Sitcoms were better in the days of ‘Only Fools and Horses’
David Jason talks to Chris Harvey about fame, censorship and being spurned by Monty Python
Back in the Seventies, David Jason and Ronnie Barker were rehearsing an episode of Open All Hours and had set each other off. They were falling about laughing, and when they came off the small rehearsal stage, Barker turned to the younger man and said, “It’s not bad, is it? We get paid very well for making ourselves laugh.” Jason turns to me: “I’ve carried that with me my whole career.”
Jason, of course, played the put-upon nephew Granville to Barker’s crafty shopkeeper Arkwright in Roy Clarke’s much-loved sitcom. Now Granville is the unscrupulous proprietor of Arkwright’s shop in the rebooted Still Open All Hours, which was watched by a staggering
12.2 million viewers when it returned for a one-off special on Boxing Day 2013. It has since run for five series, with the sixth starting tonight, and still attracts audiences of more than 4.5million. To put it in perspective, that’s almost twice as many as watched the finale of Fleabag, despite its acres of newspaper coverage.
“It’s just escapism,” Jason says. “It’s a vehicle to make people laugh, that’s all it is. There’s a lot of people fed up with the constant grind, and the dramas getting heavier and heavier.”
We’re in the stately surroundings of a National Trust property in Buckinghamshire, not far from where the actor lives with his wife Gill, their 18-year-old daughter Sophie, and various chickens. Jason is 79 now, but looking altogether dapper, and in person he’s as irrepressible as Del Boy Trotter or Pop Larkin from The Darling Buds of May. He’s rarely still. He abandons his comfortable armchair to demonstrate why Del Boy falling through the bar in Only Fools and Horses tickles people so much. It’s because he doesn’t put an arm or leg out to break the fall, and his eyes continue to look straight ahead, he says. He learnt it would get a laugh doing stage farces… back in the days when “my mistress was the theatre”, he adds with a thespian flourish. Jason is still making himself laugh, and me.
It can be hard work getting the beats of a performance just right, he notes – “little tiny things that people would be totally unaware of ” – but when he hears stories about actors head-clutching, and saying, “I’m in the zone, don’t talk to me”, he’s not having it. “Don’t make out that it’s more complicated than it is.”
I mention that Ronnie Barker retired as he came up to his 60s, and ask if Jason had ever considered it. “It never even crossed my mind,” he tells me. In fact, at 61, he was still only half way through his two-decade stint as detective “Jack” Frost in A Touch of Frost, and becoming a father for the first time.
He hadn’t quite met the person he wanted to settle down with until he met Gill, he says, although he did have a long-term relationship with Welsh actress Myfanwy Talog, who died of breast cancer in 1995. During his years coming up, he says, “I wasn’t earning any money, really. And I couldn’t afford to support a family.”
So would he recommend fatherhood as an older man. “Yeah, of course,” he says, “I suppose the thing that you miss, perhaps, is being able to do all the things a younger father would do with their child. But Sophie is lovely – when she was a baby and a small child, she was so funny, it was sheer delight.
“I still call her ‘the warf ’, because she loved Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but she couldn’t say the ‘D’. Even now, I’ll say, ‘Where’s the warfling?’, and my wife will say, ‘Oh, she’s gone out,” he raises an eyebrow mock disapprovingly, “with a boyfriend.”
He can be a bit short on tolerance at his age, he admits, “and I’m not up with all the modern phones and computers”. He expresses bafflement at the phenomenon of teenagers texting. I think it’s safe to assume that Jason is not into Twitter and social media.
I wonder if his comedy was influenced by his own mother or father? “Only my father,” he says. “He was a fishmonger in a shop off Warren Street [central London] and one in Golders Green. He used to know a lot of cockney rhyming slang which he used on me, and I picked up some of it. Apparently when he was at work, he was the life and soul of the shop. I never really experienced it. He didn’t show it in the home – this very jocular person – he was very serious.”
Jason tried seriousness: he did six years as an electrician after leaving school, before giving it up to become a jobbing actor. Stage work and bit parts on television led him to a big break in the 1967 children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set, famous for starring not only Jason but three future Pythons, in Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin, as well as Denise Coffey. It’s chaotic, still hilarious, and certainly the seed of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which followed immediately afterwards. Which one does he remember as being the funniest?
“Mike Palin,” he says, without a beat. “Not only was he the best, and for me the funniest, but he was the nicest of them all. He used to make me laugh.”
Would Jason’s career have been different if he had been asked to join? “It would. Absolutely. At the time, my nose was well out of joint. It would have changed the direction of my career – maybe I would have gone to America and been involved in that. But I’ve had such a good time and been very successful here, and done such a spread of work.”
Did they think he might upstage them? “Well I come from a different background, which maybe they didn’t want. They were all a bit cerebral. They’d all been to university. I was an actor, maybe they felt that I couldn’t contribute very much in the writing… maybe they thought that Denise Coffey and I would be a bit of, perhaps, dead wood.”
It’s a shame that Coffey was dropped, too. Does he think that women have had a fair chance while he’s been in the industry? “No, I wouldn’t have thought so,” he says. “It was always a bit male dominated, for no other reason than that was the norm… the general consensus was women weren’t as funny as men, but obviously that’s not true nowadays.”
Jason’s years in Only Fools and Horses were still ahead of him, as was his later career as an award-winning straight actor. He wishes people had noticed he could play straight roles earlier, but believes he was already using his range as a character actor in Only Fools and Horses. Del Boy, he says, was a different sort of part from Granville, “more realistic, with a lot of wonderful emotional stuff that came up”.
Does he think sitcoms were better then? His answer is a masterpiece of circumlocution. “That’s a difficult question really,” he begins, “because styles change, modern people view things differently, but by and large, I would say, trying to answer your question: yes.”
Censorship made writers more creative, he explains. Del Boy calling Rodney “a plonker”, wouldn’t have been funny if creator John Sullivan had just written, “you d---”, as today’s standards would have allowed.
“It does have a knock-on effect,” he says. “If you look at the movies and the dramas on television, they will say, ‘we’re only reflecting what is happening in society’, the language and the violence and the sex. But which comes first?”
I wonder how he looks back on the years when he was the most popular star on television. “It never really affected me,” he says, “because I’ve always kept my feet on the ground … if you look at some of the modern people who haven’t had the grounding that I had, like some of the Love Island types, they get this big shot of fame, and a couple of years later, for most, not all, it’s over.
“It’s a very, very cruel mistress, fame, or can be. I never took it very seriously. I’m just pleased that I’m able to still do what I love doing.”
‘I come from a different background, which maybe they didn’t want – they were all a bit cerebral. They’d all been to university’