David Jason: My Life (20 page)

No CGI in those days, of course: no noodling this scene together on a computer afterwards; no jumping up and down in front of a blue screen for a few minutes and then going home to let the pixel-boffins do the rest. In the mid-sixties, if you wanted to be filmed diving into a cup of tea and then being pelted with sugar lumps, you had no option but to build a cup of tea big enough to dive into, and a pair of sugar lumps big enough to be pelted with. And then the diving and the pelting actually had to happen. Accordingly, on the day, I arrived to find cup, tea bag and lumps of an appropriate scale ready and waiting, along with a suitable quantity of brown-coloured water. And, of course, that tight white wetsuit.

Incidentally, the problems they had with that brown water – trying to get the shade of brown right, to the satisfaction of the people from Tetley, who were obviously very fussy about how their product was going to be portrayed. It went through many phases – from puddle to wet dog. It was ages before everyone was happy.

So we went for a take. And all went well, until we got to
the end. There was a problem with the sugar lumps: they floated, and remained floating for about ten minutes before they sank. Sugar lumps, as practical experiment in domestic settings has long since proved, don’t do that. Sugar lumps sink. So a means had to be devised of causing the sugar lumps to go under. They were made from wire mesh, coated with plaster of Paris, and the method chosen involved splitting the lumps open and putting weights inside them. Big weights. Stage weights, to be specific – the blocks of steel they use to hold stage flats in place, a number of which happened to be hanging around near the set. They started off putting one of these weights inside and then going for a take to see what it looked like. Now it sank – but not in a realistic enough way. So they continued adding weights until everyone was happy that the lumps behaved as sugar lumps might. By the end of this incremental weight-increase process, I looked up from my position, treading brown water in the teacup, and noticed, to my alarm, that it was now taking two props boys to manhandle each one of these cubes.

I now found myself dressed like a sperm in Woody Allen’s
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
and dodging an artificial sugar lump weighing about the same as a baby elephant. As it whistled past me, it felt like I had been blasted full in the face by a strong wind. There is no question that, if I hadn’t managed to flip aside as the sugar lump narrowly slipped past the skin on the end of my nose, I would have been splattered all over the teacup by the second one. Forget the tea bag; the flavour would have ended up flowing out of me. Health and safety: where were you then?

With a considerably more slender degree of danger, I also did a commercial with my brother Arthur around this time. Arthur and I had a little ventriloquist act that we had worked up for special occasions. He would be the ventriloquist and I would be the doll – an extremely disobedient doll. We got a very small pair of trousers, stuffed the legs with socks and rags and attached
small wellington boots to them. I would tie these altered trousers around my waist using a belt, and then stand behind a chair, flopping the wellies over the chair back, and Arthur would stand alongside me, as the ventriloquist, and pretend to work me. If I put make-up on so that my jaw looked hinged and my mouth seemed unnaturally large, the effect was quite amusing.

A friend of Malcolm Taylor’s was a casting director for commercials and she had seen us do this routine, so one day, when she happened to be looking for a vent act for a yogurt advertisement, she asked us if we fancied having a go. We thought, ‘Nothing ventured.’ So we went along to the audition and ended up sitting in a waiting room with about half a dozen genuine vent acts, all holding their dolls – a slightly awkward scene, as you might imagine. Eventually, it was our turn. The director sat us down and had us do some business with a yogurt pot. I was supposed to conclude the skit by putting the spoonful of yogurt in my mouth. Instead, by way of a final flourish, I took the spoonful of yogurt and rammed it in my ear. It was just something I thought of on the spur of the moment. This seemed to clinch it. We got the job.

Such were the things I was prepared to do in those slightly unfocused early days. I dreamed of being an actor, and I’d stick yogurt in my ear if I thought it would get a laugh and advance my cause.

* * *

I
N
A
PRIL 1967
, I got a small part in
The Dick Emery Show
on BBC television. Dick was a damn good stand-up comic and also a drag act, and he was a huge star at the time. His catchphrase entered the language: ‘Oooh, you are awful – but I like you.’ He turned the affectionate but over-forceful whack with a handbag into an art form, and nobody stumbled in heels while walking up a street the way Dick Emery did. People loved him.

