David Jason: ‘An Only Fools return? Let’s go for it’

As far as he is aware, David Jason has only sworn once on TV. “There was one moment in A Touch of Frost, when I said ‘f---’ under my breath. You didn’t hear it, but viewers [knew what I was saying],” he tells me. “When we were working on Darling Buds of May or A Touch of Frost or any of the big shows that I’ve done, if there was a moment where the characters could have sworn, me and the producers and the writers would sit down and say, ‘Do we really need that?’ And nine times out of 10, we would say, ‘no’.”

One of the most familiar faces on TV, who for a generation will forever be known as the wheeler-dealer geezer Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses, the avuncular Jason is not a man to use bad language. “Plonker”, yes. But a four-letter curse, definitely not. Hence one reason for his absence from the coarser, vulgar world of today’s TV comedy. “If I were to be offered a new sitcom role now, I would have to see what the content was like, because I don’t like graphic language,” he says. “I’ve always avoided that. I don’t think it’s necessary. But then, finding a programme that you can watch with your nearest and dearest, youngest and oldest, is proving more and more difficult on television these days.”

I’m talking to Jason at a small film studio in west London. He’s a sprightly 86 and in the flesh not much changed from the man who has graced some of the most-watched TV shows in recent history. ITV’s A Touch of Frost, which ran for nearly two decades and in which he played the curmudgeonly detective Jack Frost. The Darling Buds of May, also for ITV, the Arcadian ratings topper set in 1950s rural Kent and which gave the nation the word “perfick” thanks to Jason’s indelible performance as Pa Larkin.

And, of course, Only Fools and Horses, a perennial winner of Best British Sitcom polls, in which Jason played the paternalistic, spivvy market trader in sheepskin alongside Nicholas Lyndhurst’s gormless Rodney. His face is still round and smiley, his frame still short and squat, and although he emanates an unexpected pugilistic energy, like a boxer, there is an indelible wholesome decency about him, just as there is to the parts he is most remembered for: each one a down-to-earth, incorrigible, if somewhat beleaguered optimist.

Jason, who lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife Gill Hinchcliffe (the pair have a grown-up daughter, Sophie-Mae), has just finished filming a documentary, Open All Hours: Inside Out, celebrating another career highlight. Featuring behind-the-scenes footage and a specially shot brand-new scene to bring the comedy to a proper close, it’s a tribute to Roy Clarke’s classic grocery shop-set sitcom in which Jason played the socially stymied delivery boy Granville to Ronnie Barker’s irascible, stuttering, penny-pinching shopkeeper Arkwright; the pair pratfalling about like a northern version of Laurel and Hardy.

The show ran for 26 episodes across four series and consolidated a lasting friendship between Jason and Barker, which had begun some years previously when Jason appeared in Barker’s 1969 comedy series Hark at Barker. Jason was already a big fan of Barker and had to persuade his agent to let him star, despite the low fee. “I said to my agent, ‘I want to do this. I don’t care what they’re paying, I want to work with Ronnie Barker.’ To me, it was more important to be able to work with one of my heroes than to have an extra 50 quid or whatever it was.”

A few years later, Barker starred in his 1973 series of comedy pilots, Seven of One, to which Clarke had contributed an episode set in a Doncaster grocer’s shop, and so Open All Hours was born. “That episode had needed a physical comedy person, and Ronnie thought of me, because I always played an idiot who kept falling over,” says Jason, who still calls Barker “the guvnor”; Barker died in 2005. “I was a huge fan of Ronnie B’s.”

Open All Hours is one of the BBC’s most beloved creations. So much so that in 2013 it spawned the jaw-droppingly successful sequel Still Open All Hours, which saw Jason’s Granville in sole charge of Arkwright’s store. It ran for six series, regularly attracting viewing figures of 4.5 million.

