David Jason: My Life (16 page)

He was also extremely committed to his art. To achieve plausible one-leggedness, as the role of Long John Silver required, Paul had his leg strapped up tight behind his thigh,
which almost crippled him in reality. Every time he came offstage, there were two people waiting in the wings to unstrap him and ease his leg down, so the circulation could start returning to his foot.

Our
Treasure Island
also nobly refused the option of a stuffed parrot in order to go for a real one instead – a huge macaw, a wonderful creature, hired from the local pet shop. However, sometimes it would play, and sometimes it wouldn’t. It was quite compliant about sitting on Paul’s shoulder – and extremely compliant about shitting all down the back of Paul’s costume. Some nights, though, the parrot would get bored and express its boredom by turning round and showing its arse to the audience. Alternatively it would launch an attack on the big hooped gold earrings that Paul was wearing, sometimes managing to yank them out altogether. And sometimes it would go for the earring, miss, and get Paul’s ear instead. Paul would frequently end the night with big lumps taken out of his lobes.

Of course, for as long as the bird was onstage the audience would be watching it, rather than the play, so the entire cast knew the indignity of being upstaged by a parrot. But Paul knew that indignity most keenly of all. There was a moment where he had to perch the parrot on a balustrade for a while, and then later collect it by putting out his arm. If the parrot was in the right mood, it would walk up Paul’s arm and back to his shoulder again, earning a giant round of applause. If the parrot was in the wrong mood, it wouldn’t budge – much to Paul’s increasing irritation. But he was a pro, and he got on with it, bloodied ears or no bloodied ears – an example to us all, whatever our walk of life.

Those Bromley days were a fiery old baptism altogether, because while you were doing your current production at night, you were rehearsing your next one during the day. New scripts were constantly having to be learned – something which I have always found very effortful – and the threat of accidentally and
ruinously dropping a passage from
Treasure Island
into a Saturday matinee of, say,
Hay Fever
was ever-present. Or, perhaps even worse, dropping a passage of
Hay Fever
into a Saturday matinee of
Treasure Island
.

Rehearsals generally ran from ten fifteen until four in the afternoon, when you would break for tea and then get ready to be onstage for curtain-up at seven thirty. And given that I was still living with my parents at Lodge Lane when this contract began, by the time I had driven home it was about eleven thirty or midnight and I’d have to be up again at eight fifteen to be ready to drive back down to south London for the next morning’s start.

Eventually, to be nearer the theatre and to start growing up and being a normal adult-type person, I moved into a flat above a hairdresser’s in Thornton Heath. The hairdresser’s in question belonged to my brother Arthur and his wonderful new wife, Joy, whose own towering beehive hairdo in those days was an absolute work of art. The business was named, without fear of confusion, ‘Joy’s’. Arthur and Joy had decided they no longer wanted to live above the shop and, with things going well for both of them, they had put a deposit down on a place on a new housing estate nearby. They offered me the flat at a generously low rent. It was the first rung on the ladder to independence. Every night I would unlock the front door, head through the darkened salon, past the big dryers and, amid the sticky scent of lacquer and shampoo, climb the stairs to bed. At last, no doubt to my parents’ intense relief, I had flown the nest – and at the age of twenty-six, probably not a moment too soon.

In
Aladdin
I had acted with an actress called Frances Barlow. She was only five foot four, so even I was a bit taller than her. I had seen her in a musical and had been smitten with her and when we acted together I finally plucked up the courage to ask her on a date. We went out for quite a long time in the mid-1960s. She lived with her father, out near Heathrow Airport,
so, again, my Mini Van clocked up quite a few miles. Our relationship ran along very easily and pleasurably. Then one day, when, quite by coincidence, we had both been auditioning in the same building, we went for lunch. Somehow the conversation ended up with us discussing the possibility of us moving in together and things becoming more permanent. And the more I thought about it, the more it terrified me. At that stage in my life, I thought of myself as wedded to my career and I was paranoid to an absurd degree about getting tied down and trapped and stopped. Moving in with someone would have scuppered my future – or so my panicked mind thought. So we finished.

