David Jason: My Life (37 page)

We finish in Singapore and move on to Jakarta. On the plane, one of the cast members comes and sits next to me. They say, ‘I’ve been asked if I would come and talk to you and ask you to go a bit easy on the rest of the cast.’ I say, ‘What do you mean?’ They say, ‘Well, you’re being very ungenerous. You’re getting all the laughs and you’re not being very generous to anybody else.’ I say, ‘I suppose you realise that nobody would even talk to me at the beginning of this. Nobody helped me at all. I’m only doing what I have to.’ I say that I think they ought to have a look at the billing. On the billing it says, ‘Leslie Phillips and David Jason in …’ I tell them, ‘That’s why I have to do it.’

From Jakarta on, to my intense relief, there’s a bit of a thaw in relations between us all. Leslie becomes a touch more friendly, starts to give me the time of day a little. Our relationship duly becomes workable – settles down into the tacit respect that each of us has for what the other can do. Fair play to Leslie: he didn’t have the first clue who I was and I suppose he needed me to prove myself to him. I’m glad I stuck around to do so.

It was hard to be glum for too long with audiences like the ones we got on those tours – great crowds of ex-pats, for the most part, working in the Far East on oil and engineering projects, maybe living over there with their families, working long hours and long days, and more than up for a laugh. They
would book tables at the Hilton, and pitch up at seven for a drink. Then they would have dinner, and drink some more. Then at ten, we’d come on, and by that time, they were wonderfully well away.

And we did a very good job. OK, the productions could be a bit ramshackle in certain departments and less slick than they might have been in the West End. Derek’s wife Pat, who was very down to earth and nice as pie, used to come with us sometimes, as part of the management team, and occasionally shortage of numbers would mean she would be commandeered to sit in the corner, just offstage, and act as the prompt. Lovely lady – terrible prompt. She never used to know where she was in the play, which is not an especially useful trait in that line of work. One night, in Hong Kong as I recall, we got a bit lost, as happens from time to time. So I came to the prompt corner and whispered, ‘Next line, next line,’ only to hear Pat whisper back, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know where I am.’ So I had to go back out and ad lib. But we managed to get ourselves back on track and no serious harm was done.

Nevertheless, we handsomely entertained people who desperately wanted entertainment and who longed for a bit of contact with Blighty. These were people away from home on six-month or even year-long contracts, and they missed home, and we gave them some kind of taste of it.

Meanwhile, I was earning £500 a week, which was handsome money at this time, and being required to spend almost none of it. Nearly the only time I ever had to dip into my own pocket was when it came to settling the mountainous phone bills I ran up, calling my girlfriend Myfanwy back in Britain.

I worked with some good actors, too – especially on
The Unvarnished Truth
. When the offer came up to do the trip again, I didn’t hesitate. Frank Windsor was very quiet and very nice: a gentleman. John Fortune had a sense of humour so dry it almost crackled. Quite apart from being excellent comic
performers, both were proper team players, which is what you need to be in a touring production, unless the whole thing is going to implode horribly. The three of us stuck together, helped each other out, and had a jolly time. The only problem I had with John, in all the days we spent together, centred on the unfortunate matter of a hair that, apparently unbeknown to him, had sprouted between his eyebrows and grown to a considerable length, and which was showing no signs of stopping any time soon. As the tour wore on, in passages of the play where John’s face and mine were necessarily close, the hair grew ever more to be a source of wonderment to me – its scale and luxuriance, its ability to survive John’s vision and stand alone against disaster.

One night, the pair of us were killing a bottle of whisky in my room and I felt emboldened to raise the matter of the extraordinary hair. ‘John,’ I said, in a voice that may well have been rather slurred, ‘could you do me a favour? Can you get rid of that hair? It’s becoming something I’m fixing on, and I shouldn’t.’ John, whose voice was also possibly quite slurred, couldn’t have been more obliging. He removed the hair there and then. After which, I rather missed it, to be perfectly honest. But, on the whole, it’s always best to confront these things, actor to actor, and we never had a moment’s discomfort after that.

