David Jason: My Life (45 page)

The location shooting was done in and around Bethersden in Kent – in glorious summer weather, fortunately. We used a fabulous Grade II listed house called Buss Farm which had an outhouse and an old Tudor barn attached to it. The interiors, though, were done in the studio in Yorkshire and the real genius of the show, it seemed to me, lay in making the footage from the two different sources blend. There was one scene in particular in which the family were outside in the evening light – a scene in which I had to say to Charley, ‘Listen to that – it’s a nightingale. You don’t get that in London. It makes your heart lift.’ And then everyone goes inside, into the kitchen. Peter Jackson, the lighting director, whose background was in film, lit that evening scene in Yorkshire to match what we’d already got in Kent, and you simply couldn’t see the join because it was done so brilliantly. The series was a high-quality piece of work altogether. We owed a lot to his brilliance, and to that of the whole team put together by David Reynolds.

I discovered something about the impact that
Darling Buds
was having, and about the sheer breadth of its appeal, when I was invited one weekend to be a guest of honour at Wycombe Air Park at a summer show for underprivileged children. This
was at the point where
Only Fools and Horses
seemed to be about as popular as it was possible for a television show to get. I went along, fully expecting that when I got in front of these kids, I’d be hearing lots of shouts of ‘Oi, Del Boy!’ and other things Trotter-related. In fact, the minute I stepped out of the car, I was greeted by a wall of cries of ‘It’s Pop Larkin!’ and ‘Perfick!’ and ‘Hey, Pop Larkin – where’s Mariette?’

But that’s what the show did. The idyll it depicted spoke very directly to people – and to people of all ages. It was an example of a kind of television show that was already, even then, falling out of favour and which has continued to decline – a programme that families watched together. And what they saw, coming back at them from the screen, was this wonderful loving family, with kids they adored, sitting round at Sunday dinners, piling into the back of a truck and singing … People watched it and thought, ‘Wouldn’t we all love a little bit of that, if it were possible?’ And that was the link, really, because the message of
Darling Buds
was the message of
Only Fools
too: that the most important thing is what happens at home and with the family.

A couple of years ago, Catherine Zeta-Jones got in touch and said she was coming to London to do some filming, and she would love to see me and Gill for a meal. She and her husband, Michael Douglas, were renting a house in Richmond and we fixed up to have lunch there one Sunday.

It was the first time I had seen her since she got married, and she greeted us at the door of this rather magnificent property and said, ‘Come and meet my husband – I think he’s in the pool.’ It was a beautiful, sunny day and we went through the house to the garden. Michael was in the water, playing with his sons. Catherine said, ‘Michael, come and meet David.’ Accordingly, my first sight of this great Hollywood star was as he came towards me, hand extended, just out of the pool, dripping wet, with Bermuda shorts on. All very relaxed.

After lunch, we had coffee and I sat down with Michael,
and, between doing the thing that fathers do of calling out to the kids to be careful about running near the pool and instructing them to play nicely, he said, ‘I’d just like to thank you for what you did.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, Catherine told me that when you did the show together, you really were very generous with her and looked after her a lot.’

Well, I was pleased he thought so, but it was very much the way of things on that show. We all looked after each other. Which stands to reason: we were one big (and overfed) family.

* * *

D
ARLING
B
UDS
WAS
my mother’s favourite show – her favourite of all the things she lived to see me do before, at the grand old age of ninety, she fell asleep on her sofa. My sister June rang me. ‘I can’t wake Mum.’ I drove from the house in Buckinghamshire and there she was, asleep and not to be woken.

She had outlived my father by fully twenty years – Dad with his arthritis, sleeping in the bed downstairs at Lodge Lane. I helped him get ready for bed one night – helped him with his pyjamas, his plastic bottle. The indignity that the elderly know. Pneumonia took him in the end. I remember visiting and holding his hand and trying to talk to him but he was already shutting down. How hard it is and how unfair it seems, letting go of someone you know so well. And now Mum too.

She had moved into a basement council flat and continued to rent it, despite the offer of other places elsewhere. She liked it there. She didn’t see why she should move. Signs of my success didn’t much impress her, in the main. When I bought the first house I owned in Buckinghamshire, she said, ‘But I don’t see why you need all this
space
.’ My two-seater sports cars – the MG Midget, and then the TR7 – she referred to as ‘David’s mean cars’, meaning they didn’t have enough seats to take her and my Auntie Ede to wherever they wanted to go. Nevertheless,
she came to a recording of
Only Fools
, and she quite liked that. But what she really loved was
Darling Buds
. She related to it much more closely. It was funny, though, the way she talked to me about Pop Larkin – entirely as if he were another person. I was never entirely sure she knew it was me.

