LOVELY JUBBLY ...we’re No 1!

The results are in... and the Trotters have been crowned YOUR all-time TV favourites in our exclusive reader poll. But who else has made our Top 100 – and who hasn’t Read on to find out...

Cushty, as Del Boy would say. Thank you to all your readers for voting for us. As I’ve always said, ‘He who dares wins!’

DAVID JASON

Dear readers, drum roll please... as winter closes in and the family huddle around the small screens – be they TV, computers or tablets – we decided to put our head above the parapet and stir up some controversy. We asked our readers across Ireland and the UK to send us your Top 10 TV shows so that we could compile the definitive list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows, as voted for by you.

And how you rose to the challenge. We were inundated with entries covering all manner of shows (yes, we even got votes for

The Partridge Family and DIY SOS) and, having spent days sifting through them, they’ve finally been counted and verified. So here then, over the next eight pages, you’ll find the best TV shows ever made, and details of how you can watch them if you missed them first time around, depending on your access to streaming and catch-up services.

There are plenty of surprises among the dependables. Of course,

Dad’s Army and Strictly are in the Top Ten, but the only American show up there is Friends. Poldark appears too... but you might be surprised to discover which of Robin Ellis’s Cornish captain or Aidan Turner’s most floated your boats. In Ireland, residual affection saw the inclusion of Strumpet City,

Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of James Plunkett’s classic novel of the 1913 Dublin lockout, while

Insurrection, his seminal 1966 drama imagining the Easter Rising as if it had happened in the television age, perhaps is too old to be remembered by many.

While The Wire and The Sopranos make the Top 100, there’s no room for Better Call

Saul – regarded by some as even better than related series Breaking Bad, which is on the list. New classics such as The Last Of Us, only one series old, perhaps are too fresh to have won affection as well as admiration. Frasier is there, Seinfeld isn’t. Minder makes the cut, The Sweeney does not. I, Claudius, packed with major stars, is forgotten despite its recent repeat on BBC4 – yet you still remember Brideshead Revisited with affection. In Ireland, we love our crime dramas, so Love/Hate and Kin won your affections. Needless to say, that great staple of Sunday nights, Room To Improve, ranks highly. Steptoe And Son, the template for all great sitcoms, has faded into history... but ’Allo ’Allo!, which is amusing but shallow, merits inclusion. But perhaps that’s because the shows we love most are those we watched as children, the ones that bring a nostalgic rush – which explains our everlasting affection for Blue Peter and Bosco, Wanderly Wagon and The Simpsons.

For years now, we’ve been meeting the superstars of the small screen week in week out. Ireland’s favourite weekly TV guide has been steering you through each week’s viewing to make sure you never miss a minute, alerting you to all your streaming favourites as well as the best of terrestrial TV.

That’s why your favourite programmes’ actors and creators are happy to spill their secrets to TV

Week – and what stories they’ve told us! Because we love your No.1 show Only Fools And Horses as much as you obviously do, we never miss a chance to chat to David Jason, aka Del Boy. ‘If I went to the Moon, a chap would pop up from behind a crater and say, “Lovely jubbly!”’ he told us in 2008.

‘Once, I was relieving myself in the gents’ and a bloke said, “Can I have your autograph? I didn’t want to embarrass you out there.” So he waited till I was mid-flow in the toilets. Unbelievable! But it didn’t occur to us that the show could go on like it did and still be held in such affection. It never entered our minds.’

And his co-star Nicholas Lyndhurst, or Rodders (now starring opposite Kelsey Grammer in the

Frasier reboot), told us he was accosted in the street daily with ‘Oi, Rodders!’. ‘But the papers loved it,’ he recalled. ‘They could say “plonker” now!’

Kevin Whately, who played Sergeant Lewis on Inspector Morse before taking the lead in its spinoff Lewis, revealed, ‘Morse’s maroon Jag was an old stunt car that John Thaw himself had written off more than once in The

Sweeney. You could see the road through the floor. It was hell on wheels.’ Morse is on the list, though good old Lewis isn’t.

And Martin Compston, whose

Line Of Duty character DS Steve Arnott is known for his natty waistcoats, revealed the terrible cost of lockdown over-indulgence. Before the final series began filming, he’d been starring in a thriller called The Nest which included several scenes with his shirt off, so naturally he’d made sure he was in great shape.

When the Line Of Duty wardrobe department measured him for his clothes he was a 30in waist. Then came six months indoors... and when shooting started he could no longer squeeze into his trademark three-piece. ‘It was horrible – I’d totally changed shape,’ he told us. He then hit the gym, a worthwhile investment of energy because Line Of Duty has come in at No2.

Maggie Smith makes our Top Five, playing the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton

Abbey, the greatest of all costume dramas, which gave her such acerbic lines as, ‘I wonder your halo doesn’t grow heavy, it must be like wearing a tiara round the clock.’ And perplexed by a piece of newfangled slang, she once queried, ‘What is a weekend?’, which is when we’re here to serve you, free with your Irish Mail On Sunday!