Royce Ryton, the writer of
The Unvarnished Truth
, also had a part in the play, so he travelled with us, too. Royce was quite an odd cove. On occasions he would wear a pink suit and walk around with a long feather quill in his hand, connoting to all and sundry his trade as a playwright. Well, I suppose it was easier to carry a quill around than a typewriter. Something happened which annoyed him at one of the airports – I think a three-hour delay was announced – and he lost his cool and was seen jumping up and down in his pink suit and feather – which is no outfit, really, in which to get angry.

What a lark the whole thing was, though. We were treated like lords and made to feel like stars, or thereabouts. An English-language newspaper in Dubai greeted my arrival with the headline ‘
SUPERMOUSE IS IN TOWN!
’

OK, so, technically, that should have been Danger Mouse. But who was quibbling? Not least when beneath the headline was a large photograph of me captioned ‘David Jason in
A Short Intake of Breath
’.

OK, so, technically, the photograph was a still from
No Sex Please – We’re British
. But again: who was quibbling?

There was so much that was new to me. To depart from Heathrow and, a few hours later, be arriving in Malaysia and walking past a sign at the airport reading ‘Dadda smugglers will be executed’ (‘Dadda’ being the Malaysian word for drugs) – well, that was a sight to open a relatively untravelled Londoner’s eyes. Ditto the sight of the river in Jakarta, a tidal reach which comes in from the sea, where people openly crouched to do their business in the water. Ditto, again, the sight of that business, equally openly floating on the surface or stranded at the side of the water.

One minute I was in Dubai shopping for a dishdash to wear – the classic long cotton shirt garment – and finding a rather fetching blue one with an embroidered neck. The next minute I was seeing the pyramids in Egypt and looking at the death mask of Tutankhamun. And the minute after that I was bartering for a carpet in Singapore and being shown the notorious Changi Prison – a leading centre for corporal punishment by caning. We were taken there by the hotel manager who thought we ought to see it – if only from the outside. I don’t know whether he was issuing some kind of warning regarding the maintenance of standards in our performance, but it certainly looked like somewhere none of us wanted to end up and I’m sure that, deep down, we upped our game that night.

Derek Nimmo would frequently be having lunch with highly
important people who were highly important for reasons that were never entirely clear to me – diplomats, business executives, political players. One day he invited me along to a lunch with a highly important sheikh. After we had eaten, the sheikh asked me meaningfully, ‘Would you like some tea?’ At this point, Derek gave me a gentle kick under the table and a look which suggested I might want to decline. ‘No, I’m fine, thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s Scottish tea,’ the sheikh added encouragingly. Again, I declined. For Scottish tea, as Derek explained later, read undercover whisky. Our pal the sheikh didn’t seem to take milk.

The hotel managers were, altogether, most obliging in showing us the sights – and some of these sights were amazing. In Dubai, the sheikhs seemed to be going in for competitive airport building. We visited a massive marble mausoleum, actually a terminal building, fantastically constructed – and yet only catering at that point for the arrival of two aircraft per week. It was explained to us that it was built, essentially, out of jealousy of the scale of the neighbouring sheikh’s airport. Well, it stands to reason: you wouldn’t want your airport to be smaller than anyone else’s, would you?

The manager of the Jakarta Hilton laid on a huge banquet for us – champagne, groaning platters of fish, shrimp, lobster and salad, servants bowing and scraping. It was like being in some kind of fairy tale. The banquet was served on a dais under a flowing awning looking out over the gardens where exotic flowers bloomed and fountains danced. The idea that acting could open up experiences like these to someone from a terraced house in Lodge Lane seemed staggering to me.

One night after a show the manager in Hong Kong arranged for cars to whisk half a dozen of us away to a restaurant in the backstreets where girls danced as we dined. Then, at the conclusion of the meal, we were all led through the restaurant’s kitchens, across a courtyard and up a metal fire escape where the manager smoothed a palm with Hong Kong silver and we
were ushered into what I suppose we should refer to as the ‘special room’, with seats for us around a small platform. We sat and drinks were brought to us. And then a woman arrived, stepped up onto the platform, danced and gradually disrobed before … Well, how to put this? Let’s just say that – call me old-fashioned or hopelessly sheltered – I had no idea that you could use an unpeeled banana for quite those purposes. Neither, come to think of it (and, again, apologies for my naivety), did I have the merest inkling that you could press a ping-pong ball into service like that – nor that it would shoot quite so high into the air when you did so.

