David Jason: My Life (32 page)

Returning to
Open All Hours
was also a chance to renew acquaintance with Lynda Baron, who played Nurse Gladys Emmanuel, the district nurse, Arkwright’s thwarted lust object. Lynda was great company. She was a wonderful singer, and long before she did
Open All Hours
she had been a cabaret artist and had worked with Danny La Rue. But the most impressive thing about her – and the thing that had Ronnie and I spitting feathers – was that she had a photographic memory. She would do the first rehearsal, which was always a ‘blocking’ day, which is to say, going through the script and working out all the positions on the set during the scenes. Lynda would come in the next morning and she would have absorbed everything from the previous day and be able to work without a script, while Ronnie and I were still fumbling with bits of paper and looking confused. Needless to say she was also DLP (dead line perfect), unlike me, who was still prone to the occasional gentle paraphrase.

After rehearsing the six episodes, we set off up to Doncaster for a couple of weeks to film all the exterior shots. Arkwright’s corner shop was, in fact, a commandeered hairdressing salon. The location scout had found the place, ideally corner-situated,
and came to an arrangement with the owner, paying her to go off on a two-week holiday. The props department then moved in and turned the place into a plausible general store. Everybody in the neighbourhood seemed very tolerant of us, even when shooting went on into the night – although there was one occasion when a window flew up on the other side of the street and a bloke leaned out and, very politely, asked, ‘Is this going on much longer? Only I’ve got to get up early in the morning.’ We reassured him that we would be finished very shortly. He said, ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ and shut the window.

It wasn’t until a subsequent series that a local man came at me on the street with a bread knife. But we’ll get on to that in due course.

In Doncaster, I had to master the use of Granville’s delivery bike – not as straightforward as it may look, because when you turn a corner on those delivery beasts, the fixed container at the front doesn’t turn with you, which is highly disconcerting. But, of course, I was able to tap into that valuable experience I had, working for the Victor Value supermarket at the age of fourteen. You never forget, you know. Riding a bike is like … well, riding a bike.

With location filming completed and edited back in London, we adjourned to Television Centre to shoot the rest of the material in front of a studio audience, one episode at a time, always on a Sunday night. This was my first prolonged taste of filming television in front of an audience and the way it requires you to serve two masters: the audience in the studio and the audience at home. That was quite a difficult balance. When the audience laugh, you have to find a way to ride that laugh and absorb it and then choose the right moment to continue on with the show. You mustn’t crash into the audience but you mustn’t look like you’re waiting for them to stop laughing, either. So there’s a little beat in there which isn’t catered for by the script. The director can extend time by cutting away for
a reaction shot, which helps you out. But there’s still a technique to interacting with the audience’s laughter that you only pick up by doing it.

There was no canned laughter, by the way. We never used it. However, before the recording, when the warm-up guy went out in front of the audience to do a little routine and get everyone in the right mood, the director would always make sure he taped the audience’s reaction to the warm-up man’s gags. Then he knew he had some laughter in the can which he could use to cover over any dropouts at edits, should they prove necessary. That was the only sense in which the laughter was ever artificial.

During the filming of that first series of
Open All Hours
, Ronnie and I grew closer. After Sunday recordings we would set off together to a bistro in a mews near the Victoria and Albert Museum where we would order what Ronnie referred to as ‘battery acid’ – the house wine, which was throat-peelingly filthy. Soon I started going to see Ronnie and the family for dinner – first of all in Pinner, in north London, where he and Joy lived with their three children, and then out in Oxfordshire, at the old mill house called Dean Mill which he and Joy bought and restored. The pair of them had excellent taste and Ronnie was a great collector, with a very good eye for stuff from antique shops and junk shops. He didn’t collect things because they were valuable, particularly. He collected them because they appealed to him and he liked to have them around.