This was a pattern which was to repeat itself several times during those early years when I was struggling to get a footing in the business. I went out with girls and became close to them, but at the first sign of anything more permanent or of the emotional connection strengthening, I would break away and flee, as fast as I could. I wasn’t just phobic about commitment, in the traditional male way, I was phobic about wrecking my chances of making it as an actor, a project from which I rarely relaxed in those days and which preoccupied me to the exclusion of pretty much all else – including, I can only confess, the feelings of the woman I happened to be with at the time. (Frances went on to work as a singer on a Greek cruise liner. And the ship’s captain, who was obviously no fool, invited her to dine and they were wed, I’m very happy to say.)

Back at the theatre, I found myself cast in Sheridan’s
The Rivals
. I played Bob Acres and the aforementioned grand thespian, Paul Bacon, played Sir Anthony Absolute. Paul and I ended up sharing a dressing room. He would have been in his forties at this time, and I was twenty-six – but a young twenty-six, and knowing very little, really, about the ways of the world. I certainly had no idea what homosexuality was. I just thought he was very theatrical and a lovely man who could hand down his experience to me. For example, the Restoration was a period
that Paul knew well and for
The Rivals
he taught me all sorts of tricks – how to bow and how to stand and how to shape your hands in the appropriate style. He was a great and generous teacher and I loved him for that.

What I didn’t realise was quite how much he liked me.

One day Paul said, ‘You must come round for supper and we can go through our lines together.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be a great help – lovely.’ He turned out to be residing in the less than grand circumstances of a tiny Bromley bedsit, and apparently living out of a suitcase. Still, there was a stove in the corner on which he cooked us a wonderful meal, and we talked about the play, did a reading, and sat in the room’s two armchairs having a glass of wine or two. And then, as the hour wore on, Paul rose from his chair, came and sat on the floor in front of me, put his arms across my knees and gazed up at me.

I thought, ‘This is odd. This is what you’d do if you were a girl. Or certainly if you were a girl in a movie.’

At that point, Paul started to run his hand up my leg. At this, the hairs rose on the back of my neck. I remember feeling that it was very important to keep talking – to keep talking and, almost as if not noticing, push away that hand. Which I did. But back the hand came, creeping further along my thigh. So I, still talking fast, pushed it away again. Back it came.

Eventually, Paul said, ‘You know you want this, dear.’ To which, I replied, ‘Actually, I should probably be getting off home.’

I stood up and stepped round him towards the door. But in that instant he had somehow leapt between me and the exit. I still don’t know how he did that – how he got from a reclining position on the floor to a standing position at the door in the click of a finger. It was like magic – the sort of thing David Copperfield might have done, in his 1980s pomp. I thought there must have been two of him – perhaps a body double, working as a plant.

And then he put his arms around me and started to kiss me.

I remembered at that point an expression I had heard girls use: ‘His hands were everywhere.’ Now I knew exactly what they meant. No sooner had you taken one hand out of here than another one went in there. He was like an octopus.

Pressed back against the door, I eventually got a decent hold on both his forearms, held them tight and said, as firmly as I could, ‘Paul, I don’t want to lose your friendship, but I really must go home. Thank you for a nice evening.’

We never mentioned it again and our friendship, blessedly, continued to thrive. Paul died in 1995, without reaching the level in the profession that he desired and deserved. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he found household-name fame at a remove, as the voice of Hector in the hugely popular children’s glove-puppet show
Hector’s House
. I was really pleased for him, although, thanks to that night in a Bromley bedsit, I could never hear that floppy-eared dog saying ‘I’m a great big dreamy old Hector’ in quite the way I was intended to.

CHAPTER SIX

A short stay in a cheap motel. The Book of Genesis, revisited. And how I did eventually become a pirate.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO
demonstrate range and flexibility in your early years as an actor, so it’s with some pride that I now relate how, within a month and a half of launching myself onto the nation’s screens for a few seconds as a harnessed policeman, I was back again, appearing for a few seconds as an unharnessed criminal.

