Ooh Matron, what a Carry On
Almost 80 and still tickling audiences, Jim Dale on Kenneth Williams’ cruel streak, and the day Dr Nookey came a real life cropper
ACTOR Jim Dale is casting around for a word that illustrates the gulf between British and American humour. ‘Bullocks,’ he declares finally, and for a moment I wonder if he has become exasperated by the enormity of the task and given up.
Then he clarifies. ‘If I said, as I did to Sid James in Carry On Cowboy: “Last night Colonel Houston’s ranch was raided and they got away with 40 cows,” and Sid had retorted: “Bullocks”, then I’d said: “I know what I’m talking about”, and Sid had replied: “And I know what I’m talking about too: they were bullocks, not cows,”’ no one in an American audience would laugh. They don’t know what bullocks are — or understand how double entendres work.’
We Brits, however, would be in on the joke: we’d titter at the innuendo without being offended because jokes with double meanings are a staple of British humour. They are saucy, rather than blue; risqué, not vulgar. And they are the enduring theme of that peculiarly British comic institution, the Carry On films.
Jim appeared in 11 of them, and his name will forever be associated with Carry On. It’s perverse, really, because in a showbusiness career that has spanned 63 years — yes, incredibly, miraculously even, Jim turns 80 this summer — he spent just six years in the Sixties filming them.
He went on to work with Sir Laurence Olivier, acted in comedies by Shakespeare and Moliere, and played the circus owner Barnum opposite co-star Glenn Close in the Broadway musical in New York, his adopted home town.
But I met him recently back in London, where’s he performing a one-man show he also wrote, at the Vaudeville. It’s the very theatre where he made his West End debut 50 years ago, although the name of the show harks back, yes, to that golden spell in slap-and-tickle.
Just Jim Dale: Still Carrying On, is Jim’s unassuming homage to himself — and it’s a delight.
His co-star and old chum Barbara Windsor was there for the opening night, when she and Jim mocked up an iconic scene from Carry On Again Doctor: he, in white coat, as Dr James Nookey holding a stethoscope to the ample chest of ‘Miss Goldie Locks’.
In the original, Barbara wore nothing but three strategically placed hearts. This time round, aged a rather more decorous 77, Barbara wore the hearts embroidered onto her dress. Jim wore the same expression of hopeful longing he did as Dr Nookey.
Jim is as lithe and slim as a youth; his voice strong, his gift for timing pin sharp. He still possesses a balletic grace — which is unsurprising because, as a lad growing up in smalltown Northamptonshire (his dad was an iron foundry worker), he was an early Billy Elliott, the only boy in the local dancing school.
‘And a fine, upstanding youth I was,’ he says. He just can’t resist a double entendre.
HE WAS also accident prone: as a teenager, cutting his teeth in the dying days of music hall, Jim went for an audition hoping to do impressions, caught his foot in a tear in the stage curtains and fell flat on his face.
The roar of laughter that greeted his pratfall was his first, inadvertent, experience of the joy of slapstick.
In the Carry Ons, it became Jim’s hallmark. He had multiple fractures and broken bones as evidence.
Remember the scene, a classic of the genre — we’re back with Carry On Again Doctor — when an inebriated Dr Nookey careers though a pair
of double doors and down a flight of stairs on a hospital trolley before crashing to a halt on a food-laden buffet table?
Jim does: almost 60 years on, he still has the scars to prove it. Rolling up his shirtsleeve, he shows me his left elbow, pockmarked with welts and blemishes.
Uniquely and somewhat recklessly, Jim did all his own stunts.
‘I remember asking the director: “Why do you always schedule my stunt work on the last day of filming?” And the director said: “For a very good reason, Jim: if you break your neck, it won’t ruin anything.
‘ “We’ll bring in a real stunt man, shoot the scene wide angle. Nobody’ll know.’’ ’
JIm WAS injured in that trolley scene. In a sort of life-imitating-art irony he whacked his elbow with such force that he ended up in a real hospital (rather than a mocked- up one at Pinewood Studios) with his arm in plaster.
Next day, ever the trouper, he was back on set filming another stunt, the plaster cast hidden under his sleeve. ‘ I had to jump into a hammock, fall through it and crash through a wooden floor.
‘The director said to me: “make sure you hold your damaged arm across your chest and turn your face slightly to camera.”’
He demonstrates how the contortion worked, with a grimace. Jim wasn’t paid danger money; in fact he wasn’t paid any extra for doing his own stunts — although his hospital bills were paid.