* * *

M
EANWHILE
, I
HAD
finally landed the dream role of Batman – satisfying at last the burning aspiration to play a superhero which had been planted in me by the Dan Dare comic strips of my childhood. Well, kind of. Robin was Nick Lyndhurst – one of the rare occasions on which Batman has been cast shorter than his crime-busting partner. Still, that was
Only Fools and Horses
for you – never inclined to do things conventionally.

That episode, from the seventh series, in 1991, is still one that people go back to and talk about. The sight of Del Boy and Rodney running through the streets in full costume, the least likely world-savers you have ever seen, struck a loud bell with viewers which just carried on ringing. When we first read that script, we all loved it, but I had some strong feelings about the way the costumes had to go. Realistically, in the spirit of hired party costumes, Del and Rodney’s Batman and Robin outfits would probably have been a bit tired, a bit tatty and quite ill-fitting. My feeling was that, in order to get the full comedy out of the moment where they save the woman from the robbers, they should look like Batman and Robin – or as close as possible – and that the costumes should be exact replicas of the originals and made to fit us. That’s the way we ended up taking it and I was glad, because when we finally got that shot of them running through the smoke, it just lent itself even more to the ridiculous. If I go back to Bristol, the one they all remember is Batman and Robin. That’s the one they always come up and say, ‘I was there.’ It really seemed to chime.

That was also the series in which Raquel gave birth to Damien, shouting words that came straight from the lips of John Sullivan’s wife, Sharon, when she was in labour. ‘Don’t you ever come near me again, Trotter,’ was, I believe, one of Sharon’s, give or take the Trotter. Neither Tessa nor I had experience of childbirth at that time, and because we wanted to make the scene realistic, we took advice from midwives at the West Middlesex Hospital, where the scene was being filmed.

None of us realised that the seventh series would be the show’s last. You rarely knew, at the end of a series, whether there would be another, because commissioning normally happened subsequently. So you just had to hang on and hope and see what the stars and John Sullivan came up with.

Certainly nobody had said they wanted to leave. Indeed, in the absence of a fully fledged run, each year, from 1991 through to 1993, we reconvened for a Christmas Special. The 1991 story, ‘Miami Twice’, saw us decamping to Florida. Which is quite a long way from Peckham. And this time, we really did go. (Spain, in an earlier episode, had actually been Dorset in the freezing cold with the lights turned up bright.) We filmed at the famous Biltmore Hotel, a giant wedding cake of a building, and were thrilled to be told that the room in which we were recording was the favoured suite of Al Capone – who was a kind of Trotter in his way, albeit a bit more violent. The hotel was being refurbished while we were there and certain parts of the building were off-limits, including a staircase up to a bell tower. The restriction was too tempting for Nick and me, who, like school-kids, immediately shot up there to take photographs of ourselves.

The storyline included cameo roles for Richard Branson and Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. The cast and crew were all booked to fly out on Virgin Atlantic and Richard Branson found out and, being the great publicist, asked for a part in the show. He was very charming but would it be unreasonable of me to say that I’ve seen better actors? His big moment came in a queue
at the airport where he pushes in, prompting Del to say, ‘Hey, ’scuse me, what’s your game, pal, eh? Blimey. Anyone would think he owns the plane.’ I assumed, after that, that a happy lifetime of free rides and regular upgrades lay ahead of me. Alas, I was wrong. Show business can be a very cruel industry.

Barry Gibb, meanwhile, had a bigger part, and even a line. Del and Rodney are shown on a tour boat, going past his house – a massive place with a big lawn that goes down to the water. As they pass, Barry is out there on the lawn with a hosepipe. Del, of course, can’t resist shouting to him, ‘All right, Bazza!’ Cut to Barry Gibb, mumbling, ‘Oh God. There’s always one.’ Barry was wonderfully self-effacing. He invited Nick and me into his house, introduced us to his wife, gave us tea, showed us over the place – which was, of course, a palace. He was a great fan of
Only Fools and Horses
and used to get tapes of it sent over to America.

