the line, ‘Is that you, Chunky?’ At this, to my astonishment, the Queen Mother graciously waved a hand in my direction. I nearly dried. Del Boy has been waved at by the Queen Mother. I knew she was going to be up there, but I didn’t expect her to wave.

Afterwards, we changed quickly out of our costumes and into dinner jackets and lined up, as is traditional, to be presented to the royal party. The Queen Mother passed along the line and when she got to me, she said, ‘Thank you.’ I was, of course, deeply touched. But then I noticed her saying ‘Thank you’ in exactly the same tone of voice to everyone else in the line, too.

We couldn’t hang around, though. We had to get straight into a car and head back to Dorset to carry on filming. We had a bottle of whisky and some water to settle the adrenalin which was still coursing through us. (Buster never drank. He sat in the front. All the more for me and Nick in the back.)

Also on the bill that night: Ronnie Corbett, Nana Mouskouri, Ken Dodd and my old colleague Bob Monkhouse – not that I got to speak to him in the rush. Still, that night I’m sure we both felt like we were a long way from Weston-super-Mare.

This was a lovely interlude, but it did nothing for the scheduled shooting of ‘A Royal Flush’, which was already well behind. I then didn’t help matters by losing my voice and needing three days off – as I recall, the only time on
Only Fools
when I ever had to call in sick. As soon as I recovered, Nick went down with the flu. The schedule was now a wreck and we were officially in panic mode. There was no time to edit the film sections so that they could be played to the audience at the studio recording; the live audience recording had to be cancelled entirely. This meant the show ended up with no laughter track.
There was also no time for music to be fitted to the soundtrack. We were shaving it so finely that, at one point, contingency plans were made to broadcast the final scene in the flat live on Christmas Day. This would have been somewhat nerve-racking. We may have been coming fresh off the back of an appearance at the Theatre Royal, but performing live to nearly 19 million people was not something of which any of us had much previous experience. It also would have played merry havoc with all our Christmases: by my reckoning, you want to be watching television on Christmas Day, not appearing live on it.

As the chaos raged and then tension rose, the answer to all questions on the set seemed to be ‘F*** knows.’ When are we shooting the studio scenes? ‘F*** knows.’ When are the script revisions going to be ready? ‘F*** knows.’ Frequently a hand gesture accompanied the answer – one’s thumb and one’s forefinger slid over one’s nose. Eventually the gesture completely replaced the verbal answer. ‘When’s the camera rehearsal?’ Hand-to-nose gesture.

Somehow, though, a broadcastable programme came together, albeit with editing continuing into the early hours of Christmas morning – Ray Butt working like one of Santa’s elves on amphetamine in order to get the show finished on time. If the resulting episode was a bit patchy, one should hardly be surprised. We were just relieved there was a show at all. Afterwards, John Challis had commemorative T-shirts made for everyone, featuring a big image of a thumb and forefinger clenched around a nose.

* * *

I
N 1987, IN
the months between filming
Only Fools and Horses
, I was approached about the possibility of playing a part in a television adaptation of
Porterhouse Blue
, the comic novel by Tom Sharpe. Malcolm Bradbury had converted the book into
a four-part series for Channel 4 and the producers wanted me to audition for the role of Scullion, the head porter of a Cambridge college. ‘Do you know the book?’ my agent asked. I didn’t, but I went out and bought it, and I read it and thought it was really great. I was a little puzzled, though, about the connection that the director had made between me, famous for playing Derek Trotter, and Scullion, this arch-manipulator who was all about respect for your superiors and respect for king and country, while quietly co-opting power for himself. The only conclusion I could come to was that both these characters were archetypal working-class men, and
Porterhouse Blue
was, in its way, like
Only Fools
, a piece about class, albeit in a different era and a vastly different place.