David Jason: My Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

least I wasn’t hospitalised in that particular incident – unlike the time when a lump of brick, thrown by mybrother’s mate Jimmy Bickers, created an opening in my forehead which required closing by qualified medical staff. And unlike the time when the top of my skull broke the flight of a rusty paint tin flung by, of all people, my brother Arthur – his third significant attempt on my life. And unlike the occasion when the back of a parked-up welder’s truck into which I happened to be scrambling proved to contain a six-inch nail which cut a long, deep groove in my thigh. Blessedly, Mr Bickers, Jimmy’s dad, the owner of the only car in Lodge Lane, was at home and prepared to play the part of the ambulance driver. I needed anaesthetic while that particular gash was healed, and in those days that meant chloroform dripped onto a gauze mask. Really, if the wounds didn’t get you, there was a decent chance the treatment would. It’s a wonder I made it through this period at all. But such was life as a Lodge Laner – lived under the permanent risk of death to ourselves and others.
    Eventually, to our immense chagrin, when I was about ten years old, the council levelled the bomb site and built a small block of flats in its place. And with that we lost our playground. The flats are still there, and the alley too, and many of the old houses, but sadly not number 26, which at some point became a car park. But times have changed, of course, and customs with them, and you’ll look in vain nowadays for children throwing handmade tomahawks at each other. Maybe they’re doing it on the internet, instead. That would be far safer.
    With our playground gone, we had to seek other venues for our amusement. But the world of entertainment was itself moving on rapidly. There was untold excitement round our way in the summer of 1953 when Ronnie Prior’s dad acquired the neighbourhood’s first television set. He had it installed for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II that June and then invited everyone within about a three-mile radius to come and share the experience. You’ve never seen such a crowd gathered in a single sitting room. People were hanging from the light fittings.The technological marvel we were all straining to see had a glass screen, the thickness and approximate shape of a standard goldfish bowl and affixed to a teak wood cabinet large enough to conceal several bodies. Yet the apparition on that screen of these silvery figures, going about their regal business in Westminster Abbey, seemed utterly miraculous. The only thing you’d ever seen like it was the movies. But this was the movies in the corner of a room – unthinkable levels of magic.
    Two years later – just in time to catch the launch night of Associated-Rediffusion, the first ITV channel, in September 1955 – we had our own set at 26 Lodge Lane, on hire purchase. You put a sum down, paid a weekly fee, and then two years and half a dozen new tubes later, the television was yours. That opening night for Associated-Rediffusion included a variety show, a boxing match and an advert for Gibbs SR toothpaste. But never mind the fact that the tubes kept going and that my father was never entirely happy with the positioning of the aeriel on top of the set, I rather liked the look of television. My hunch was that it had a great future ahead of it, if it ever managed to catch on.

CHAPTER TWO
The cockerel from hell. Something called acting. And the law feels my collar.
    EVERY SUMMER MUM would take me and my brother and sister to stay with her family in Wales, going on the train from Paddington, which was a stunning scene of noise and smoke in those days. It’s hard to convey, now, the excitement in the build-up to those trips. Sleep the night before would prove nearly impossible. Then there would be the ride on the Underground, taking our cardboard cases; and then, at Paddington, the walk down the ramp that led into the station, with the unutterably exciting