David Jason: My Life (40 page)

‘Was it left here?’

‘No, it was right, wasn’t it?’

I had just about reached the point of despair when we turned into a road that neither of us recognised and saw the film crew at the far end of it. We got back with seconds to spare before our next call.

That jaunt definitely sealed something between us. Nick and I recognised in each other a kindred urge to mess about, whenever possible. I was delighted to find myself working with someone who was as ready as I was to stage a mock blazing row behind a closed door and then pretend not to be talking to each other for the rest of the day – to the cast’s and the crew’s deep concern. And I was equally delighted to be the colleague of someone who saw, as keenly as I did, the value of nailing Lennard Pearce’s shoes to the floor. That was the night when – with the wind up us, as it frequently was – Nick and I broke into the wardrobe room, dealt with Lennard’s shoes and, for good measure, turned his costume inside out. We thought we
were very amusing. Next morning we came down and started getting changed and all we could hear from Lennard’s side of the room was ‘Who’s been f***ing about with my costume? Look at it!’ And then he went to put his shoes on. And, at that, I’m afraid to say, he lost his rag. ‘Someone’s nailed me shoes to the floor. Who would have done such a thing? I think we should get the police in here.’ He said he wasn’t going to work that day, and had to be talked round by means of a calming chat from Ray Butt and effusive apologies from me and Nick. I have to say it was the only time I saw Lennard lose perspective. It wasn’t like him not to see the funny side.

One day, Nick arrived for rehearsals with a bag of novelty explosives. Essentially, they were thin bangers, with string at each end. You could tie these across a door, for instance, and anybody opening it would be greeted by a bang like a small bomb going off. Quality entertainment. Every morning it was the job of the production assistant, Tony Dow (who went on to become a director of the show), to set out the chairs and mark up the floor in the church hall in Hammersmith where we rehearsed. One day, Nick and I got in early and loaded up the stacked chairs with bangers. We then loaded the cubicle doors in the toilets too, for good measure. As Tony unstacked the chairs, he triggered one shocking explosion after another, until he decided he wouldn’t touch another chair. Nick and I were still laughing about this when there was an explosion in the toilets followed by a female scream of gigantic proportions. We went white. The little old lady who cleaned the church hall had entered the Gents with her mop. It nearly finished her off. No more bangers.

Ronnie Barker used to say, ‘You can’t be funny on an empty stomach.’ It’s one of the great truths of comedy. Between the dress rehearsal at BBC Television Centre on a Sunday afternoon, and the recording in front of a studio audience, Nick and I would go to the BBC canteen. I would have sausage, chips and
beans, and Nick would have egg, chips and beans. Always the same. It became what we did – a ritual, almost a superstition. Sometimes the others would join us, and sometimes they wouldn’t. But that’s where you would find me and Nick.

What Nick and I also shared were bouts of nerves before the recordings. We would be backstage and we would hear the audience come in, hear them get settled, hear the warm-up guy doing his stuff. We’d be pacing backwards and forwards, anxious as mice. We’d say to each other, ‘Why do we do this to ourselves?’ That feeling never changed. We were still the same, twelve years later. You couldn’t not be nervous. You were presenting a new play every week to an audience. There was so much to go wrong. And you had two hours – which sounds like a lot for a half-hour show, which
Only Fools
was at first, but it really isn’t, because there will be retakes and cameras have to be moved, and sets altered, so the pressure of time was always hanging over you.

Some audiences would be worried for you. It’s an unusual atmosphere for the spectator, especially if it’s the first time they had watched a show being filmed – very unlike watching a play in a theatre. Between them and the set were the cameras and the assistants running around the place, and the sound-boom guys. It can be pretty intimidating and sometimes the audience would catch that sense of intimidation and freeze up a bit. Sometimes we’d do the opening scene, and the laughs wouldn’t come, even though you knew there were laughs there. If I could sense that the audience wasn’t responding, I would do something stupid or dry on purpose, and then share it with the audience – blame Nick or the lighting crew or the director, or anyone who was to hand. And then the audience would relax. They knew they could laugh and not get into trouble, and by the same token they knew we weren’t taking it too seriously. And then they’d be off. And once they were off, there was generally no holding them.

