David Jason: My Life (48 page)

We went back to the house, Gwyl and I. I opened a bottle of whisky. Over the course of the next few hours, we finished it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Marriage, birth and matters arising.

IN THE MONTHS
after Myfanwy died, I threw myself deep into work, hoping it would get me through. Once, there had been a time when I could work to the exclusion of everything else. Once, I could immerse myself in work the way I could immerse myself while diving. I could let it fill my ears and sink right down into it until I was entirely absorbed by it, and until it was the only thing that was going on and the only thing that mattered. Not this time. Work wouldn’t get me over this one. I needed other people. I fell back on the love and support of my family – my brother Arthur and his wife Joy, my sister June – people who must so often have tried unsuccessfully to attract my attention while I was sunk fathoms-deep in work but who, to my unending gratitude, were loyal and still there now that I was thrashing around on the surface. I felt as needy as a baby in those times – utterly lost – and they took care of me.

And so, in due course, did Gill. Gill was a floor assistant at Yorkshire Television in Leeds. The first time I set eyes on her, I was climbing out of a car and Gill was coming out of the double doors from Yorkshire TV’s reception, having been sent down to meet me and show me to the studio. She later told
me that, right there, she had felt an almost physical jolt and a voice in her head told her, ‘This man is going to affect your life.’ Her other immediate thought was that I looked lonely, which was how I felt. At that point the notion that we would start a relationship would have struck both of us as unlikely. She was twenty years younger than me and we were living different lives in different parts of the country, and I was still numb with grief. Yet work kept bringing us together, and when it did, we would snatch conversations, and when we talked there was, unquestionably, a connection that neither of us had ever felt before. On my days off, Gill would take me to some of her favourite places: the Yorkshire Dales, the tea rooms at Bolton Abbey or across the North York Moors to Whitby and the coast. Sometimes she made me meals at her house in Mirfield and our fondness for each other grew and grew.

I didn’t expect to find someone new and settle down. I thought I’d had my chance of that and it had gone. How fortunate for me that I was wrong. One weekend, I invited Gill to come and stay with me in Buckinghamshire. And very quickly I realised, as surely and as firmly as I had ever known anything, that I was in love with Gill and that I wanted us to live together. It was a huge leap for her. She hadn’t moved in with anyone before. Also, she had now been promoted to floor manager at Yorkshire Television and was only a couple of months into the new job. Her career was on the up. Yet, to my relief, she didn’t hesitate. She put her little house up for sale and she came down to Bucks and we started building a life together and being happy.

Of course, even though work was no longer the great healer, I still had work to do – doing
Frost
, mostly, at this time, but also, at the end of 1996, reconvening with the cast of
Only Fools and Horses
to do the set of Christmas Specials, marking, for many people, the story’s true conclusion. Which meant that Gill was there, in the studio, to share the moment when the curtain came down. Three years had gone by since we had made
the show’s previous Christmas Special and most of us assumed it was all over. But John Sullivan was still keen to tie up the ends of the story. He wanted the Trotters finally to become millionaires. In 1996 he wrote three one-hour episodes which were screened consecutively across that Christmas and in which Del and Rodney at last saw it all come good and made some money. Everything about the narrative pointed to these being the last ever episodes of
Only Fools
. The first two shows got audiences of 21.3 million. The third episode got 24.3 million. That’s still a record for a British sitcom. It was a staggering number. It made me dizzy to think about it. You simply couldn’t get it into your head how popular this show had grown to be.

At the end of the studio recording for that third episode, with the Trotters now officially on their way to wealth, we got a standing ovation from the studio audience that went on for longer than any I have ever heard – just on and on and on. Nick and Buster and I and all the fantastic cast were joined by John Sullivan and we had a group hug on the set, all of us in tears. It was very emotional and difficult to compute. We all knew this wasn’t the kind of experience that comes twice in your life. What a series. So many brilliant moments and lines; such clever writing. Sullivan was a traditionalist, in a way: he made the characters do the work and they didn’t need to resort to extremities of language or action. Yet there was such tremendous light and shade.
Only Fools
had a death, it had a miscarriage, it had a birth … The more John saw how we worked together, the more he felt he could push into areas where comedy didn’t ever go. It was great, honest stuff and it touched people’s lives. We had most of the nation behind us, really, when we properly got going.

