David Jason: My Life (31 page)

The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs
was written by Bernard McKenna (who wrote
The Odd Job
) and Richard Laing. I played Edgar, essentially a humble and rather clueless pen-pusher, who is promoted, by an administrative error, to the post of personal assistant to the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In that position he somehow manages to be successful, despite himself, in a whole variety of espionage missions. There was a lot of deadpan stunt work, which I relished. I seem to remember getting my tie stuck in a filing cabinet in one episode – and in another, driving a car very fast over a humpback bridge, so that all four wheels left the ground. Did I vault a sofa at any point? It would be hard to imagine I didn’t. I also remember hanging off a windowsill at the top of a tall house in Regent’s Park while my Secret Service colleague Spencer (played by Mark Eden) tried to haul me in from inside by the sleeve of my cardigan – only for me to slip out of the cardigan and plummet to the ground. Or, at any rate, plummet to the pile of cardboard boxes carefully arranged out of shot to break my fall. I think everyone on the production was slightly surprised at my willingness to perform these stunts myself. They would quite happily have supplied me with a stuntman. But where’s the fun in that? I was happier being given the chance to channel my inner Buster Keaton.

We filmed thirteen episodes in all. I can still remember the combination of deep anticipation and high anxiety just before the first show went out – feeling enormously proud and, at the same time, vulnerable and exposed. To promote the series, I was asked to do an article for
TV Times
– one of those ‘boy, I’ve really arrived’ moments in an actor’s life. They knew that I could ride a motorbike, drive a car, ride a horse (more or less, thanks to those lessons in Weston-super-Mare) and fly a glider.
So I was depicted on a picture spread doing all of these things. Showing off, in other words. The photographer was called Bert Hill. I went up in the glider and he went up in the tug that tows the glider up, and did air-to-air shots. We did pictures on a trials bike, and some of me diving – not in the Cayman Islands sadly, but in a lake somewhere in Britain. When the piece came out it was entitled ‘TV’s Man of Action’. Of course, I made out to people that I found it a bit embarrassing, but actually I thought it was great. It made me feel pretty special – like some kind of top gun.

In the papers, critical reaction to the show was good.
Edgar Briggs
had ‘style and panache’, according to the
Daily Telegraph
. The
Daily Mirror
said the show revealed that ‘David Jason is a modern Buster Keaton with most of that great silent actor’s gift of timing, rhythm and skill’. As comparisons go … well, I was ready to accept that one.

One problem: ratings. They started low, and they didn’t get any better. Now, it’s always easy to blame external circumstances for things like this, but, in this case, bear with me: the show was scheduled to go out on ITV on a Sunday evening, at the same time as
The Brothers
was going out on BBC1. In other words,
Edgar Briggs
was pitched up against just about the most successful drama series on television at that time. It couldn’t have been a worse clash. In today’s terms, it would be like trying to launch a new comedy show opposite
Downton Abbey
. The only people likely to watch would be a small hard core of new-comedy fans and the bewildered. In some ways, the scheduling of
Edgar Briggs
was a compliment: it demonstrated the amount of faith that ITV had in the show. They clearly thought it was competitive. But their confidence backfired. It meant the show was badly hampered from the off. It limped on and petered out. On commercial stations, naturally, ratings rule. There was no offer of a second series. The experience was, as you will readily understand, a bit of a blow for ‘TV’s Man of Action’. I had the
big build-up, followed by the big let-down – and then the lingering and very public disappointment, stretched out over thirteen rather gloomy weeks. I was chastened. I went back into my shell a bit.

Still, at least
Edgar Briggs
had got as far as people’s television sets. In the same period, there was another attempt to launch a comedy series with me in the leading role – this time, a project of the director/producer Sydney Lotterby at the BBC. The show was by Roy Clarke, the writer of
Open All Hours
, and was entitled
It’s Only Me, Whoever I Am
. The central character was meant to be a kind of Walter Mitty figure who could never quite get his act together because he was always off on flights of fancy. Again, there was loads of enthusiasm around the project and a big sense of having found something that would work.

