Actors - David Jason

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	Actors - David Jason

Sir David Jason OBE, was born David John White on 2 February, 1940, in Edmonton, London. He is a highly regarded British actor, admired equally for his dramatic work as for his comedy roles.

David was brought up in Lodge Lane, North Finchley, and went to school nearby. He trained as an electrician after leaving school while negotiating his way into repertory theatre. He took his stage name from his twin brother Jason White, who died at birth. His elder brother, Arthur White, is also a character actor.

Early career

David Jason started his television career in 1967 as a spoof super-hero Captain Fantastic (and also other roles), in the television sketch comedy series Do Not Adjust Your Set. His co-stars were Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Humphrey Barclay, who recruited David Jason to appear in Do Not Adjust Your Set (partly to offset the rather intellectual style of Idle, Jones and Palin), admired David's masterful sense of timing.

Jason also appeared in variety shows in support of stars such as Dick Emery. This was in an era when British performers such as Peter Cook, Marty Feldman, Tony Hancock, Benny Hill and Kenneth Horne were all regularly demonstrating superb timing skills to humorous effect. David Jason's eye-catching performances would also attract the attention of Ronnie Barker, who would become a mentor to Jason in the next era of his career.

Jason was somewhat ahead of the Austin Powers
and Johnny English
film genre in an inventive TV series about an inept spy called The Secret Life of Edgar Briggs.

Jason was recruited to play Dithers, the hundred-year old gardener to Barker and co-worker of a maid played by Josephine Tewson, in Hark At Barker, then Blanco in Porridge, a prison-based comedy also starring Barker, then junior employee Granville in Open All Hours, starring Barker as the miserly proprietor of a general store. He also took the lead role in ITV sitcom A Sharp Intake Of Breath.

In the 1970s he did some work for radio, appearing in Week Ending (regularly satirising such figures as then UK Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen), and was the original "B Ark Captain" in the sixth episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Maturity and success

In 1981 he created his most enduring and popular role, that of Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, a wide-boy who makes a dubious living in Peckham, south London, trading in shoddy and counterfeit goods with the assistance of his brother Rodney (played by Nicholas Lyndhurst) and Grandad (played by Lennard Pearce) or, latterly, Uncle Albert, played by Buster Merryfield. In this role David popularised some slang words; examples being the mild insults "dipstick" and "plonker" and the celebratory "lovely jubbly".

He soon earned acclaim for a string of serious roles, as Skullion in Porterhouse Blue, Detective Jack Frost in the TV series A Touch Of Frost and Pa Larkin in the tale set in rural Kent, The Darling Buds of May (based on the H. E. Bates novel and featuring pre-Hollywood-fame Catherine Zeta-Jones).

He has also worked as a voice artist for Cosgrove Hall on a number of children's television productions, providing voices for Dangermouse, B.F.G, Count Duckula
and Toad from The Wind in the Willows, as well as several other cartoon voice-overs and advertising work.

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