Only Fools and Horses
got off to a ragged and inauspicious start, though. On the first episode, we had three directors in quick succession. Ray Butt trapped a nerve in his back and was taken to hospital in severe pain. (Nick and I went to visit him and took him some medicinal gin and tonic, pre-mixed in a disguised bottle, and some equally medicinal cigarettes, which he very much appreciated.) So Gareth Gwenlan (who was, in due course, to become the producer/director of the show and, beyond that, the BBC’s head of comedy) came across from another show as a temp. Gareth hadn’t seen the script before that day, which wasn’t great. Then, shortly after that, Martin Shardlow was hired as a proper replacement for Ray. I rather lost my cool over this immediate chaos. It was our first night shoot, on our first series, and I so wanted us to get it right – yet here we were changing directors every three minutes. I stormed about the place, muttering, ‘I think they must be trying to sabotage us.’

We survived, though, and, once things settled, it was clear very quickly that we had the makings of a tight team. There were no weak characters in
Only Fools
, and there were no weak actors. Everybody had something to bring. Roger Lloyd-Pack was RADA-trained, and his father, Charles, was a famous film and stage actor. His performance as the fabulously dim Trigger was so good that one tended to come to the conclusion that Roger must be genuinely like that as a person. He wasn’t at all. He was quiet, unassuming, totally easy-going – and a consummate actor. Not all that long ago, I was watching the television and up he popped, playing a cardinal in
The Borgias
– which is about as far from Trigger as you could probably get, acting-wise, without putting on an animal costume.

The same was true of John Challis as the oh-so-superior Boycie. John was charming, well spoken, an actor of great weight, and an absolute gent to work with – another proper team player. Then, as the series grew, there was Ken MacDonald
as Mike, the landlord of the Nag’s Head. Every episode he was in, you could guarantee that at some point – during the camera rehearsal or in the middle of a set change – Mike would produce a beer mat from somewhere, put a nick in it and lock it on the bridge of his nose, before looking round the room and saying, ‘Who threw that?’ That was his number and he never tired of it. Mike loved the show and the people in it and could become quite emotional about his attachment to everyone. His character in
Only Fools
wasn’t especially big, but he was utterly committed to it because he just thought it was one of the funniest shows ever and he wanted to be a part of it. I think we all felt the same.

The first series was duly broadcast in 1981 to a unanimous display of … well, relative indifference, really. The BBC didn’t demonstrate any particular urgency to promote the show. Reviewers responded by ignoring it altogether. It was broadcast on a Tuesday evening, which isn’t always the best night to drag in the big numbers. Altogether, it had a kind of under-the-radar feeling about it. We all knew there was massive potential here, but early in a sitcom’s life you never really know what they’re thinking upstairs, in the big rooms where the decisions are made.
Only Fools and Horses
could have been cancelled there and then, and we would have been gutted, but not entirely surprised.

* * *

I
WOULD LIKE
to say it was the second series in which
Only Fools and Horses
really broke through the glass ceiling, but it wouldn’t be strictly true. It was, however, the series in which the show broke through the glass chandelier, so I guess that was something.

One day John, Ray and I were trading stories about working days and stupid things that had gone on in our old jobs, and
John told us one about something that had happened to his dad. John’s dad and a couple of his mates would turn their hands to anything to earn a bit of money, and they were doing some odd jobs in a big country house. At some stage, the house’s owner had said to them, ‘We’ve got this pair of large Jacobean chandeliers, which need a specialist to come in and take them down from the ceiling and give them a clean. Do you know anyone who might be able to do that?’ John’s dad chipped in and says, ‘Oh yes, guv – we can do that for you, no problem.’

Because this pair of chandeliers weighed so much, they were bolted right through into the rafters of the floor above, meaning that to detach them it was necessary to send someone to remove some floorboards from the room overhead and unbolt the mooring, while the others stood below, holding on to the chandelier and waiting to lower it to the floor. On this occasion, one of the lads went upstairs to unscrew one of the chandeliers while John’s dad and another lad stood down below ready to catch … the other one. With predictable and expensive consequences. The story really made me laugh. I said to John, ‘You’ve got to use that. It’s too funny not to.’