We made a pilot, and I remember a scene outside a cinema in which my character went into dream mode and was overcome by a fantasy in which he turned into a military colonel and began ordering the cinema queue around. At the time I felt nothing other than the sense that I was making a show which would end up on telly and really connect with people. It was written by a great writer, directed by a great director. What could possibly go wrong?

The pilot was edited and finished, and Syd and I got together to watch it. Afterwards, Syd said to me, ‘You know what? I’m really sorry, David, but it doesn’t work.’ I agreed with him: it didn’t. I don’t know whether there were ingredients missing, or whether we had approached it in the wrong way, or what had happened – I couldn’t put my finger on it at all. All I knew was that it felt flat. Again: bitterly disappointing.

What could you do? Battle on. Somebody said to me, very early on, ‘If you want to make it in comedy, you have to have an idiotic determination to succeed.’ Well, I seemed to be meeting the requirements. I had the necessary determination and I had the necessary idiocy.

Incidentally, we shot some of that failed pilot for
It’s Only Me
in the north of England. In the evening we used to let off steam by playing snooker back at the hotel where we all stayed. Syd’s first assistant on that shoot was a bloke called Ray Butt, and Ray’s accent was so East End, you could cut it with a knife. I couldn’t help taking the piss out of him, walking around the table, flexing my neck and saying, ‘Awright, Ray? Awright, son?’ We should bear this harmless and apparently negligible piece of mimicry in mind because without it I might not have landed a certain cockney part later in my career, in a series that definitely did work.

* * *

I
N 1975
,
P
RISONER
and Escort
, from the ‘Six Dates with Barker’ sequence, became a series called
Porridge
, with Ronnie B. in one of his best and eventually most popular roles as Norman Stanley Fletcher, the cunning but always deeply humane lag. The series was produced by Sydney Lotterby. After my performances as Dithers, Ronnie knew I could play funny old farts and there was a character in
Porridge
called Blanco, who was meant to be a seventy-year-old prisoner whom Fletcher had a soft spot for and kept an eye on. Ronnie requested that I play him.

I was two hours in the make-up chair, doubling my age in order to become Blanco. It had been a similar time for Dithers – quite uncomfortable and not a little boring, if the truth be known, but you lump it. The way Ronnie turned into Fletcher, by contrast, was breathtakingly effortless. He’d spend a little bit of time in hair and make-up, put the chewing gum in his mouth and he was off. He put on that character like he put on a coat. When he was Fletcher, he was Fletcher. When it was time to go to the canteen, he was Ronnie Barker again. He could slip in and out of it at the click of a finger – which, I guess, is the sign of true comfort in a role. Some actors never
come out of character. Apparently this is true of David Suchet when he’s playing Hercule Poirot, the Agatha Christie detective. Talk to him at any point during the working day, and you’ll be talking to Poirot, complete with the accent. He stays in character. Why not, if it helps you? That wasn’t how it was for Ronnie, though: he was in and out.

They built HM Prison Slade, with its Victorian-looking gantries and stairways, on a special set inside an old water-storage tank at Ealing. I would come out of my cell and walk along the gantry and then go down the stairs to the ground floor and sit there in the communal area, with all the lags, playing chess. It looked and felt extraordinarily believable.

All the scenes in the prison cells, though, were filmed at Television Centre. So, too, were the scenes in the prison hospital. There was a lovely moment where Blanco is in the prison hospital bed next to Fletcher, talking about the possibility of being released on parole. ‘No, Fletch. They’ll never release me. They’ll have to carry me out,’ he says. ‘I’m too old now. They’ll be taking me out in a wooden overcoat.’ Fletcher says, very gently, ‘No, you’re not old.’ Then there’s a pause while he thinks about it. ‘You
look
old. But you’re not old.’ That lovely line was made up by Ronnie during rehearsal. I think all the script had for that moment was: ‘Don’t talk like that.’ What Ronnie came up with was funny and touching, so in it went.

Porridge
, of course, went on to be an extremely highly regarded sitcom, routinely mentioned right up there among the very best when the lists get written. People always say that the essence of a sitcom is people trapped by their circumstances. In that sense,
Porridge
was the essence of the essence. After all, you don’t get people more trapped by their circumstances than prisoners and their wardens. The comedy that Ronnie and the cast – and, of course, Clement and La Frenais – worked up out of those ultra-restrictive confines is the stuff of genius. I feel enormously privileged to have had a small part in it.