“The BBC’s head of comedy at that time [Shane Allen] invited me to go for lunch with him, and I don’t very often get offers like that,” says Jason. “He asked me if I had any ideas, and was there anything I might like to do? After a moment’s thought, I said, ‘Well, one of the things that’s been occurring to me is whatever happened to Granville?’ And that’s how it happened. But we should have had the shop front changed to ‘Granville and Arkwright’. I’m disappointed that I never thought of that before…”

Jason is a bit of a nostalgist at heart. He can’t, for instance, help but mourn the England that the original Open All Hours immortalised: a time when community life revolved round the local shop and the country truly was a nation of shopkeepers.

“Small shops are hanging on by the skin of their teeth,” he says. “[The rise of delivery apps] has changed the way we shop. Even supermarkets are beginning to be outmanoeuvred by it. These days you can have a meal for half a dozen people delivered by some bloke on a pushbike. You can have beds delivered to your door overnight. You can phone it up and it’s there in the morning. So the whole dynamic is slowly moving away from the shop in the high street. And that’s very sad.”

Open All Hours may immortalise a now-vanished England, but it also immortalises a vanished form of comedy. The humour was distinctly 1970s, with Arkwright’s stutter a running gag and the buxom nurse Gladys often at the receiving end of Arkwright’s leery, if hapless, attempts at courtship. Jason, however, argues that the sort of character-driven humour it embodied – whereby the joke was invariably on whoever was making it rather than whom it was directed at – is these days a misunderstood art.

“You should be able to laugh at a character, regardless of where you come from in society,” he says. “But people are too sensitive now. Yet if we can’t laugh at ourselves, we are in danger of losing our sense of comedy, which is old-fashioned British joke-telling in the nicest possible way. Too many people have too much influence. You can get a person sacked simply by what you say [about them] on the internet. It’s a difficult one.”

Not that anyone has criticised to his face the humour in Open All Hours, or indeed Only Fools and Horses, whose ITVX reruns now come with trigger warnings, advising viewers they may find some of the jokes offensive or outdated. “Not one person has ever complained about any show that I have done,” he says. “No one has said they didn’t believe in it or didn’t enjoy it.”

In that case, surely then there’s a case for reviving Only Fools and Horses on TV? It’s certainly almost impossible to overstate the reach of John Sullivan’s 1980s classic, set in a working-class Peckham where dreams were big and opportunities small, and where the Trotter boys are forever on the lookout for an (invariably dodgy) way to “make a bit of bunce”. After all, a musical version, based on the original scripts, recently completed a four-year run in the West End.

“But the problem [with a TV revival] is that the man who created it is no longer with us,” says Jason, referring to Sullivan, who died in 2011. “He wrote every episode and just happened to be a genius. I’m not so sure that we have a writer clever enough to take on his mantle. No one could write the characters like he could.” But if the right script were to come along? “Well yeah, providing we have a good script, let’s go for it!”

For someone who established himself as one of the best-loved faces on TV, Jason’s career had a haphazard beginning. He grew up in Finchley, the son of a fishmonger and a cleaner, and had an older brother and a younger sister. He also had a twin brother who died at birth. Jason has always been resolutely, even defiantly unsentimental about this. “From my point of view, it was a distant curiosity, a piece of passed-down history,” he writes in his autobiography My Life. “It was hard to feel it as a loss – or even as an event in my life.”

As a child he was not academically inclined. But he did enjoy acting and as a teenager joined a local theatre group in Friern Barnet. Nonetheless, on leaving school he worked as a gofer in a garage, before training as an electrician. In 1964 he decided to try his hand at acting. He had no formal training and his first role involved blacking up for Noel Coward’s South Sea Bubble at the New Theatre in Bromley. “Fault me if you will,” he has said about this. “But I just needed a break.”

For several years he slogged his way through regional rep. “Summer seasons, pantos – anything where there was a stage.” But he was gaining a reputation for physical clowning, and eventually was spotted by the producer Humphrey Barclay. “He saw me being a silly bugger, and he thought he could use me in the show that he was putting together.”

That show was Do Not Adjust Your Set – an ITV series for children starring Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Denise Coffey. Given the names involved, this could have sent Jason’s career in an entirely different direction, but it was not to be. Instead, Idle, Palin and Chapman went off to create Monty Python’s Flying Circus for the BBC, leaving Jason and Coffey behind. “Yes, it rankled. We got sidelined. That’s how it felt to me,” Jason later wrote.

