Today’s TV favours the hard-hitting, the callow, the angry...
invitations to the conventions which have been held since 1998, partly because he doesn’t feel comfortable appearing in public as himself, without the comfort of a role to hide behind, and partly because people would expect him to be Del Boy when he turned up – and without a John Sullivan script to hand, he didn’t want to disappoint fans.
He’s not one for red (or in his words ‘Dread’) carpet events either.
“It’s because I can’t quite accept the adulation or the pressure of people being interested in me. My life is spent hiding behind characters. So I find the ‘Dread’ carpet difficult because I have no-one to hide behind.”
He also admits that there have been times when he wanted to distance himself from the Del Boy character, when he couldn’t go anywhere without people shouting, ‘Oi, Del!’.
“It does get you down a little bit,” he reflects. “I’m delighted it’s brought so much pleasure to so many people but there are only so many times that you can talk about falling through a bar or trying to not catch a chandelier. It gets a bit tiring.”
Was he worried about being typecast as a one-dimensional character?
“There was an element of that, but it was a small element and I’ve done so much in other spheres of the business,” he says now.
“Del did cost me a few pieces of work along the way and, in other cases, I had to fight really hard just to be able to get into the room and start persuading people that there was more to me than a south London wheeler-dealer,” he writes.
But he came through with many other roles, including Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May and as DI Jack Frost – all entertainment which he acknowledges is a far cry from some of today’s darker TV offerings.
“It’s just a fact of life that today’s programmes favour the hard-hitting, the callow, the angry ... The tone is louder, more shouty,” he writes.
Trailers also give away too much these days, he adds, with punchlines of comedy shows and key moments of dramas revealed before they’ve even been aired.
Do people need gentler television, like The Darling Buds Of May, which featured warm-hearted characters in life and love situations on a rural Kentish farm?
“We need a mixture. There are so many people of different ideologies and religions – you have to try to give something to everybody – but there does seem to be a preponderance of journeys of dramas going in one direction, while there is still a huge audience for shows like The Darling Buds of May. Some of the repeats get a huge audience.”
The book also charts the career disappointments – he was offered the part of Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army for two hours before the offer was rescinded when producers found out that Clive Dunn was available to play the role.
He was also hurt when he wasn’t asked to join Monty Python’s Flying Circus after working with Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle on its children’s predecessor, Do Not
Adjust Your Set.
But he needn’t have worried. His hard-working ethos paid off as he soared to new heights as Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter, in the iconic sitcom which ran from 1981 to 1991, with 16 sporadic Christmas specials aired until the end of the show in 2003.
It’s a role he’d never resurrect, because the writer John Sullivan is no longer with us, he says. But he’s hoping that Granville will return in Still Open All Hours and would like to bring back his dedicated detective in A Touch of Frost, which ran for 15 series, ending in 2010.
“I’ve always thought we could bring Frost back, but as a private detective. I’m still hopeful that might touch a few people in the commissioning department.”