The impact of
Only Fools and Horses
and the way that people responded to it was constantly surprising me and continues to do so. In the early 1990s, during the Gulf War and its aftermath, I met a bloke in a pub who worked at the RAF Command
headquarters at High Wycombe. He said, ‘Do you know what they do in their downtime? They race three-wheel vans against each other, and they paint them yellow and put “Trotters Independent Trading” down the sides of them. Why don’t you come up and see the lads? They’d love to meet you.’ So I did. I didn’t get to see a three-wheeler race when I was there, but I did see the lads and was in awe at what they do and their bravery and their spirit. With the bloke from the pub, I then hatched a plan, along with Nick and Buster, to send a Trotters van out to Kuwait. We could slip it into a Hercules plane among all the other stuff on a supply run and then, when the lads and the lasses unloaded the plane at the other end, they would find this Trotters van in the middle of everything. And we could fill it up with stuff – sweets and treats and bits and pieces to amuse them.

I said I didn’t want there to be any publicity around it because I didn’t want anyone to think it was just for that. I wanted it to be a kind of private joke – something between the Trotters and the RAF. And it happened. We got the van and we stuffed it full of chewing gum and toothpaste and cake and all sorts. Brian Cosgrove gave us a load of
Danger Mouse
and
Count Duckula
tapes on which we stuck labels saying things like ‘Debbie Does Dallas’ and ‘Unzipper-de-doodah’ (possibly). They put this van into the middle of the giant hold of a Hercules and covered it up with important things like medical supplies and ammunition and flew it to Kuwait, where its discovery brought a bit of light relief.

It was just a TV sitcom, and yet how the tentacles of that programme reached out. In 2011 I was filming a series called
The Royal Bodyguard
and a chap called Liam Byrne came up to me. Liam was the armourer on the show, looking after the weaponry that was needed. He said he wanted to speak to me and had promised some friends of his that, given the opportunity, he would tell me his story. So I sat down with Liam. He
explained that he had been a sergeant in charge of a platoon on a tour of Afghanistan. Before he had flown out, his wife told him she had packed a few things at the foot of his bag which might cheer him up in the event of bad times. Liam was touched, but he didn’t think too much about it. Then one day he found himself leading his platoon on reconnaissance. On that particular mission, one of his lads was hit and killed. It was a tight unit of men, and when they got back to the camp, everyone was distraught – so unbelievably down at what had happened. Liam didn’t know what to do to pull everyone back together. Then he remembered what his wife had said, about packing him things for bad times. These, surely, were those bad times. Liam went to his bag. At the bottom of it were some Pot Noodles and a copy of ‘The Jolly Boys’ Outing’, the
Only Fools and Horses
Christmas Special from 1989. Liam’s heart sank a bit. He wasn’t sure, in the circumstances, that these particular items could be relied upon to do much at all. Still, he gave it a go. They boiled up the Pot Noodles; they put on ‘The Jolly Boys’ Outing’. It helped. Watching these wally-brains on the screen, mucking about on a trip to Margate, being ridiculously British, took those battered lads out of themselves. Somehow it lifted their morale out of the dust and it began to stand them the right way up again. It was the start of the healing process, after which they could go on. I was staggered by Liam’s story and deeply moved by it. It made me realise that I had no idea how far what we did carried, and only the vaguest sense of its true repercussions. Yes,
Only Fools
was just a sitcom – and what could be more frivolous or irrelevant? You’re just arsing about in front of a camera and getting paid to make yourself laugh. Yet what you do goes out there and has effects beyond any you could ever have imagined at the time.