Undeterred, Jason went on to establish himself as a jobbing actor. “I did one or two West End plays,” he says. “But I hadn’t cracked the code, as it were, for the big time.” Around the same period that Monty Python came to life, Jason was cast in the role of Lance-Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army, only to lose it again hours later when the director’s original choice, Clive Dunn, agreed to take it on.

And then Barker came calling. So began Jason’s long career in popular TV entertainment – and a long-running association with the BBC. He has fond memories of the corporation during the 1980s and 1990s.

“It was a great company because the bosses who commissioned the shows were very accessible,” he recalls. “I mean, you could go for a drink in the BBC bar after rehearsal and you’d be rubbing shoulders with the head of light entertainment or the head of drama or whatever, and you could speak to them.”

Yet in many ways the character of light entertainment is now a very different beast. Not least since the era of the live studio audience is now largely consigned to TV history. Jason, who cut his teeth on such a format, despairs. “I learnt the trade in front of a live audience in the theatre,” he says. “Only Fools and Horses and Open All Hours, those were in front of a live audience. And that gives you a flavour of a real-time audience reaction, which teaches you two things: what works and what doesn’t, and how to time certain things. Because when a line gets a reaction, you’ve got to know how to handle that so that you remain real for the audience while also timing the next piece that comes along. It’s quite a complicated process.”

His last foray into sitcom was BBC One’s The Royal Bodyguard in 2011, for which there were high hopes. However, it was cancelled after one series. “That was my fault,” he says. “I never quite got it right. I can’t blame anybody but myself for that. I loved the script, but I just wasn’t very funny. I’m sorry about that! It would have been nice to get another chance at it, though.”

Jason has always been a bit of a daredevil. In 1997 he made a two-part TV series about his love for scuba diving. In 2005 he gained his pilot licenceand bought himself a helicopter, a Robinson R44 which he would frequently fly to the Isle of Wight, even to the occasional meeting. Alas knee trouble has put paid to his days in the sky and he no longer flies, settling for walking the dog instead.

His personal life has also not been without complication. In 1995 he lost his long-term partner Myfanwy Talog (the couple had no children) to breast cancer. He married Hinchcliffe, whom he met while she was location manager on A Touch of Frost, in 2005 and the couple had Sophie-Mae in 2009, when Jason was 61. Rather than baulk at taking on a baby at an age when some of us start looking towards retirement, Jason instead threw himself into parenthood. “When our daughter was a baby, up to the age of six, were some of the best times,” he told The Times in 2024. “She used to make me laugh so much. I fondly miss those days.”

In 2022, Jason discovered he had a second daughter, an actress named Abi Harris, now in her 50s, who was born following a brief affair between her mother and Jason in 1970. It was Harris who contacted Jason to tell him she believed he might be her father – a suspicion later confirmed by a paternity test.

The pair met for the first time at a London hotel in 2022. “It was very nerve-racking, but we got over that and have been working and building a relationship ever since,” Jason has said of this late-life discovery. His daughter Sophie-Mae took the news in her stride as well. “I took her into the library, sat her down and was expecting all the tears, flailing of fists and running out of the room and she didn’t,” Jason has said about this. “She said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. When do I get to meet her, then?’ I was expecting a bomb to go off, and she took it right on the chin. She was just wonderful. They get on well together now, so it’s lovely.”

He comes across as extremely happy with his lot but also not a man who has ever bought into his own hype. I tell him that friends of mine, who had just returned from India, had been greeted with his Del Boy catchphrase, “Lovely jubbly”, when they discovered they were British, and he simply smiles. “I just wish that people in certain parts of the world could say that to each other, as opposed to picking up a stick and beating each other with it,” he says. “It’s much more fun to enjoy banter rather than fisticuffs.”

Open All Hours: Inside Out is on U&GOLD on Thursday 7 May at 8pm

[Source: Daily Telegraph]