IT’S MURDER BEING POSH!

70SCHEEKYCHAPPIEROBINASKWITHISBACKASA MADAME BLANC MYSTERIES LA-DI-DA EXPAT IN THE

Nearly 60 years ago, a 12-year-old Robin Askwith developed his first crush on an older girl he followed up the hill to school each day. She was 13 and, although young Robin didn’t know her name at the time, it was none other than Only Fools And Horses’s Sue Holderness. ‘I was her stalker for four years!’ jokes Robin, 71. ‘My hormones had started to kick in and I noticed this cute girl. I was just this little twerp and she had her eyes on the older boys. Many years later, I was watching television and I thought, “Wait a minute! That’s the girl I used to have a crush on!”’

All these years later, Robin’s adolescent longing for Sue has sort of been requited as she plays his wife in The Madame Blanc Mysteries, Channel 5’s light-hearted murder series set in the South of France. Robin is, of course, a 70s legend himself, playing a cheeky chappie in comedies such as Confessions Of A Window Cleaner and later in panto and in soap (he was ageing rocker Ritchie de Vries in Coronation Street a few years ago).

In the series, Robin plays Jeremy Lloyd James, the expat lord of the manor in the fictional French village Sainte Victoire. When Robin was offered the role though, he wasn’t convinced he could play it. ‘I didn’t think I’d be any good,’ he says. ‘I’m from a very middle-class family but the Confessions movies took the accent down a bit. Then stuff like Benidorm, where I played a really nasty conman, came along and people think that’s me. So even I needed convincing. But as soon as I put on Jeremy’s blazer I thought, “I’ve got this guy.”’

There’s another reason why Robin was pleased to be cast in Madame Blanc. Although set in the South of France, the series was filmed on the tiny Maltese island of Gozo. When the show’s creators Sally Lindsay and Sue Vincent asked Robin to play Jeremy, they’d no idea he had been living there since 1991.

‘I first came here when I was about 17,’ he says. ‘I was quite gorgeous back then and modelled for pocket money. They say that Gozo chooses you, you don’t choose it. I bought a bit of land here in the 80s, bought a boat and sat in the harbour. It sounds like I’m a millionaire, but this was a thing you could do on thruppence.’

There’s a Mick Jagger vibe about Robin with his lean frame and shaggy mop of blonde hair; he’s a raconteur, full of stories about getting drunk with Oliver Reed and stoned with Jimi Hendrix. Robin now tours a one-man show full of his outrageous stories. ‘As a friend once said to me, “Robin, you are incident prone.” And I am – with some very famous people!’

This role in Madame Blanc is his first regular primetime TV gig for decades. ‘It could be seen as a bit of a comeback,’ he says. ‘But I’m quite stoic. I have no expectations.’

Vicki Power The Madame Blanc Mysteries, tonight, 7.55pm, Channel 5. Previous episodes are available on My5.

Robin as Jeremy with Sue as his wife. Below: as a young man in 1975