My moment on the show, basking in the light cast by his skirt-wearing glory, came and went in the blink of an eye, but I seemed to make an impression on him. Dick was booked to do a summer season at the Pier Theatre in Bournemouth that year, and when my name came up as a possible cast member, he was instrumental in getting me the job. I spent May in London, rehearsing the two shows we were taking down there, a pair of farces whose names, perhaps, betray their nature:
Chase Me, Comrade
and
Honeymoon Bedlam
. And then I packed my suitcase, slung it in the back of my new car and set off for the seaside.

New car? Yes, I had chopped in the trusty Mini Van for a Mini without the van bit – new, dark blue, found at a showroom in Finchley and bought, of course, on the never-never. I was very proud of that car.

That was my first taste of the joys of a summer season in an end-of-the-pier show – and I probably couldn’t have found a better comic to undergo my initiation with than Dick Emery. Dick was formidably good at his job, and very serious and diligent in the way he went about what he did. After a while, though, when he got settled into the play and everything was up and running, the comic in him would re-emerge and he would get up to all sorts of nonsense.

Most of the contents of the plays now evade my memory’s grasp, but I particularly remember a scene set in a hotel bedroom in
Honeymoon Bedlam
where I had the role of a young policeman sent to interview the hotel manager, who was played by John Newbury. Dick entered, dressed (surprise, surprise) as a woman, and at one point he would have to walk down to the front of the stage and then turn his back on the audience and address John and me, upstage centre. As soon as Dick knew the audience couldn’t see his face, he’d start gurning at us, pulling the most horrendous faces – faces in which his lower lip seemed to pass up over his nose, faces wherein his eyes seemed to grow
to the size of tennis balls and his chin to drag along the ground, faces which seemed to express the most alarming of sexual intentions towards us … the worst faces you have ever seen. This was all done, of course, with the intention of getting us to crack up and muff our lines. Dick was merciless. It wasn’t enough for him to see you starting to go. He would keep at it until you went completely. It reached a point where even the audience could sense that he was up to something. They could hear the tremble in our voices and see that we had turned puce and were doing our best not to look at him. The audience didn’t mind, of course. They loved that kind of stuff, coming from Dick, and, after all, this was seaside fare – people on holiday who were out for a good time. This was not the West End.

Dick was married to a dancer and a choreographer called Josephine Blake. This was his fifth marriage of five. However, there was a girl in the company who was very attractive. She turned Dick’s head, and he decided he had to have her. So he set himself the task. He was quite brazen about it – very open about his courting of her. I couldn’t believe his audacity, in a way. He came in with huge bunches of flowers and chocolates for this girl, wined her and dined her. He was a very charming man and she was powerless to resist. When Dick’s wife came down from London, as she did from time to time, the rest of us had to put our heads down and pretend that nothing was going on. The affair lasted for the season – because that’s all it was, for Dick: a season’s affair. But I think the girl got quite broken-hearted about it at the end. She had taken it more seriously.

It’s a wonder Dick had the time and energy for all this. When we were in Bournemouth he would do the stage show six nights a week and two matinees, and then on a Sunday, which was supposed to be his night off, he’d drive off to do a stand-up routine at a seaside joint somewhere else. I went with him one night to Swanage Pavilion. It was a revue show for the
holidaymakers, with Dick top of the bill. He was on a percentage of the box office, so he was pulling down some tidy money for those appearances. And because it was a slightly different setting, he could do more risky, close-to-the-knuckle routines – be a bit more ‘blue’, as we used to say. The place went mad for him. I count Dick as one of the great British comics of that time. In my opinion, he was right up there with Bob Monkhouse as a gag-teller.

I loved that summer season. I was on £29 per week, which seemed relatively princely to me. I shared a dressing room at the theatre with John Newbury and on a nice day we could open its door and go out onto a small balcony and smell the briny sea. Of course, when the weather was rough, the entire play took place against the background roar of waves thundering against the legs of the pier. You often wondered whether, by the time the curtain fell, you would be halfway to France on a lump of wood.