Consequently his place was like a house of wonders. There was a tall cabinet, I recall, with three shelves in it, and each of the shelves was groaning with little statuettes of 1920s bathing belles: porcelain figures, in swimming costumes, all a bit risqué for their period, possibly, but with beautifully detailed china faces and bathing caps hung with jewels. When I went to Ronnie’s place, I used to stand in front of that cabinet for ages. I was also struck by a statue he had of a woman in flowing
robes, holding a lamp and standing on a rock. At the top of the stairs there was a cabinet full of toy soldiers, the old lead ones, beautifully finished and hand-painted. There were boxes of cigarette cards, too, some of them still in unopened packets, and there were thousands of postcards. Ronnie loved images of the seaside from the turn of the century and dedicated albums to them. I remember, too, leafing through an album entirely comprising postcards made from silk – page after page of them.

The walls of the house, meanwhile, were covered with wonderful pictures, of all shapes, sizes and styles. I said to him once, ‘How do you do it?’

He said, ‘It’s easy. If you like something, you put it up on the wall.’

I said, ‘But what about the colour, the size, the question of whether it matches the carpet?’

Ronnie said, ‘Forget all that. Just sling it on the wall and enjoy it.’

But he and Joy had such natural taste that they could adopt that approach and it was bound to work. If it had been me, I would have been worried about getting it wrong. I didn’t have confidence in my own taste the way they did.

Still, I got a bit of an education from Ronnie in this area. When we were on location for
Open All Hours
, we had Sundays off, and Ronnie would get his driver to take me and him off for the day and go hunting for bric-a-brac in the surrounding villages. (I didn’t have my own driver in those humble days, by the way – I was just the poor errand boy in the Fair Isle jumper, don’t forget.) We would seek out antique shops and junk places and spend hours nosing around. The tinier and the more offbeat the shop was, and the further it was into the middle of nowhere, the happier Ronnie was. I eventually plucked up the courage and picked up a few things which he gave me the nod on. I remember, in particular, getting hold of a large advert for Sunlight Soap, probably dating back to the 1920s and using a
primitive 3-D effect. It was made using painted vanes, so that from one angle it appeared to be saying ‘Sunlight Soap’ and then, from a slightly different position, it read ‘The Perfect Wash’. I thought that was amazing, and it was just lying around in a junk shop, where the bloke wanted next to nothing for it. Ronnie was lusting after it, but I got in there first. That advert hung in my kitchen for years.

Ronnie’s house in Oxfordshire was a treasure trove, and a place where I and, in due course, my girlfriend Myfanwy were made to feel extremely welcome. But it was also somewhere where I almost met a premature death – or, at the very least, narrowly escaped life-altering injuries.

It happened one summer. Myfanwy and I were staying for the weekend, and after a very nice evening in which a certain amount of wine had been drunk, everyone went off to bed. We had been put in the spare room, at the top of the house. It was a very hot night, though, and I couldn’t get to sleep, so I thought I would get up and take a bit of air. In our room, I had noticed there was an additional door, set into one of the outside walls and so clearly leading to the outside of the house. Using my by now quite intimate – but at the same time slightly inebriated – knowledge of the layout of Ronnie’s place, I worked out that this door must give onto a flat roof. If I could stand out there and take the air for a while, I might find sleep came a little more easily.

So, I went and opened the door and cool air duly rushed in. Being the countryside, and not, apparently, a moonlit night, it was pitch black outside, to the extent that I couldn’t see any further, really, than the threshold of the door. I certainly couldn’t see anything much below me. There were no street lights – and no stars, even. I stood in the frame of the door and put a bare foot outside, over the edge. I couldn’t feel anything with my toes, but I knew that one step down or so would have to be that flat roof. All I needed to do was step forward and drop
down onto it. Maybe I could even sit down in the doorway, ease myself forward over the threshold and get down that way. I was all ready to do this and jump out when it suddenly occurred to me that there might be little stones on the surface of that flat roof, and that these might play havoc with my bare feet. So, instead, I contented myself with standing in the doorway and breathing in the night air for a while. Then I closed the door and went back to bed.

In the morning, I went and opened the door and had a look out again. There was no flat roof there, or indeed anywhere. What there was was just a thirty-foot sheer and immediate drop down onto the disused mill wheel below. I told Ronnie about my night-time adventures with the door over breakfast and saw the blood drain from his face. Within a few days of our departure, a builder was round there putting a nice, secure balcony across the offending door.