When Jim filmed the Carry Ons he was married to his first wife, Patricia, and the father of four young children. He didn’t party after filming — he was much too busy helping to raise his brood, he says — but among the eclectic Carry On cast, he was most friendly with the outrageously waspish Kenneth Williams.
‘Ken would flirt with me,’ he recalls. ‘It became a running gag. He did it to make everyone laugh. He was a b****r, too, because he loved to stir up mischief.
‘ He told Peter Butterworth [another Carry On regular] that I absolutely hated him, and viceversa, and for a while Peter and I didn’t talk to each other.
‘Then one day I said to Peter: “Has Ken ever said anything to you about me?” and it all came out. Ken loved that kind of childish joke.’
Jim reveals, too, that it was Williams’s intervention that secured his place in the Carry Ons — although at the time Jim thought, on the contrary, that Williams was scuppering his career.
‘my first film wasn’t a Carry On,’ he explains. ‘I had a very small part in one by the same company. It was called Raising The Wind . . . which would probably be called Carry On Farting, today,’ he adds.
The 1961 film starred Kenneth Williams, who played the inept conductor at a music school. In one scene, the bass trombone player — Jim — hits a wrong note. Williams reprimands him. Jim gives a oneline riposte, which, in rehearsal one day, he decided to deliver in Williams’s distinctive nasal tones.
Almost immediately he regretted it. Everyone erupted into laughter — except the butt of the joke. ‘I couldn’t hear what Kenneth was saying, but I saw him stalk over to the director and I could have read his gestures a mile away.
‘He was pointing towards me and making a fist. Then the director came over and told me to hold back on the impression. “You sound more like him than he does,” he said.’
Jim, chastened, imagined he’d never work with Williams again. But to his surprise, a year later, he was invited to become a permanent member of the Carry On team.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he recalls. ‘I said to the director: “But Kenneth Williams hates me. I saw him stalk up to you in that last film we made and he looked so bloody angry.”
‘And the director said: “You’ve got it wrong. He wasn’t angry. Just the opposite. He said: “For God’s sake, use him. If he can take the mickey out of me and make me laugh, he’s a godsend.” And that’s how I came to join the team.’ Jim’s metier is comedy, and after his spell on the Carry Ons he joined the National Theatre company in 1970 at the personal invitation of Olivier, who knew Jim would make a brilliant Shakespearean clown.
In the U. S., however, Jim is associated with Harry Potter, having won two Grammys for his recordings of the novels in audiobook form.
The trophy cabinet at the home in manhattan he shares with his second wife, Julia, groans with a host of awards.
DURING the pre-Beatle years of the late Fifties and early Sixties, the young Jim also packed in a short spell as a British pop star.
His best-known hit, Be my Girl, produced by George martin — who later worked with the Fab Four — reached No 2 in the charts in 1957.
But Jim detested the screaming adulation pop stardom brought and became, instead, a lyricist; his lyrics to the Seekers’ 1996 hit Georgy Girl — title song of the Lynn Redgrave film — earned him an Oscar nomination. ‘I didn’t like being chased through the streets by hysterical children,’ Jim remembers. ‘One night there was a melee outside the Birmingham Hippodrome.
‘This police sergeant was running alongside my limousine and then I realised why: his hands were trapped in the window. We were dragging him along.
‘And then there was all the pushing and grabbing.’ To demonstrate it, he grasps my cardigan and tugs firmly at it. ‘ You see? I hated all that,’ he says. ‘And the recognition. I didn’t need it.’
He has the utmost reverence for real aficionados, however, the fans who turn up at the stage door with old programmes for him to sign — one arrived the other day with a 50year-old one from his first performance ( in a musical called The Wayward Way) at the Vaudeville — and he enjoys cheery London cabbies wishing him luck with the show. It’s just the throng; the stage whispers, the intrusions on his privacy he detests.
Jim is a modest man and, I suspect, a shy one. He is certainly erudite — he can quote as copiously from the Bard as he can recall old music hall jokes — and it does him scant justice to equate him only with the films for which is best remembered.
Every night before Jim goes on stage, he admits, he suffers from stage fright. ‘But the skill of a good actor is convincing the audience you don’t feel nervous at all,’ he says. Which he does, of course, like the old trouper he is.
Tickets for Just Jim Dale are on sale via the Box Office on 0844 482 9675 or the website: justjimdale. com. The show runs until June 20.