David Jason: My Life (49 page)

‘You’re gonna have such fun. You are. And when you get the hump, cos you’re bound to get the hump sometimes, I’ll muck about and make you laugh. Cos I’ve mucked about all my life, and I never knew the reason why until now.’

* * *

W
E LIVE VERY
privately, which is how we prefer it. The garden, the workshop – those are the places I’m happiest. I like to have a project on the go – something to restore, something to fix. The pond needs cleaning? That’s my idea of a good time. I love anything in the garden, actually. I’ve built two steam engines which you can sit astride, and a raised five-inch gauge track in
the garden, which travels between two stations, with a bridge over the pond and a tunnel. I used to plonk Sophie on the back when she was smaller, sit there with my knees up around my ears, stoke the coal in the tender, sound the whistle and steam out around the perimeter of the garden.

We go on holiday to a quiet place in south-west Florida where we can take boats out and I can dive. We are blessed in what we have, of course, but I think you would struggle to describe ours as a ‘celebrity lifestyle’. That’s not how we see ourselves and it’s not what we want. Very occasionally, we might find ourselves on the red carpet at a film premiere or at an awards ceremony. But it amuses Gill and me how bad we are at that stuff. We know the score: you should linger in front of the photographers, smile graciously and lap up the attention, for it may not be yours forever, not even next week. But I’m normally clammy-palmed with a combination of fear and embarrassment, and we end up making a poorly disguised dash for it, rushing along the carpet, blinking blindly into the flashlights, hanging on to each other like a pair of silly old fogeys. Any photograph taken of us at any point on this dash will be nearly guaranteed to make us look uneasy. We don’t care. That’s not who we are.

I get recognised when we’re out, and it can get a little out of hand. Gill and I were once invited to watch the tennis at Wimbledon by Bruce Gyngell, who was then the managing director of Yorkshire Television: champagne lunch, seats on Centre Court, the works. In the row in front of us, and just along a bit, was Jack Nicholson. Gill and I thought, ‘Great: no question of us getting bothered here. People will be too busy bothering Jack.’

Wrong. While Jack sat there, utterly untroubled, watching the tennis, a steady stream of well-wishers made their way along our row to say hello – to the point where, eventually, people around us felt obliged to intervene: ‘Leave the poor bloke alone.’ Now, who’s the bigger star, do you suppose: me or Jack
Nicholson? Well, naturally, it’s Jack Nicholson. But he’s
such
a big star that there’s something slightly intimidating about him. People kept their distance. Whereas I’m Del, I’m Pop Larkin: I’m approachable. Which is lovely of course, and better than having people cross the road to avoid you, I’m sure. And better still than having people cross the road to your side in order to poke you in the eye with a burnt stick. And yet … well, sometimes you end up deciding it’ll be more comfortable for everyone if you stay at home.

Inevitably, it affects my life with Sophie a little. There are things I can’t do with her. I just have to accept that. Legoland, Thorpe Park … we’ve tried those places, but people gather. Still, what we do instead is go to matinees in the West End:
Mary Poppins
,
The Sound of Music
,
Wicked
, you name it. Anything with songs and ice cream in it is fine by us. That’s our time together and it’s a precious thing. I show her the theatre. I show her where I come from.

And then, if it’s a nice day, I might fly my helicopter. Which sounds a bit flash, I suppose: a bit ‘TV’s Man of Action’, as the
TV Times
once had it – you might even say a bit ‘celebrity lifestyle’. But there it is. It’s all Gill’s fault anyway. For my birthday about twelve years ago, she bought me a chance to go up in a helicopter, flying out of High Wycombe. I really loved it and I decided to learn to fly one myself. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever mastered: your hands and your feet have to work in contrary motion to one another. It’s a bit like playing the drums, I guess, although with greater risk of death. Yet I did it, and I did it when I was in my sixties, and I’m very proud of that.

With helicopters, you work your way up gradually: a little solo trip around a field at first, and then, as part of your exam, a solo cross-country flight to designated points. The first time I attempted that, I managed to get lost and I had to land in a field to ask a farmer for directions. Poor bloke. He was surprised
enough to see a helicopter come down on his land and even more surprised to see Del Boy get out of it. I failed the exam, needless to say, and by next week the story of the bozo who got lost on his cross-country test was all around the airfield. Still, I passed eventually, and with the need I now had to get to meetings and locations up and down the country, I managed to rationalise buying my own little machine – a four-seater Robinson R44, my mechanical pride and joy.

So, a wife, a daughter, a helicopter … the good fortune showered upon me in these recent years is, I am truly aware, more than any man would have a right to dream of.

Oh, and the knighthood. I nearly forgot the knighthood.

One morning early in 2005, Gill brought the post to the breakfast table. Among the usual bills, there was a letter from Downing Street. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his government wished to know whether I would be prepared to accept the honour of becoming – to use the official title – a Knight Bachelor. There had been no word of warning of this. It was totally out of the blue. Naturally, I assumed a wind-up and checked the envelope for evidence of the hand of the usual suspects: David Reynolds, say, or Brian Cosgrove, or Micky McCaul. Micky had once sent Gill a very convincing summons to jury service at the Old Bailey. This kind of deception wouldn’t have been beyond him.

