David Jason: My Life (22 page)

Like everything in
Do Not Adjust Your Set
, the Captain
Fantastic films were about all sorts of nothing much. One episode was devoted entirely to the arrival of a giant box in the middle of a field – truly stupid stuff. (Diving about on the grass in that field brought my face out in hives – my first allergic reaction to pollen.) Humph had the idea that Captain Fantastic should arrive in the Land of the Backwards People. The Backwards People had coats on back to front, buttoned up at the rear, and gloves, and masks on the backs of their heads, and walked with a bizarre gait. Captain Fantastic encountered them on a beach – it was all rather bizarre and eerie in a
Doctor Who
-like way. Humph also found this wonderfully twitchy piece of classical music called ‘March of the Heroes’ and that became the films’ soundtrack, binding it all together. I thought that, in some small way, I was following in the path of my heroes, Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton, and it made me very happy. I felt that, if I did nothing else in my career, I’d always have Captain Fantastic.

Series one ran to thirteen half-hour episodes, the first of which went out, as a kind of appetiser when the biggest audience was likely to be watching, on Boxing Day in 1967. This was turning into a bit of a tradition for me. Two Christmases previously, you’ll recall, I had been able to gather the family to watch my blurred and distant figure swinging from the ceiling in a policeman’s costume in the BBC pantomime. This festive season, I proudly brought my kin together to see me muck about in some mock-Shakespearean nonsense, appear on triangle with the popular German group the Eric Von Tuthri Players – formerly the Eric Von Tuthri Four – and fail to get served by Michael Palin’s bafflingly obstructive grocer. They also got to witness a deafeningly discordant performance of the theme song from
The Sound of Music
by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the surreal pop-jazz group featuring Neil Innes and Vivian Stanshall, and a skit in which an entire gang of criminals turned out to be undercover policemen. (The Bonzos, incidentally, were a crazy bunch of way-out musos, and we were all dedicated fans
of theirs, especially after hearing their hit song ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’. When they performed that number in the studio for the show, the entire crew were going around singing it, and carried on for weeks afterwards.) Plus, of course, they were privvy to my starring role in the first episode of the adventures of Captain Fantastic – ending on a fairly typical cliffhanger, voiced sonorously by Mike: ‘Who is the mysterious tree? Who was in the exploding lunch box? Who was the first man to drink the Channel? Will Captain Fantastic survive the horrors of the boating park? See next week’s exciting adventure. Or don’t as the case may be.’

Did the room rock with the White family’s delighted Yuletide laughter? I’m not sure that it did. Just like with
Crossroads
, the programme was filmed as-live because Rediffusion was reluctant to spend money on tape-editing, so the quality of the production was not exactly cinematic. The broadcast of the first episode also included a four-minute passage of blank-screened dead air, where someone had forgotten to put on the advert reel.

Still, never mind how it played at 26 Lodge Lane.
Do Not Adjust Your Set
was an immediate smash hit with its target audience. Kids got it straight away. Whatever else you wanted to say, there was nothing like it on the television at that time and suddenly all the kids locked on to it. It spoke directly to them – to the point where they could feel proprietorial about it. It was their humour: none of the adults got it. The mums and dads would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re watching this rubbish for’ – and that just elevated it even higher in the kids’ estimation. It was mad.

The funny thing was, none of us knew much about kids. Certainly none of us had kids at that time. So it wasn’t as though the show was based on close observation of what makes kids laugh and what doesn’t. This was the exact opposite of market-researched comedy. Maybe the secret was that, at some level, we simply
were
kids. Otherwise, I can’t explain it. All
I know is, the sketches had to make us laugh, or they didn’t get in.

The show began to develop. Terry Gilliam, an American friend of Mike’s and Terry’s, who had a lot of hair and pitched up in an enormous Afghan coat, contributed a couple of sketches and then, in the second series, did some animations for the show – one about a Christmas card, and another which was a strange chain of consciousness, called ‘Elephant’. (I still have a drawing Terry did of me, in 1968, during another Humphrey Barclay television sketch project called
We Have Ways of Making You Laugh
. Frank Muir was the star of that show, and Terry would sit in the studio with a pen and pad, sketching away, and then, at the end of the programme, reveal what he had drawn. One time he turned his pad to the camera to reveal … my head on a pig’s body. Well, thanks for that, Terry. But I wonder what a Terry Gilliam original is worth now? I could probably sell it and buy a place in Barbados.)