John said, ‘I don’t know how we could do it, though.’

I said, ‘But the Trotters get up to anything to earn a few quid. Surely we could cook up some way to get them out to a country house.’

John went quiet, and I thought at first he was a bit reluctant to take on the idea. In fact, it was because his brain had already gone into overdrive and he was even then working it out. Sure enough, John came back with an episode entitled ‘A Touch of Glass’, in which the Trotters land up in a stately home and pass themselves off as specialist chandelier cleaners. Their duties require them to remove a pair of thumping great chandeliers, one at a time, from the ceiling of the hall. Grandad disappears off upstairs with a hammer and a screwdriver to undo the bolts
from above, while Del and Rodney stand beneath the chandelier with an outstretched sheet, ready to catch it as it drops. There’s the noise of screws being loosened and then, with the most almighty crash, the untended chandelier drops to the floor.

There was a lot of pressure on that piece of filming. The chandelier might have been fake, but it had still cost the licence payer a lot of money and nobody wanted to have to commission another one if it smashed when the cameras weren’t turning. Anticipation was high and everybody and his brother had come in to watch – all the crew and production staff and anyone who just happened to be around. When we went up the ladder, I said to Nick, ‘Now, brace yourself, Rodney, brace yourself.’ I wanted the audience to believe that something was about to happen to me and Nick, so they wouldn’t even think about the chandelier in the background. We braced ourselves, and the chandelier beyond us dropped. There was a momentary silence and then I heard the magic word ‘Cut!’, followed by whoops and screams of laughter and rounds of applause. People were rolling about on the floor and Ray Butt had stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth to stifle his mirth. I don’t think the crew stopped laughing for about ten minutes.

At the end of the second series, classic flying chandelier moments notwithstanding,
Only Fools
was averaging merely 9 million viewers. Contrast
Last of the Summer Wine
, the BBC’s most popular sitcom at that time, which was generally getting about 16 million. We were even lagging behind
Terry and June
– and this at a time when everyone seemed to think
Terry and June
was finished. Worse than that, the previous programme in our slot, Ronnie Corbett’s
Sorry!
, had been getting 10 million viewers. In other words, we had lost the BBC a million of the viewers who had previously been happy to watch the channel at that point in the week. Those are the kinds of statistics which make television executives start to get twitchy with the trigger
finger. We all had to think, ‘Well, it’s been fun, but that’s probably it.’

And then industrial action intervened – and entirely in our favour. In July 1983, a technicians’ strike at the BBC temporarily caused programmes to be cancelled and drove some big holes into the scheduled output. It obliged the BBC to raid the cupboard for old material to fill the gap. The second series of
Only Fools and Horses
thereby found itself getting an early rerun. More than 7 million people were watching every week – which was quite impressive, given that this was in midsummer, when television audiences commonly dwindle. Suddenly, deep in the heart of the BBC, faith was renewed, the candle relit, the flag run back up the flagpole. John Sullivan was commissioned to write a third series, and, better still, a fourth series beyond that. ‘Ordre du jour!’ as Del might have put it.
Only Fools
had been granted the time to grow.

* * *

T
HAT
M
YFANWY
’
S AND
my relationship could withstand the stresses of renovating a ruined country cottage suggested there was something fairly strong about it. One day, she said to me, ‘Why don’t we move in together?’ All my life I had always resisted any such thing. Indeed, traditionally this was the point in any relationship at which I had always run a mile, causing no little distress along the way. But now I didn’t run away. I felt ready.

The cottage in Crowborough wasn’t really convenient for either of us, except as a bolt-hole, so Myfanwy and I started looking around for a house. In the process of doing up the cottage, I had realised, belatedly, how I liked the country life. As much as I loved London and was brought up in the Smoke, I found the quiet and isolation of the countryside had started appealing to me really strongly. As that noble man of letters
Dr Johnson said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he has probably been living in a bachelor flat in Newman Street opposite Micky McCaul for too long.’ I felt I was done with dossing down off Oxford Street, and it came to a point where I decided I would move to the countryside, make my permanent base there, and keep the flat on for whenever I needed to stay in the city for work.