Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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After Rep, Jason acquired an agent – Ann Callender, the wife of the BBC producer/director David Croft, who was based at The Richard Stone Partnership – and adopted the stage name of Jason (possibly in honour of his late brother, although he once claimed that it was prompted by his fondness for Jason and the Argonauts) after discovering that there was already a ‘David White’ on Equity’s books. He then proceeded to work in a wide range of plays and summer seasons.
His first major break on television arrived in 1967, when he became a regular member of the new ITV children’s comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set alongside the future Monty Python stars Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones and the versatile character actor Denise Coffey. Overseen by the producer Humphrey Barclay (who had been recruited specially from the BBC with the brief of creating a bold new brand of ‘adult’ comedy shows for youngsters), Do Not Adjust Your Set was, for the time, an intriguingly adventurous and imaginative sketch show that mixed silliness with surrealism to appeal beyond the normal audience for its modest tea-time slot. Among Jason’s regular contributions was his role as Captain Fantastic, a comically British bowler-hatted and moustachioed super-hero drawn into a succession of darkly slapstick situations. His very physical Buster Keaton-style performances helped distinguish him from his more reserved co-stars, and won him not only a sizeable youthful following but also some encouragingly positive reviews in the newspapers.21
After the show ended in 1969, Jason went on to appear in a wide range of other productions, including another ITV tea-time comedy show in 1970 entitled Two Ds and a Dog (in which he was reunited with Denise Coffey, playing a couple of eccentrics called Dotty Charles and Dingle Bell who, with their dog Fido, travel around in search of adventures), a short stint in the daily ITV soap Crossroads (playing an increasingly unpredictable gardener), and a few one-off episodes of such shows as Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Doctor in the House. He also joined the large team of contributors to the long-running BBC Radio 4 satirical news series Week Ending. Rather more significantly, he was given a regular role – or, more accurately, range of roles – in LWT’s Hark at Barker.
Hark at Barker was a sketch show, running from 1969 to 1970, that first brought Jason into the orbit of Ronnie Barker. Like Jason, Barker had started out in Rep, acquiring his technique and exploring his range by accepting each new weekly challenge as the conveyor belt of productions rolled on. He represented to Jason just how far an actor like him could go in his profession: the rather portly Barker had never been leading man material, but his versatility, intelligence, discipline and wit had enabled him to become a very popular, in-demand and critically admired performer, who was now regarded as a star in his own right. The two men soon saw in each other a kindred spirit, became good friends, and worked extremely well together on the screen.
Encouraged by his association with Barker, Jason then went on to win his own first starring vehicle in the 1974 ITV slapstick-spy spoof The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs. Although it was actually a very patchy affair – sometimes inspired, sometimes falling flat – and it struggled to compete for viewers in the ratings, the programme brought him easily the most positive publicity of his career so far, with the Daily Mirror describing him excitedly as ‘the talk of the comedy world’ and quoting his director, Bryan Izzard, as predicting that he ‘is going to be a great star’.22 He followed this in 1976 with another starring vehicle for ITV entitled Lucky Feller, which cast him as a woman-shy man called Shorty Mepstead who was still stuck at home with his mother and his much more confident elder brother, but this programme, too, failed to capture the public’s imagination and faded quietly away after a solitary series.
Here was the nagging problem for David Jason: he was, by this time, sufficiently well known to attract plenty of media attention for his new projects, along with quite a few predictions about his imminent ascension to ‘overnight star’ status, but the projects and promises continued to come and go without that final big breakthrough being made. Indeed, by the middle of the decade, the optimistic articles were already beginning to sound somewhat hollow. His most vocal champions in the press were starting to sound unsure, with The Stage newspaper capturing their growing sense of frustration, disappointment and impatience when it declared: ‘Somewhere there is a writer whose ideas Mr Jason can execute to great effect, but they have not yet met.’23 In a ruthless profession where timing is often thought to be everything, the actor was fast reaching the stage in his career when his image as one of the ‘next big things’ was in serious danger of seeming outdated.
The most significant thing that happened in 1976 was his recruitment, in a supporting rather than a starring role, in a new BBC2 sitcom that reunited him with Ronnie Barker: Open All Hours. Deeply respectful of his more experienced, and more famous, friend and fellow performer, Jason was happy to serve as his sidekick, playing the put-upon and quietly desperate little Granville to Barker’s big, tight-fisted, lustful and stuttering shopkeeper Arkwright. The chemistry between the two performers seemed effortlessly engaging, and the show, gradually attracting more and more viewers, would run on well into the next decade. It added greatly to Jason’s popularity, while seeming to suggest that, by this stage in his career, he had found his level as, to put it bluntly, a superior kind of support act.
Although he continued to be offered, and sometimes accepted, the odd starring role of his own, the moment never seemed right to finally realise his full potential. The most successful of these ventures was almost certainly A Sharp Intake of Breath, which lasted for four series over four years, starting from 1977, on ITV. Playing yet another likeably ‘ordinary’, somewhat whimsical, figure named Peter Barnes (and ably supported by a good cast that included Jacqueline Clarke, Alun Armstrong and Richard Wilson), the show performed very well in the ratings and he received another flurry of favourable reviews, without, once again, threatening to become one of the small screen’s iconic comic figures.
By 1980, therefore, David Jason was in real danger of being pigeonholed, albeit reluctantly, as the nearly man of great British comic acting: the splendid character actor who, due to bad luck rather than lack of talent, had lost out when it came to landing the career-defining roles. He still wanted to break through, and he certainly still deserved to break through, but, to be harshly realistic, time seemed to be fast running out.
Nicholas Lyndhurst, in contrast, had many years ahead to fulfil his own great potential, but he, too, was looking to move on at the start of the new decade. Tall and skinny and aged just nineteen, he was eager for roles that allowed him to be something other, and more, than yet another stereotypical boy or son.
Born in 1961 in Hampshire, Lyndhurst had first stepped on to a stage at the age of six, when he played a donkey in his school’s nativity play (‘My only line was “Hee-Haw . . .”’). Two years later, he started asking his mother if he could go to drama school, and, when he reached the age of ten, his mother relented and he went off to the Corona Stage Academy, in Hammersmith, west London. ‘I was determined to go to this magical place where the teacher was an actor, though I had no concept of what I was aiming for,’ he would later explain. ‘I didn’t believe I’d ever actually open my mouth and have a speaking part in anything. The idea of achieving fame and fortune didn’t cross my mind.’24
Lyndhurst did start to appear in adverts, but this was primarily to pay for his tuition fees. His first ‘proper’ television work came in a couple of BBC Schools productions, followed by a number of peripheral non-speaking roles in a variety of mainstream programmes. His debut in a major production was as Peter in a 1974 BBC adaptation of Heidi, and he followed this a year later by playing Davy Keith in a BBC period drama mini-series called Anne of Avonlea (a sequel to Anne of Green Gables).
It was shortly after this, when Lyndhurst was deemed to have reached that difficult ‘transitional’ phase between juvenile and adult actor, that work started to dry up and his professional future looked uncertain. The only option was to wait and see what, if any, offers arrived, and, fortunately for him, a very exciting one materialised in 1978: the role of Ronnie Barker’s young Cockney son in the post-prison sequel to Porridge, Going Straight. Building on the priceless prime-time exposure that this afforded, he then moved on to win the role of Wendy Craig’s gauche teenaged son Adam