Sir David Jason - A Life of Laughter. Stafford Hildred
to bits. It was parked right on the side of the lake and it was pretty miserable really, especially when I ended up getting left behind when my bike packed up.’
Despite his enthusiasm for high speed, David was usually a careful motorcyclist, yet he did come close to losing his life on his motorbike when he was racing back from Clacton with Mike Weedon riding pillion. It was a busy summer evening with the main roads so clogged with traffic that inventive David had picked a favourite personal short-cut, winding round a sequence of back roads.
As dusk fell, the two youngsters thrilled to the speedy journey and leaned energetically into every bend, until they reached a particularly sharp corner when David yelled to his passenger, ‘There’s too much gravel, I’m going to lose it.’
To Mike’s horror, David pulled out of the bend, straightened the screaming machine and went straight on over the bank at the side of the road. With enormous good fortune, they crashed violently through the undergrowth and found the road again on the other side. Then they hit the bank and the bike just took off. When they landed they were remarkably lucky to hit the road facing straight ahead and carry on unscathed. Mike breathlessly yelled to his daring driver, ‘Dave, Dave, stop. Let’s have a fag.’
But the daring young man on his flying machine was seriously scared himself. He yelled back grimly, ‘If I stop now, I’ll lose my nerve,’ and just kept on heading for home.
David’s love of speed was undimmed by the experience. He later exchanged his trusty 350cc BSA for a much more powerful 500cc Shooting Star, which could comfortably exceed the magical ‘ton’.
Mike Weedon recalls, ‘He really cherished that 500. He did the ton more than once. He loved high speed. He used to get quite excited about having gone more than 100mph. We had no farings to make us more streamlined in those days, so David would lie down as flat as he could on the bike to get up to those sorts of speeds. He loved it.
‘We used to race each other up the A1 and back down the Watford bypass, but it was nothing really serious. We just enjoyed racing for the fun of it and hoped the police didn’t manage to spot us.’
David plays down his high-speed youth and insists, ‘We were never real tearaways on the bikes, we were gentleman motorcyclists. There were the rockers but me and my mates had flat caps and goggles and we weren’t into all the Teddy Boy thing either. We were very shy and found it very difficult to talk to the ladies and we didn’t succeed in that department at all. So we concentrated on our motorbikes. I suppose that is what young lads do –find other ways to expend their energy. We used to strip them down, heat them up, and rebuild them.
‘I was so into motorbikes that in our outside toilet on the toilet roll holder was carved something like ‘While You Sit Here You Will Have All Your Best Dreams’, and I wrote underneath ‘Or A Super Road Rocket’. At the time, that was the Mercedes Benz of motorbiking.
‘Today, I drive a Jaguar XJS. In those days, a Super Road Rocket was as far away as the moon or an XJS because they cost about £750. We were earning £12 a week then. If I really pushed myself, I could save £2 a week which I did.’
The three lads also spent a few weeks with Bodgy’s grandfather down in Cornwall where they were all bedded down in the same room on a huge straw mattress for the night. Mike remembers, ‘It was in a little place called Mylor where there was a creek which led to Falmouth Bay. We all went out on a fishing trip in this rowing boat and tried to catch some mackerel.
‘Then the tide turned and we suddenly had to start trying to row in against the tide. For a long time we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but finally we managed to get back into the creek and back to Bodgy’s grandfather’s place only to be told that the mackerel were out of season. We had been wasting our time.’
Mike and Bodgy finished the day drowning their sorrows with a few beers in the local, The Pandora Inn. On the way home, they had to climb a 1 in 4 hill. A combination of disappointment and alcohol had dimmed their concentration and they lost control and completed a difficult day by finishing up in a ditch. But David missed out on this final disaster because he had chatted up a young lady down by the seaside and had taken her out for the evening. He was starting to realise that laughter was a great way of breaking the ice with girls.
‘I could never impress a girl by being cool or sophisticated,’ said David, ‘even if I wanted to. But if I could make them laugh, they seemed to become more friendly.’
David was the first of the trio to take any interest in the opposite sex, although he was always careful to make sure that girls never came between him and his motorbike. He was always close to girl next door, Julie Pressland, who was just three years younger. ‘Julie was always sweet on David,’ remembers Mike Weedon, ‘but I don’t think there was ever any reciprocation there. We were just young guys, and girls never really came into our lives that much at the time, even David’s.’
Julie insists she and David were only ever very good friends. ‘I was never his girlfriend, or in love with him, or any of the other nonsense that has been suggested. I know he did have girlfriends but to me he was always so single-minded about making it as an actor that I don’t think there was ever any room for a serious romance or marriage. As long ago as I can remember, he was so dedicated to making it that nothing was going to get in his way. I think he always thought, deep down, that you could either have a normal family life, a marriage and children and all that, or you could be a successful actor. He just didn’t believe you could do both. He felt if you tried to carry a wife and children along as an actor, they would somehow fall by the wayside.’
Julie was perceptive enough to know that the real and enduring love of David’s life was to be his acting. Certainly, he enjoyed passing flirtations with girls quick enough to follow his sharp sense of humour but he never had the obsession for the opposite sex that drove so many young men to devote their lives to the pursuit.
David reflected later, ‘When I was 16, the only thing my mates were interested in was the pub, the dance hall and girls. The last thing they were interested in was acting. You had to have guts to run against the tide.’
The acting bug had bitten David for real and all his efforts were channelled into making his appearances with the Incognitos as professional as possible.
When he left school, David was wary of leaping straight in and following his brother into the precarious existence of struggling to make his way as a would-be actor. Arthur was first persuaded by their parents to take a ‘sensible job’ as an apprentice butcher but, like David, he knew he really wanted to act and launched boldly into the competitive world of weekly rep. David was happy and enjoying his amateur performances with the Incognitos and agreed to follow his parents’ considered advice that he should get a trade behind him first. His forceful mother Olwen typically insisted, ‘Actin’? That’s not respectable. You need a job. You need a trade.’
David’s first job was as an apprentice garage mechanic but he did not take to that, later recalling unhappily that his initial attempt at a sensible career consisted largely of, ‘Lying under cars in mid-winter, this stuff dropping on you, the wind whistling up your bum.’
He left after a year and decided to train as an electrician, while still pursuing his acting interests on an unpaid basis, and joined the London Electricity Board as an apprentice but the Board made him redundant. ‘I was 20 when I was made redundant by the LEB,’ he recalls. ‘It was an awful thing but it was not the end of the world. It was difficult for me. I had spent my life being employed by people. So my mate and I started our own business.’
David decided that if no one else would employ him, he would have to work for himself and, with a friend called Bob Bevil, he set up B and W Installations, after Bevil and White. But David sums up in one word his efforts to become a businessman.
‘Pathetic. As an amateur, I was acting every night of the week in those days. I formed my own electrical business so that I could be more of a free agent. But I was doing so much acting, I was always having to take time off from work to get home, get changed, learn lines. I was packing up work at about four in the afternoon to get ready for an amateur performance at eight.
‘I