But no. It wasn’t a wind-up. It was true. I was made a Sir in the Queen’s birthday honours of 2005. I felt very humbled – and maybe even a little awkward about it. For me, those kinds of titles go to heroes in battle or to heroes in charity. To get one for acting, which doesn’t seem to me to have any parity with those things … well, I found that a bit hard to get my head around. Still, it was on offer. I was hardly going to turn it down, was I?

The date was set for my investiture on 1 December. On its own, it was a thrilling and momentous prospect for Gill and
me, but just to make it even more interesting, we decided to combine it with our wedding.

Gill and I often spoke about getting married, and especially after Sophie came along, but we could never come up with quite the right plan for doing it – a way that wouldn’t create stress and fuss. If someone could have come into the kitchen and quickly spliced us over breakfast, we would both have been happy, though friends and family might have felt a bit let down. I suspect Birley would never have spoken to us again. Now, there’s a thought …

Anyway, the investiture solved our problem – and kind of obliged us to act, because Gill really wasn’t keen to go to the Palace as an unmarried mother. While she was organising a special lunch for the investiture at the Dorchester Hotel in London, Gill noticed that they do private wedding ceremonies there. We hatched a plan to get married, quietly and in semi-secret, on the eve of the investiture.

We invited a handful of people to come to the Dorchester on 30 November 2005 – close family members and Gill’s best friend Sue Hallas. The only people who knew why they were really there were Sue, my soon-to-be mother-in-law Birley and my sister June – and, of course, Sophie. The others (Arthur and Joy, June’s husband Miggy, her two sons Michael and Mark and their partners, and Gill’s two brothers, also called Michael and Mark, funnily enough) thought they were coming to a party for the investiture. Only when they walked in did they find out they were guests at a wedding.

The marriage took place at 5 p.m. in a beautiful room at the hotel. Gill wore a gold lace dress with a little jacket and I wore a lounge suit with a buttonhole. Sophie, who was four, was our bridesmaid. It was intimate and romantic and just the happiest time. Afterwards everyone came back to our suite for cocktails and canapés and to cut the cake. Even though it was a set of rooms with a separate sitting room, the hotel staff had put up
a little bed for Sophie at the end of our four-poster. Sue quietly wondered whether we were OK with that on our wedding night and we laughed because it hadn’t even occurred to us that it was odd.

The following morning, I arose a married man and went straight off to become a bachelor. Or, at any rate, a Knight Bachelor. I was allowed to take my new wife with me to the Palace and two further guests. I chose June and Arthur to be with me, we three siblings thus, in a manner of speaking, completing the totally implausible journey from Lodge Lane to Buckingham Palace. Well, if the royal family never showed up to use the front room the Whites kept ready, we’d just have to go to them instead. Sophie, of course, was too young to attend the investiture, but Birley brought her to the Palace for the photos outside afterwards.

At the Palace, as Gill and June and Arthur watched, I went down on one knee on the foot stool and the Queen stepped forward and touched me on both shoulders with the sword. I’ll let you into a little secret here: she doesn’t actually say ‘Arise, Sir David’. The whole ‘arise’ thing turns out to be an urban myth and is not a part of the ceremony. Shame, really. It’s a good line. She should use it. However, afterwards, I stood and the Queen said, ‘You’ve been in the business a long time.’ I don’t know why, but I found myself telling her I hoped I hadn’t done anything to offend her at any point. She laughed and said that so far as she was aware, I hadn’t.

And then it was back to the Dorchester, and a slap-up lunch for fifty. Nick Lyndhurst, sadly, couldn’t make it, but so many other pals and companions were there: Humphrey Barclay, Micky and Angie McCaul, Johnny Dingle, Malcolm Taylor and his wife Annie, Brian and Angela Cosgrove, John Sullivan and his wife Sharon, Meg Poole, Johnny Lyons and his wife Anne … At the beginning of my speech, I stood up and said, ‘First of all, Gill and I were married yesterday …’ and the place erupted with cheering and thumping on the tables.

Amazing. A married man, a Sir, and all inside twenty-four blissful hours. I would have loved Ronnie Barker to have been there that day and shared this with us all. He was a man whom I thought more deserving of a knighthood than me. Alas, Ronnie had died two months previously. But earlier in the year, when my knighthood was announced, he had, typically, sent me a poem to commemorate the event, and at the lunch I declaimed it, so at least he was there in word:

Congratulations, Little Feed,

Her Gracious Majesty decreed

That Granville, little errand lad,

And Del Boy, Frost, and others had

All served their nation passing well,

So here’s to Granville, Frost and Del!

The old ex-Guvnor’s proud to see

His comrade reach such high degree,

Knight of the Realm, and TV star

Who never thought he’d get this far.

‘Arise, Sir David,’ she will say,

The sword upon your shoulder lay.

I raise a glass filled to the brim

And truly say, ‘Good Knight from him.’

My mother Olwen looking radiant in Wales in her youth.

My dad, 1930, doing his bit for King and Country.