Not posh enough for the pythons
MY LIFE BY DAVID JASON (Century £20)
Actor of character: David Jason as Del Boy in Only Fools And Horses
Though, by 1996, 24.3 million of you were tuning in to watch Only Fools And Horses, I’m afraid all that Del Boy ‘plonker’ stuff with crashing chandeliers and falling through the pub counter left me cold.
I can’t stand comedians exerting themselves to be loveable - Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army is another bore.
David Jason, who lost that part, incidentally, to Clive Dunn, is far better, to my mind, as Inspector Frost - 42 episodes over 18 years, a masterpiece of melancholy, asperity and kindliness. Jason also found lots of layers as Pop Larkin (Perfick!) in The Darling Buds Of May, because he is a great character actor, not a comedian.
And as Toad in the animated version of Wind In The Willows, with Michael Hordern and Peter Sallis, he is quite simply perfection.
Jason’s account of his ‘busy and fulfilling life’, is as genuinely genial as the man himself. He comes across as hugely likeable and approachable. He is scruffy and ordinary and has no side, no lurking churlishness.
Early success: But David Jason found his working class background a handicap
He was born and bred in Finchley, and as a child he was reminiscent of Peter Sellers’s Bluebottle, the eternal naughty schoolboy, drinking ink, nicking lead to make toy soldiers, the class clown who never grew taller than 5 ft 6 in.
Tragically, Jason was an only twin - and his mother claimed to have buried the stillborn other baby in the garden.
Well, there was a war on. Jason’s mother was from Wales and the family made regular trips to Pontlottyn, a place of sulphur mines and malevolent hunchbacks that could be Ingmar Bergman’s medieval Sweden. Jason’s dad was a Billingsgate porter, who combined banter with ‘a brooding, forbidding presence you did your best not to cross’.
Jason’s solace - ‘an escape I increasingly found myself hurrying towards’ - was amateur dramatics. For his performances in John Osborne and Tennessee Williams with the Muswell Hill Players, a local newspaper called him ‘a young James Cagney’.
For many years, Jason interspersed acting with being a garage mechanic and an electrician, mending irons and toasters, rewiring flats and fitting out pubs. Eventually, he had to make a decision.
‘Stuff the two-up, two-down and the Mini on the drive. Stuff the conventional path I’d slowly been drifting up’ - Jason decided to turn pro.
It was a struggle: blacking up to play the bongos in Bromley Rep; a tour as a pirate with Ron Moody as Captain Hook; end-of-the-pier stints with Bob Monkhouse and Dick Emery; encounters with a plastered Bob Todd; and panto with the lugubrious Terry Scott, for whom ‘fame had temporarily exhausted his patience with lesser mortals’. Which is one way of putting it.
These were the lean times of hideous digs, with nylon bed sheets and Gestapo landladies.
The most frightening moment was when Jason was propositioned by the elderly actor (‘You know you want this, dear’) who did the voice for Hector’s House. Jason also traipsed around the Far East in dreary farces with a feckless Derek Nimmo and the appalling Leslie Phillips, who radiated ‘animosity and coldness’.
Jason’s big break was to be cast as Bernie Killroy, a crooked boxing manager, in Crossroads, where he was lucky to be forgiven for sitting in Noele Gordon’s special chair.
Jason has never forgotten the mad plots, the tiny studio, the zero rehearsal, the fluffed lines, the dropped props and the cameraman falling over the carpet. It was all retained - and broadcast.
Masterpiece: Jason as Inspector Frost
Promotion of a kind came in 1967 with a role in Do Not Adjust Your Set, co-starring the pre-Python Pythons, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones.
It was now, however, that Jason was made to realise ‘I hadn’t been to drama school. I hadn’t been to university and acted there. I had no qualifications behind me’ - except for his natural performing instincts.
Jason was becoming peerless at porters and waiters, devising lengthy bits of hysterical business not anticipated by the actual playwright or director.
‘I was doing a fair amount of swinging from wires and an awful lot of falling over, not to say quite a bit of jumping across soft furnishings.’
But the Oxbridge mob didn’t appreciate this. Though Jason’s Do Not Adjust Your Set character, Captain Fantastic, an idiot super-hero, was popular with audiences, Idle and the others, without consulting Jason, decided not to renew the show’s contract.
They wanted to move on and make Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The memory of this clearly still rankles. ‘They were very chummy with each other and, dare I say it, a bit cliquey. I fitted in like a pork chop in a Jewish salad.’
Jason got sidelined. ‘I minded that ... I was pretty bitter about it.’ Decades later he ran into Eric Idle in a restaurant and - well, Jason still found him obnoxious.
Fate had other ideas. In 1969, Jason fell in with Ronnie Barker. He was cast as the hairy gardener, Dithers, in the Lord Rustless/Futtock’s End programmes, and he played Blanco, an elderly lag, in Porridge.
It was Granville, however, the wistful, yearning shop assistant in Open All Hours, which ‘propelled my career to another level’. Monty Python has dated very badly - it is just plain silly - but Open All Hours remains a masterpiece: the emotional claustrophobia of being stuck in a back-street grocery store (filmed in Doncaster); Barker’s bullying and miserly Arkwright; Jason’s elderly dreaming lad in a Fair Isle tank-top.
Partner: With Myfanwy Talog, who died in 1995
He’s as good as John Mills in H.G. Wells adaptations. I am glad that Jason states that ‘Ronnie Barker was a man whom I thought more deserving of a knighthood than me’ - because that is surely scandalously the case.
Granville led to Del Boy, and onwards to Frost and Pop Larkin. It was only because he was due at the Palace to be dubbed by the Queen, in 2005, that Jason allowed himself to get married to his long-term girlfriend, Gill.
For as regards relationships, ‘I was paranoid to an absurd degree about getting tied down and trapped and stopped ... At the first sign of anything more permanent or of the emotional connection strengthening, I would break away and flee.’
So - deep down he is not, perhaps, as approachable and likeable as he appears? Jason says he is at his happiest when diving in the ocean or flying in his helicopter. That is to say, when he is immersed in an element, under the sea or up in the sky, where there is absolutely no one else about.
And if he is, by temperament and preference, cagey and solitary, it is a fact that you don’t get to be this successful by being nice and compliant, day in, day out. It can’t be done, though there is no need to turn into Terry Scott, Leslie Phillips or Eric Idle, either.
I’d have welcomed more information about Myfanwy Talog, the brilliant and beautiful Welsh actress who was Jason’s partner for 18 years, who died of breast cancer in 1995. Jason offhandedly says she was well known in South Wales for her programmes with ‘Rees and Ronnie’.
Not quite. He means Ryan and Ronnie, also both now dead. Myfanwy was on their show as Phyllis Doris, a blowsy valleys tart. Did the BBC wipe the tapes? I’d give anything to see them again.