To save a bit of money, I rented a little three-bedroom cottage in a leafy suburb with the actress Doremy Vernon, who later played the canteen manageress in
Are You Being Served?
, and a young actor who was my understudy. We worked out that it would be much cheaper than going into digs, and it also left us completely free to come and go as and when we pleased. On the occasions when we needed to pop back to London, I would cram Doremy and John Newbury into the Mini and give them a lift, dropping them off in Chiswick before I headed on back to my flat in Thornton Heath. Doremy had to travel in the front seat because she had been a dancer and her legs were too long to go in the back. It was John who had to hunch up back there, much to his chagrin and lasting discomfort.

Mostly, though, we stayed in Bournemouth on our days off and entertained ourselves there. David Browning was our company manager and also played a small part in
Chase Me, Comrade
. He was a keen fisherman and would often be down
by the sea with his rod. He informed me that there were a lot of mullet in the water near the pier. That rather inspired me. I hired a speargun, a face mask and some flippers and spent a day spear-fishing under Bournemouth Pier. I ended up spearing half a dozen mullet, and then emerged from the water like Ursula Andress with the fish swinging from my belt. We took them back to the cottage and cooked them for supper.

It’s no exaggeration to say that summer in Bournemouth was formative for me – and not just because it enabled me to observe Dick Emery from close quarters. It was where I forged a connection with the man who would shape the course of my career in so many ways and link me eventually with Ronnie Barker.

Humphrey Barclay was a television producer, not long out of working in radio. Rediffusion, the London ITV station, had put him in charge of creating a new comedy show for children. It was meant to be a revue show, with sketches and music, which I don’t think children’s television had gone in for before. Humphrey was partway through recruiting for it, and had already found some interesting and very talented, though as yet unknown, writers and actors who were recently out of university. Their names were Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Humphrey was looking for another ingredient to add to the mix – someone who could do physical comedy.

Initially, his thoughts turned to my great friend Malcolm Taylor – known to you already as the director of the stage version of
Under Milk Wood
, and as a man who attempted to smuggle currency out of the country in his socks. Malcolm auditioned for Humphrey – and Humphrey gave him the job. Malcolm then did a remarkably selfless thing. He told Humphrey he should have a look at me. When I talked to Malcolm about this afterwards, he just said that he thought the work would be perfect for me – more perfect for me than for him. That’s
not the kind of thing that happens in our business very often. Most people cling to whatever opportunity they’re given, and understandably. But not Malcolm. I was always enormously touched and grateful to him for that.

In order to have a look at me, Humphrey made the journey down to Bournemouth, and took his seat for an evening performance of
Chase Me, Comrade
. Now, Humphrey was a classics graduate from Cambridge, and a rather scholarly and intellectual man. I’m not sure that sitting among a crowd of lairy holidaymakers watching Dick Emery camping about the place in drag was naturally his first choice for a good night out. It didn’t help either that, in
Chase Me, Comrade
, I didn’t make my big entrance until the start of the second half of the play, so Humphrey had endured quite a lot before I even showed my face. Humphrey later confided to me that I came very close to playing to his empty seat. During the interval, he was right on the edge of cutting his losses, walking out into the good Bournemouth night and going back to plan A.

A fortuitous piece of timing, then. I owe so much of what subsequently happened in my career to Humphrey that I shiver to think what might have become of me had he not overcome his better judgement and forced himself to endure a few more minutes of end-of-the-pier farce.

So, at last, on I came. The first half of the play had concluded with everybody else running around after Dick Emery, who, unless my memory is deceiving me, was dressed up as a Russian ballerina. (I don’t wish to accuse Humphrey of being fussy, but what’s not to like about this set-up?) The second half opened with me arriving in an empty house, letting myself in through an ajar door at the centre of the set, and shouting, ‘Anyone home? It’s Bobby Hargreaves. I’m your new neighbour.’ The stage remained empty. In the middle of the set, positioned at the foot of some steps, was a large ship’s bell. During the play, this bell was used to summon everyone to dinner. The deal was
that I’d ring the bell to find out if there was anybody home and, at that point, everyone would come back onstage.