When we reconvened for those annual Christmas Specials, it was as if we hadn’t stopped. You just fell straight back into the way of things. I would put on Del Boy again and find that he fitted like a pair of wonderful old carpet slippers.

* * *

A
S
T
HE
D
ARLING
Buds of May
was drawing to a close, I was taken out for lunch by Richard Bates and Philip Burley from Excelsior Productions. I went along suspecting that they might have another project in mind for me and I was excited to hear what it might be. In fact, when the conversation eventually turned to business, Richard said, ‘What do you want to do?’

I was a bit confused and said, ‘Do about what?’

Richard said, ‘I mean, what do you want to do next – on television?’

I was still a bit confused. I said, ‘What do I
want
to do?’

He said, ‘Yes. Is there anything that you’ve always had a yearning to do and never had the chance?’

I was gobsmacked. It was the first time in one of these meetings that I’d ever heard that question, or anything like it. The form had always been: ‘We’re going to produce
x
, would you like to play
y
?’ To find myself in the position where someone was asking me what I wanted to do – effectively sitting opposite me with a blank sheet of paper in front of them and an expectant expression … well, this was a shock and it was a pretty stunning indication to me of the giddy heights to which I had somehow ascended.

So, straight away, I said, ‘I’ve always had this secret hankering to put on a zebra-patterned leotard and do a Summertime Special, singing duets with Cilla Black from the top of the BT Tower.’

All right. No, I didn’t. The truth, of course, is that I hadn’t come along with a prepared answer. But something did come straight to mind, in fact. I said, ‘The thing I like watching is detective shows. I’d love to play a detective.’

It was true. I was a sucker for sitting down in front of
Poirot
,
Inspector Morse
,
Inspector Wexford
,
Dalgliesh
,
Prime Suspect
– any of those police procedural dramas. I loved all that.

They said, ‘OK. Why?’ I said, ‘People like to unravel a mystery, don’t they? That’s what
I
like to do, when I’m watching – try and beat the detective to it.’ Richard and Philip said they would go away and try to find some detective stories and we would see where it all went from there.

My assumption was that they were going to ask some writers to come up with a script or a treatment, but in fact, not long after this, I received a package in the post containing five books – all works of crime fiction, all by different authors, all in slightly different areas. There was a note from Richard saying, ‘See if you like any of these.’ I was off on holiday to Florida, so that was my holiday reading sorted for me. I packed them and ended up reading them over the next fortnight, one by one, sitting beside the pool.

One I initially responded to was about a Victorian detective – a Sherlock Holmes-type character in London. I thought that was ‘olde worlde’ and a bit different. I could see myself doing that. However, the idea was swept from my mind when I read one of the other books. It was contemporary, and clever and dark, and revolved around all manner of unpleasantness, including the murder of a drug addict, and a robbery at a strip club. It wasn’t very Pop Larkin, in other words. The detective at the centre of the story was this shabby, rather bitter, caustic but very commanding character. The book was called
A Touch of Frost
and it was written by an author called R. D. Wingfield.

That was it for me. I phoned Richard there and then, from Florida, because I couldn’t wait to tell him. I said, ‘If you can get permission for
A Touch of Frost
, I’ll do it.’

Back in England, some short while later, Yorkshire Television held a lunch for the principal members of the cast of
Darling Buds
to celebrate the completion of the series. It was a very jolly affair, but as everyone was leaving and I was about to sail out the door, David Reynolds asked me if I could stay behind for a couple of minutes. When the room cleared, I was left with David, Vernon Lawrence and a couple of other Yorkshire TV executives whom I didn’t know. Someone closed the door, and Vernon then said, without preamble, ‘What makes you think you can play a TV detective?’ Excelsior must have been on to them all about this
Frost
idea. I suddenly felt like I was in an interrogation room, under suspicion. Maybe they were about to do a ‘good TV exec/bad TV exec’ number on me. Anyway, I launched into a spontaneous paragraph about how popular the genre was and how I could see the chance to explore a slightly darker edge in the character of Frost, while throwing in a bit of stuff about the superiority of the English approach to TV detective shows (audience attempts to solve crime in tandem with the detective) to the American approach (audience is shown the crime and the criminal at the start of the story, and
then follows the detective’s trail to the guilty party). I acquitted myself fairly well, I thought. At any rate, they released me without further questioning.