One small further, slightly drunk step that dark night, and I don’t like to think what would have happened. Would a mill wheel break a man’s fall? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure I want to find out. Maybe I wouldn’t have died. But I might have struggled to play the trombone thereafter.

The first series of
Open All Hours
was broadcast at the beginning of 1976. The BBC, in its almighty wisdom, decided to put it out not on the mainstream channel, BBC1, but on BBC2, which was regarded as very much the backwater for a brand-new comedy series. The BBC’s reasoning, as it filtered out to us, was that
Open All Hours
was ‘a gentle comedy’ and therefore better suited to the calms of the second channel than to the noisier, choppier waters of the first. Obviously, that was a slight blow – and yet BBC2 had its own kudos. What annoyed Ronnie, more than anything, was the use of the word ‘gentle’ in relation to the show. He told me, ‘When they say it’s “gentle”, they normally mean they don’t think it’s very funny.’

What BBC2 definitely meant was smaller audiences.
Open All Hours
did modestly well, but the first series came and went without much fanfare. There was no indication that anyone at the BBC particularly wanted to make another one, although we would have to wait and see on that.

Meanwhile, something else which came and went without really taxing the trumpet section:
Lucky Feller
. This latest Humphrey Barclay project for ITV reached the nation’s screens in the autumn of 1976 and, once again, I had the leading role. You could never accuse Humph of losing faith in me. Alas, as with
The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs
,
Lucky Feller
didn’t quite manage to flap its wings and fly.

The series was written by Terence Frisby, who wrote the wonderful sixties stage play
There’s a Girl in My Soup
. His sitcom essentially revolved around two brothers living in the south-east of London. Remind you of anything? But in this case, I was the younger of the brothers – Shorty Mepstead, who was hapless and seemingly virginal – and the drama centred on a love triangle between me, my brother Randolph (played by Peter Armitage) and my fiancée Kathleen, played by Cheryl Hall. Cheryl was married at the time to Robert Lindsay, whose star was very much in the ascendant. The pair of them would go on to appear together in John Sullivan’s
Citizen Smith
– Bob as Wolfie Smith, Cheryl as his long-suffering girlfriend Shirley. Cheryl and Bob invited me to dinner at the very nice little place they had in Wimbledon, and when the series ended Cheryl gave me a drawing of Laurel and Hardy as a memento, knowing how big a fan I was.

I thought Terence Frisby’s writing for
Lucky Feller
was great. There was one scene in particular where Shorty takes Kathleen to a Chinese restaurant – which is clearly as exotic as dining out has ever got for either of them. They look at the menu and Kathleen says, ‘Oh, look, they’ve got prawn balls.’ To which Shorty’s rather anxious reply is, ‘Really? I didn’t know prawns had balls.’ That line would sink if it was offered with a nudge
and a wink, but voiced by Shorty, in complete naive innocence, it played very nicely. My brother Arthur recently repeated that line to me, so at least it made an impression on someone.

From my point of view,
Lucky Feller
was a really enjoyable piece of work. I got to drive a bright red bubble car for the opening credits – not the last time I would be associated on-screen with a three-wheeler. These were years when I felt like I was learning all the time. Nevertheless, counting this and
Edgar Briggs
, that was two opportunities I had been given to carry a television sitcom, neither of which had quite taken off with people, and I guess you have to wonder how many chances like that you’ll be given in a lifetime – especially if you’re now thirty-six, as I was at this point. The industry was certainly more patient in those days than it seems to be now – but even then, patience had its limits. Around this time, somebody wrote in the
Stage
, the industry newspaper: ‘Somewhere there is a writer whose ideas Mr Jason can execute to great effect, but they have not yet met.’ It was a point of view – and, as it turned out, a rather prescient one. But I’m not sure that was how I was really considering the situation at the time. The most important thing was not to think too hard about the longer term, but just to enjoy the work when it came up, and for as long as it continued to do so. The journey, not the arrival, as they say.