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David Jason: In His Element by David Jason & Niall Edworthy
David Jason: In His Element by David Jason & Niall Edworthy
This book and the TV series it follows originated with the idea of taking a major celebrity to some of the world's best dive sites. Given David Jason's huge popularity and well-publicised interest in diving, an informative and entertaining diving book might well have resulted.
Regrettably, in trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, this has ended up as a travel book with some diving thrown in. It revolves around the frustrations of filming the series within a tight time-frame in which everything seems to go wrong - equipment lost in transit, constant jet lag, foul weather and illnesses.
Believe it or not, our hero suffers flu, food-poisoning and a bad back, all in the space of two weeks!
Repeated details of Jason's symptoms do not sit well with the light-hearted style of the book, and this aspect bored me at times. We are also given potted history and geography lessons on most of the countries visited and Jason is taken to meet the wackiest locals his researcher can dig up. The frequent anecdotes about these characters and members of the production crew might have been funny first-hand, but do not translate well into print.
I also found the underwater pictures rather ordinary. Many are washed out and very obviously posed, with Jason hanging on to some unremarkable lump of rock, staring straight into the camera while apparently trying to smile, despite a mouthful of regulator!
As a book about diving, this, like the TV series, is a great opportunity wasted. However, there are surely masses of David Jason fans around with no interest in our sport who will readily snap it up. Jim Greenfield |
David Jason: In His Element by David Jason & Niall Edworthy, Andre Deutsch (0171 316 4450). Hardback, 160pp, £17.99.
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