Though nearly all the writing was by Mike, Terry and Eric, Denise and I chipped in a little bit too. Denise invented a moment where the camera finds her sitting in a cardboard container and she looks into the lens and says, in a very upper-class voice, ‘Whenever I go to the theatre I always take a box.’ (OK, it doesn’t necessarily spring off the page, but to see a full-grown person in a posh dress cramped up in a box was very funny.)

The sketch what I wrote, as Ernie Wise would say, featured a sedan chair, carried by four flunkeys, all in seventeenth-century costume. We see these flunkeys running along with the chair, very primly and properly, in a park. Suddenly the flunkey holding one of the rear corners of the chair starts to wobble. The sedan drops and he comes off and rolls away down into the ditch. At this point, complete with powdered wig, I lean out rather haughtily from inside the curtained sedan chair to see what’s going on. Then I climb out, open up the back of the sedan chair
– the boot, as it were – and take out the spare flunkey, folded away in there. I attach him to the rear corner, check his calves briefly for road-worthiness, climb back in, and off we go again.

A work of profound comic genius. Clearly, I missed my vocation.

Anyway, never mind that: suddenly I was a budding star of children’s television. It wasn’t the route I’d particularly imagined going down when I set out – and I’m sure the same was true for Mike, Terry, Eric and Denise. But none of us were complaining about it.

* * *

E
ARLY IN 1968
, I was summoned to the BBC Television Centre – the high church, the Mecca of the TV world. To get an audition in those hallowed halls at the time, you either had to be God or one of His disciples. David Croft asked me to read for a part in a sitcom that he had co-written with an actor and writer called Jimmy Perry and which they were trying to get off the ground. Michael Mills, the BBC’s head of comedy, was, apparently, very keen on the show and determined to see it made. David was perfectly upfront with me: he, Jimmy and Michael had wanted another actor for this particular role, and this actor had desperately wanted to oblige them, but he was unavailable because he had already signed up for another show. They’d love me to try out, though.

One morning, at about ten, I went in to see David, Jimmy and Michael in a room at the BBC and read for them from the pilot script of this proposed series. It was pretty good stuff, I thought: set in wartime, funny, character-driven. Then I went home, where Ann, my agent, phoned me at about twelve thirty. ‘Good news,’ she said. ‘They want you for the part.’

I hung up. I was so excited. I was going to be in a BBC comedy series; I was going to be rubbing shoulders with the
movers and the shakers. I couldn’t wait to tell people – specifically my mother. I felt enormously pleased with myself.

At about three in the afternoon, the phone rang again. It was Ann once more. ‘Look, I don’t know how to tell you this,’ she said, ‘but I think you’d better sit down. I’m afraid they don’t want you for that part any more.’

Well, that knocked the wind right out of my sails while, at the same time, removing the bottom from my world. The explanation went something like this. Apparently, David and Jimmy had gone to lunch in the BBC canteen and bumped into Bill Cotton, who famously went on to be Controller of the BBC but at this point was a producer of light entertainment shows. Cotton said he was pleased he had run into the pair of them at precisely that moment because he’d just spoken to this rather well-established actor – the one Jimmy and David had originally wanted for the part I had read for just that morning. And he’d had to tell the actor how sorry he was, but the next series of the Spike Milligan show that he had signed up for some time ago had been cancelled – but at least, by way of compensation, he had Jimmy and David’s show to do instead.

So that was that. Jimmy and David had got their original choice for the part after all – and they didn’t even know it. So David, who had been put in a difficult position, had to explain the mix-up to Ann, and Ann had to explain it to me.

All of which is another way of saying that, for two and a half hours, I was Corporal Jones in
Dad’s Army
.