This was in February 1966, during the first series of
Softly Softly
, a CID-oriented drama serial, spun off from the BBC’s popular cop show
Z-Cars
.
Softly Softly
starred Stratford Johns, freshly promoted to the plain-clothes force as Detective Superintendent Charles Barlow – not that the star of the show was anywhere near the scene that I was in. My second moment of nationally broadcast action saw me play the part of the co-driver of a getaway van – a character imaginatively named ‘Smith’. Actually, the verb ‘play’ might be a bit of an exaggeration here. I’m not sure I was that convincing. I was meant to be dozing in the van’s passenger seat and to be startled awake by the arrival at the window of a policeman with a torch. When I watched it back later on the television, I almost died with
mortification. I woke up in that van quicker than any human has ever awoken anywhere. It wasn’t as if someone had shone a torch on me: it was as if someone had connected my privates to the torch’s battery. I should like to point out, though, that I was used to directors helping an actor to draw the nuance out of a character, as tended to happen in the theatre. In television, clearly, you were supposed to know all that already.

Anyway, given the absence of wires and the fact that absolutely no one in the cast, so far as I can remember, was wearing a goose outfit, I guess we would have to call this my first venture into serious televised drama. Incidentally, the actor who was sat beside me, playing the driver (and perfectly convincingly, with dialogue and everything), was Brian Wilde, whom I would later come across as Mr Barrowclough, the ineffectual prison warden, in
Porridge
.

After my abrupt wake-up on
Softly Softly
, I wasn’t entrusted with another television role for six months – until August. And even then, critics of a harsh frame of mind might have said the words ‘role’ and ‘television’ were something of an overstatement. The appearance we’re talking about was in the soap opera
Crossroads
.

Ah, the Crossroads Motel. Even now, just the mention of the word can cast a chilly hand around an actor’s kidneys – and not only his kidneys. ‘The actors’ graveyard’ they used to call it – a hole into which many a promising career disappeared, screaming, and where you were actively encouraged to bring your own shovel. The motel had opened in November 1964 and already, by the summer of 1966 when I checked in, it had become a byword for low production values and – I’m sorry to relate – iffy acting. Of course, that’s a terribly sweeping generalisation about a series in which a lot of the performances and a lot of the storytelling were really good. In defence of both the production staff and the cast, most of the show’s failures to hit the mark were the result of doing everything in a blind
hurry. The series was running at the heart-attack rate of five half-hour episodes per week. In 1967 the producers admitted partial defeat and scaled it back to four episodes in order to give themselves – and everyone else – a bit of breathing space. Three episodes per week was perhaps a more reasonable proposition, but that didn’t happen until 1980, by which time everyone was completely knackered and the programme only had six more years to run. But no one was making allowances for that.
Crossroads
had become an open goal for satire.

And yet, for all that, it was a big hit, a television juggernaut – massively popular, the ITV network’s second most-watched show after
Coronation Street
, and sometimes even capable of nudging ahead of
Corrie
in the ratings. (It was also, let us not forget, the favourite programme of Mary Wilson, the wife of the then prime minister, Harold Wilson. Could this be the same Harold Wilson who tried to stop my dear mate Malcolm Taylor from running down the country’s currency supplies by leaving Heathrow with more than £50 about his person? I believe it could.) All in all, the show must have been getting at least as much right as it was getting wrong. I wasn’t in a position to be snooty about the offer of work on
Crossroads
, but, more to the point, I wasn’t inclined to be, either. To me, it meant continuity of work and also an invaluable opportunity to learn about working in front of television cameras, which is such a different discipline from acting in the theatre. I would have been mad not to seize it.

So, off I went on the train to Birmingham, the home of ATV. Rehearsals were held in a couple of rooms in a backstreet, on the second floor of an unprepossessing building, up a flight of concrete steps with a metal handrail. The assistant stage manager met me at the double doors. These opened into the main rehearsal room, all laid out as a bare but full-scale mock-up of the set. Masking tape on the floor marked the edges of the rooms, posts indicated doors. The motel reception desk – which,
as for so many characters, would be my point of entry into the series – was represented by a couple of planks on a pair of trestles. I was shown into a smaller side room, containing a jumble of chairs around the edge, including one rather comfortable-looking armchair which I proceeded to plonk myself down into. Other cast members slowly began to arrive. Sue Nicholls, who played Marilyn Gates the waitress, was very warm and welcoming. She came up and said hello straight away. Everyone else, though, seemed to go a bit on edge at the sight of me. I couldn’t for the life of me work out why, and assumed it was just me, as a nervous novice, judging the atmosphere wrongly. So I carried on sitting there, with my head buried in the script, and waited.