Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Takes a Closer Look at the Talented Actor David Jason

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

The opportunity to catch up on former television favorites demands time. The ability to binge watch only comes when matched with the opportunity to do so.

My next indulgence is therefore a future indulgence and not one I have managed, quite yet, to dip into. It was brought to mind recently because I watched a tribute program to the principal actor, David Jason.

Jason is a legendary figure in British television. Credited with the creation of the best comedy character in the history of British television – Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses – he is quintessentially English.

I don’t believe that he has ever found a need to go and prove himself on any other market than the British one and we can live with that as he has really made his mark in the UK.

That mark was originally as a comedy actor and no matter how good as a comedic tour de force the plaudits that come always do, they arrive with a tinge of snobbery attached as people tend to think of comedy actors as the inferior to those of heft and serious drama.

Jason knew this and took on the challenge, making his mark in Porterhouse Blues, a television adaptation of a novel that saw him get accolades aplenty. He had already shed the Del Boy persona through Darling Buds of May, yet another television adaptation of a book, though that was another comedy role.

What happened next was a conscious change of scenery and focus.

Jason became a television detective.

Taking as its title, one of the six books written by R.D. Wingfield upon which the whole series was based, A Touch of Frost hit our screens in 1992. Running for an incredible 15 seasons, with 42 episodes, it lasted until 2010 and catapulted the comedic genius into the limelight as a man with a traumatic past and an annoyance with the present. Disheveled and with amazing insight, Frost was a combination of a Columbo and a Jim Rockford. He was a detective who was able to solve complex cases but not organize a filing system. He was able to get to the heart of the matter but pay little attention to the details of a force where tidiness within the superior ranks was next to godliness.

Produced by Yorkshire Television it was set in a fictional town of Denton. Atypical of the genre, Frost would frequently clash with his superior officer, “Horn Rimmed Harry”, whose job it was to manage the wayward detective and try and get him to focus on the needs of the force and the records of his cases. It was both thankless and fruitless.

Major debuts in the series included a young Damian Lewis who went on to such dizzy heights as Billions and Homeland.

What was also notable about the series was not just that it took a well loved actor from one genre successfully, into another but that it also saw the original writer, R. D. Wingfield, talk of how the character on TV was not the character he had imagined in his books. I recently read one of the six books and it is quite clear that the televisual adaptation does not match precisely the book based one. In the books Frost is far less likeable and charming, which is accompanied by his sidekicks having less respect for him than the eventually manage onscreen.

The part that Jason played in making Frost likeable and popular would have been difficult to imagine in the books as he is irascible, frequently difficult to like and opinionated in a way that larger audiences would be put off by. Jason was never going to play such an unlikeable character or was unlikely to make such a character unlikeable onscreen.

In the TV series he is endearing and charming in ways that his disheveled nature, his frequent brushes with authority and the long suffering sidekicks who get the paperwork to do, that the books fail to tackle; at least not with the ally of such a well-loved televisual feast as Jason himself.

Jason also got, for the first time on British TV, to work regularly with his brother as he was the collater in the TV series. A collater was really important in the police force before computers and was responsible for collating all the crimes, solved and unsolved and was the font of all knowledge within a police station. It meant frequent scenes between them during the solving of cases.

The series which was broadcast on the commercial ITV stations came to an end in 2010, because of Jason himself. They had long gone past adapting the original source and Frost was now the oldest TV detective on British television. At 68 years of age, he would have been retired for 8 years but Jason had had 18 years out of him so he felt that the time was right to retire him and so he did.

As a crossover from one part of the televisual firmament to another, A Touch of Frost worked beautifully and I shall now seek out all 42 episodes to add to my binge watching.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in the series for me was in an Indian Restaurant he frequented nightly after he had to leave his flat due, I think to some unforeseen accident, which was down to his own negligence. Managing to find a place he could go to have his evening meal was one thing but the restaurant was struggling. Alone in the restaurant, tucking into his nightly curry, Frost is approached by the owner. He explains that having a “copper” in the place every night was bad for business as people had stopped coming in; so, Frost is asked to stop coming in. having a look round the dawning of the effect he had on the restaurant is beautifully nuanced. It served as a symbol of how he solved crime – with all the information around him but needing something or someone to bring him that Eureka moment!

For us as viewers it was a Eureka moment to realize just how privileged we were to have now, Sir David Jason as a presence on our screens. Frost remains in the memory but is yet another symbol of the power of British drama being able to capture the viewers in quality products.

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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