It was on the set of
Porridge
that I met Richard Beckinsale, who played Lenny Godber, Fletcher’s Brummy cell mate. Richard was a handsome, friendly guy with something rather effortlessly glamorous about him. He also had an extremely dry sense of humour. You could never quite tell whether he was winding you up or not. He could spin a story so well that you had no choice but to believe it, and he liked to spend whole minutes building those stories up. He would tell you he had been in Harrods and had seen the Queen come in and buy some makeup, and the tale would be set amid all these effortless details that made it weirdly plausible. And when you said, ‘No, really?’ He would say, ‘You didn’t believe that, did you?’

I went to see him onstage one night, in a play called
Funny Peculiar
by Mike Stott, at the Garrick Theatre in the West End. He was very good in it. I remember a moment where somebody upended a bag of marbles on the stage. I can’t remember why there was a bag of marbles hanging around at that point: go and see the play or buy the script if you want to find out. But the actors ended up slipping and skating around the stage on them, as though they were on ice: it was well done and very funny.

I went backstage afterwards to say hello to Richard and congratulate him. As we left the theatre together, Richard said, ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’ I said, ‘That would be very kind.’ We walked round the corner and I couldn’t believe it when he put his key in the door of a massive Bentley saloon car, not all that much smaller than a bungalow. He just grinned, and in we jumped.

I was most impressed. I think Richard’s attitude was, if you’ve got it, spend it, because there’s no point hanging on to it. I was the opposite, but maybe that’s a wartime childhood for you. I still had, burned into my mind, the image on the huge government poster on a hoarding at the end of Lodge Lane when I was growing up – a picture of a dripping tap with the simple
instruction ‘Waste not, want not’. That graphic has stayed with me my whole life. Even now, I go round the house turning off lights. (In order not to waste electricity, you understand, not because I think the blackout is still on.)

Richard’s life ended tragically early. One night in March 1979, we were at a party thrown by Ronnie B. He and Ronnie Corbett had both decided to take their families off to Australia for a year, to exploit some work opportunities there and also to avoid Britain’s then crippling tax regime. Before leaving, Ronnie B. held a farewell bash for a few of his mates and his family. He booked a big round table at Langan’s Brasserie near Green Park. There was Ronnie and his wife Joy, Richard, myself and a handful of others. We had a meal, and lots of wine and there was much jollity. Michael Caine, who part-owned Langan’s, stopped by the table, I remember, and had a chat with Ronnie during the evening. At around eleven thirty, Richard got up and came round to us all individually, making his apologies. He said he had to go because he had promised he would look in at another close friend’s party. So he said his goodbyes, shook hands with everyone and left.

Over the next thirty-six hours, the news gradually reached us all that Richard had died of a heart attack at home during the night. It was so shocking. We were devastated for him, and for his wife, Judy Loe. It caught all of us completely off guard but it hit Ronnie particularly hard. He couldn’t work for a number of days because he was so upset.

Richard was just thirty-one years old. He had barely started.

* * *

I
N 1975, THE
BBC decided to make
Open All Hours
into a series, directed by Syd Lotterby. Six episodes had been commissioned, to be written by Roy Clarke. Ronnie asked me if I would be interested in resuming the part of Granville. I was more than
interested. I was delighted. The chance to play opposite Ronnie in an entire series was a dream outcome.

So, in 1975, work began in what we referred to as the Acton Hilton, a purpose-built block of BBC rehearsal rooms, situated in gorgeous, leafy Acton, west of Shepherd’s Bush. Dances and dramas and comedy shows and all sorts were coming together in this rather low-rent den, which made it, in fact, despite its anonymity, quite a buzzy place to be. On the top floor was the canteen, where we would adjourn for a restorative repast of egg, chips and beans, or chips, egg and beans, or beans, egg, chips and sausage, or sausage, egg, chips and beans. If you could time your lunch break to coincide with the arrival of the girls from Pan’s People in their rehearsal leotards, you considered yourself doubly refreshed.