‘Ah, well,’ I consoled myself, after I put down the phone, ‘bet that show doesn’t come to anything, anyway.’

* * *

I
N LATE 1968
, between making
Do Not Adjust Your Set
and not making
Dad’s Army
, I did at least manage to add an item to my growing CV of vanishingly small roles in television shows
that people might have heard of. I made an appearance in
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
– though not before enduring an embarrassing experience which can still dampen my palms today.

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
– in case you haven’t heard of it – was a detective series, featuring the traditional pair of cop buddies, with the twist that one of them (Hopkirk) is a ghost whom only Randall, his partner, can see. (Just to be clear, we’re talking about the original version here, with Mike Pratt and Kenneth Cope, not the much later remake with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.)

I read for the part of an illusionist’s assistant in what I thought was a rather good script, or certainly a rather good plot. The illusionist’s act involved giving a gun to a random member of the audience, getting them to fire it in his direction and seemingly catching the bullet in his teeth. (Kids: this is another of those moments where I must urge you not to attempt any kind of imitation with your guns at home.) However, a woman in the audience, who for reasons of her own did not wish the illusionist health and prosperity, was going to produce her own gun and, using both the darkness of the theatre and the noise of the trick gun as cover, pop him off.

My proposed part in this moment of deathly intrigue? Merely to stand on the stage and be a kind of music-hall barker on behalf of the illusionist, saying something along the lines of, ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, I must call upon you to be as quiet as you possibly can as we reach the moment in the act requiring the utmost concentration.’

Anyway, I went home after the audition and heard nothing for several days and assumed the director had found himself someone who could bark louder or better. But then, late on Thursday afternoon, my agent rang: ‘The
Randall and Hopkirk
people just wanted to check that you’ve got the script for tomorrow.’

Well, no, I hadn’t got the script. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d got the part.

After some more phone calls of a rising urgency, and amid apologies for crossed wires, the script was sent straight over to me at home, strapped to the leg of a pigeon – or possibly using a courier on a motorbike, I now forget which.

By the time it arrived, I had just the evening to learn the lines before getting up at dawn on Friday morning and going over to Watford Theatre, which was the location for the shoot. Really, one evening ought to have been enough to get those lines straight in my head – even for me, who has always found line-learning quite hard. It wasn’t as though this was the longest or most complex soliloquy in the history of scripted drama. Yet something about the words, combined with the general sense of last-minute panic, meant that I couldn’t say these lines smoothly any more than I could have threaded a bit of cotton through the eye of a needle by throwing it. I found I was getting to a certain point in the speech – the same point every time – and then tripping up and collapsing. I spent the whole evening working at it, with no improvement whatsoever. At which point I went to bed, hoping that I could rely on sleep’s magical balm to carry the problem away.

Alas, sleep’s magical balm didn’t do anything at all. Early the next morning, I stood, with extremities tingling, on the lip of the stage at the Watford Theatre and awaited the call of ‘Action!’ The theatre was stacked full of extras, so, essentially, I was playing to a full house. It was a slightly fancy shot. I had to stand there and the camera was pushed down the centre aisle, through the stalls, in between the audience, so that it closed in on me as I began to speak.

We went for a take. The camera came sweeping down the aisle and, on cue, I launched into the speech – only to hit the sticking point and completely dry. The theatre fell eerily silent.

‘Go again,’ said the director – rather coldly, I felt.

Back went the camera up the aisle. Everyone readied themselves again.

‘Action!’

Down came the camera, off I went – and again hit the sticking point and stopped.

‘Go again,’ said the director – even more coldly.

Back went the camera …

This little ritual went on for what felt like the best part of a morning. Every time I would reach the same point in the speech, fumble it and dry, and the camera would beat a weary retreat and the extras in the audience would mutter to each other conspiratorially. And, of course, the more it happened, the worse it got. I was like a nervous horse approaching Becher’s Brook in the Grand National. I’d see the tricky moment coming up ahead of me, looming larger and larger, and then stumble into it and end up with a mouthful of twigs.