Table tennis has never felt entirely the same to me since.

When we’d been conversing, the hotel manager had told us that, in certain Eastern cultures, the most impolite thing you can do is point your foot at somebody’s head. It’s considered the worst kind of insult. Well, for the second part of our very special private show, a man and a woman entered. They also climbed onto the platform and disrobed and then commenced their act, which, suffice it to say, was as far removed from a matinee performance of
Aladdin
in Wimbledon over the Christmas period as it is possible to get. The girls who were with us were truly embarrassed – perhaps even horrified, although, it should be noted, none of them asked to leave. I’m sure I felt quite embarrassed to be sitting there too, but my attitude was, ‘Well, life is notoriously short, and how many times are you likely to get to see this sort of thing?’

The couple reached a stage in their act where the female half was on her back with her legs pointing in a northerly direction, while her male partner knelt in close attendance. At this point the lady’s right foot attained a position extremely close to my face. Thinking I might lighten the atmosphere, which had grown heavy and somewhat awkward, I attracted the attention of the man and, pointing to the lady’s foot, feigned affront. He roared with laughter and told his partner, ‘The gentleman from London
has just accused you of offending him in the basest manner.’

Everybody completely collapsed at this. Well, when I say completely collapsed – the bloke on the stage didn’t completely collapse. One part of him didn’t collapse at all. Most impressive. But that’s the difference between a professional and an amateur, I guess.

Mad times, all in all, with one sobering moment to put the madness starkly in relief. It must have been in 1982. We were heading out on a 747 which included, on its upper deck, for the use of we passengers of privilege, a cocktail bar. There we were, three or four of us, several hours into the flight, leaning on the bar, with an air hostess serving us with whisky sours, when, through the porthole, we seemed to see flashes of light on the far horizon, probably hundreds of miles away across the desert.

I said, ‘What’s that over there? Can you see those flashes?’ A couple of the others gathered round.

The air hostess said, ‘Oh, that’ll probably be the war.’

I said, ‘Come again?’

‘Iran and Iraq,’ she said. ‘They’re at war.’

Well, I knew that. But at the same time … what a peculiar and eerie moment for reflection this was. Somewhere way below us, people were firing rockets and bombs at each other. We, meanwhile, were suspended at 35,000 feet, in our unworldly little bubble, sipping cocktails, chinking glasses and saying, ‘Chin-chin.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Menace and hair-dye on the streets of Doncaster. Goodnight from him. And two blokes called Derek.

THE DECISION OF
the Two Ronnies to decamp to Australia for a year had an upside. It meant the BBC was suddenly bereft of new material from one of its most popular comedy acts. To help fill the gap, the first series of
Open All Hours
was rebroadcast, this time on BBC1, rather than on BBC2 where it had been hidden, relatively speaking, the first time round. On this second showing it attracted some attention and got good ratings, entirely supporting Ronnie’s feeling that the BBC should have gone that way with it in the first place.

So, in 1980, four years on from the initial run, and with Ronnie now back in Britain, Roy Clarke was commissioned to write a second series, bringing Arkwright, Granville and Nurse Gladys Emmanuel together again for another shot at the glory which perhaps always ought to have been theirs. It was a highly exciting prospect for me – working with Ronnie and Lynda again, larking about in Doncaster – and yet, at the same time, I did have some anxieties about it. Granville the shop assistant – my role – was meant to be around thirty years old. I was now a full decade older than that, and – reader, let us not shy away
from this subject – a degree less well appointed in the hair department than I had hitherto been. In the intervening years, time had performed its evil depredations and I had endured a certain amount of typical male-pattern thinning around the crown region. Furthermore, a little snow was beginning to appear around the eaves.