There was a further
Only Fools
trilogy, filmed in 2001. A few critics felt we shouldn’t have gone back to it – that the bow neatly tied in 1996 was now undone again. But people seemed
to want it, the BBC definitely wanted it, and that weight of anticipation is very hard to resist. And John was writing it, so all of us had no hesitation in saying yes. Even beyond that, in 2011, I had a meeting with John and Gareth Gwenlan, the producer, at John’s favourite restaurant, the Chinese in the Dorchester, and discussed coming back yet again – with Del at sixty-five and finding out what had become of everyone. I was up for it. I thought anything was possible in John’s hands. But fate had decided this wasn’t to be. A couple of weeks after this meeting, Gareth phoned me to say that John was in intensive care with viral pneumonia. He seemed to be getting better, though, and actually came out of hospital and went home at one point. We all thought he was on the mend. But then he relapsed and they took him back into hospital. He died soon after – too soon. His loss devastated us all. Again, I could only meet his death with disbelief. You can’t believe you’re never going to see that person again, that they’re just gone. It’s the most difficult thing in the world.

Now the show really was over. While it’s up and running, a programme such as that is like this complete world that you exist in. But when it’s done, the sets get packed up and removed, and the costumes go away, and the whole thing lives on only on a piece of tape. You can’t actually go back there. So you have to consign it to the list of those things that were great and wonderful and fun … and utterly gone. I do miss it badly.

* * *

G
ILL AND
I started to talk about having a family. By this time, I was sixty, she was forty. We were older than people conventionally are when they think about these things. The idea scared us a lot. We batted it back and forth.

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

As you can tell, we were a pretty decisive pair. In the end we decided to leave it to fate and fate answered us very quickly. So now, in 2000, Gill was pregnant and, as long as it all worked out, I was going to be a father – something else I thought I had missed, something else for which I thought the time had swept by while I was below the surface, at work. How lucky is that?

We had names ready. I thought David would be a good name for a boy – kind of resolute, and noble. Gill pointed out that in the TV comedy show
The Royle Family
, they had a ‘baby David’ and we’d get mocked. It didn’t bother me. Then one evening Gill tested me.

‘David?’ she said.

I said, ‘What?’

She said, ‘I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to baby David.’

So I realised that David might get complicated. I still quite liked it, though. I quite liked the idea of continuing the line.

As for a girl, I was watching breakfast television and Sophie Raworth came on. I had seen her read the news many times before and she always had my attention. Sophie was also the name of the girl in Roald Dahl’s
The BFG
, for which I had done the voice when Cosgrove Hall made their animated version, so the name had extra resonance for me. I went through to Gill and told her I rather liked the name Sophie. We thought we might add Mae for a middle name, for no reason other than because it sounded nice when you put the two together.

Three weeks before Gill was due to give birth, we discovered the baby was over nine pounds in weight and breech. It was too risky for Gill to go into labour so she had to be booked in for a Caesarean. So much for her plans for a water birth. Still, the baby was now a date in the diary, which I at least found reassuring amid the mounting anticipation. Come the day, in March 2001, Gill’s mum, Shirley – known to me exclusively as Birley, for no other reason, I hasten to add, than I like the rhyme – and I went with Gill to the hospital and I put on the
gown and mask and was admitted to the inner sanctum to watch as the doctors delivered a 9 lb 6 oz girl: my Sophie Mae. After Gill held her, she was handed to me and the room seemed suddenly very still and I had my first moments with my daughter.

The day after she was born, the press were in the hospital car park, and they were still there a week later when Gill had recovered from the operation and we left, gingerly carrying Sophie in the brand-new car seat. We didn’t have public relations people to help us. We just bundled our way out and went home in the mid-afternoon through a flurry of snow. And everyone who has done it knows what it’s like to bring a newborn baby home for the first time – knows the nervousness and the anxiety and the warmth and the wonderment. I had hung a little banner in her room, ready for her: ‘Welcome Home, Sophie’.

And before you ask: no, on the night of Sophie’s birth, back in that hospital, I didn’t carry her to the window and talk to her in the moonlight about the life that lay ahead of her, the way that Del did with Damien at the end of series seven of
Only Fools and Horses
. But I could have done. I could have spoken those lines of Del’s in that episode: