‘I learnt everything about comedy on Telly from David Jason'

FOUR DECADES into her acting career, Tessa Peake-jones is facing a rigorous new challenge – she’s starring in a frantic farce. “I’ve never done a farce before,” she says, sounding a little breathless between performances of John Cleese’s Bang Bang!. “It’s very speedy and it requires a high level of energy. Of course you need that for every play but you need extra for this because we’re running in and out of doors a lot.there’s much more pace.”

Tessa, perhaps best known for playing Raquel in TV’S immortal Only Fools And Horses, has plenty of theatre under her belt. “But this is different,” she says.

“With some plays you can get away with a little ‘smudginess’. But you can’t with this. So much of it is timed around a door shutting or opening or whatever.you have to be very precise.”

She plays Leontine, a society lady seeking revenge on her philandering husband. In the course of the fast-moving comedy,tessa, 62, has to walk into a wall and collapse a couple of times with a blanket over her head so she can’t see where she’s going.

“I don’t normally do that kind of physical comedy. It’s quite challenging but I’m really enjoying it.”

It doesn’t always go to plan. “I have to throw things at my on-stage husband and today I threw something at a picture above his head.

“I was aiming for him but I hit the picture instead, it fell off the wall and the whole thing shattered on stage.”

She giggles. “We had to crunch across the stage throughout the rest of the play.”

Cleese adapted Bang Bang! from the Georges

Feydeau farce Monsieur Chasse. Peake-jones and her co-stars rehearsed it for a couple of weeks without him in the room, but then he came to a couple of run-throughs.

“It was a masterclass, because he’d say the tiniest thing, like, ‘Why don’t you look at him on that line?’ and when you did people laughed.

“You wonder, ‘How come he knows those tiny things?’ but then of course he is John Cleese. He’s extraordinary...

“We were all nervous,” Tessa admits. “Even doing a first preview wasn’t as scary a prospect as doing it for John Cleese! But he was so lovely. He laughed all the way through it and you felt instantly at ease.”

Playing fiery Leontine is another challenge. “I don’t normally play that sort of person,” Tessa says. “I’m not like her in real life so it’s really nice. I call her ‘the lioness’ because she roars a lot, and barks and screams and throws things.”

The tour, which has been postponed due to the coronavirus, will hopefully return next month and run until May.thentessa is keeping her fingers crossed for a new series of ITV’S Grantchester where she plays stern housekeeper Mrs Sylvia Chapman.

She broke into TV in the late 1970s and, after a few small parts, played Mary Bennett in the BBC’S 1980 series Pride And Prejudice.

Did Tessa, born in Hammersmith and trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, ever imagine she’d have such a long career?

She laughs. “I don’t remember thinking I’d have any career at all, and if I did I thought it’d be in the theatre. I didn’t for a minute think I’d do television and I certainly didn’t think anyone would know who I was.

“Those aren’t the goals.when you’re at drama school you’re just thinking about getting an agent or getting your first job with your

Equity card. Maybe some people plan ahead but I never did so it’s always been a constant surprise that people want to work with me.”

She left school at 16 and did clerical work “and other tedious jobs” before becoming an usherette at The Old Vic for her three years at drama school. Since then she’s been constantly employed.

Tessa first appeared as Raquel Turner in Only Fools in 1988 and notched up seven series.the sitcom-turned-beloved national institution made her a star.

She’s had many TV jobs since (episodes of The Bill and Holby City, recurring roles in Doctors and Grantchester) but you won’t catch her whingeing about being best known as Del Boy

Trotter’s girlfriend. “I consider it an incredible privilege to have been involved in that programme,” she says. “I learnt everything about comedy on telly from David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst. “People go, ‘Don’t you get fed u people still talking about it?’ but how can you be fed up with when they’re congratulating you for something they loved?”

Tessa puts the show’s success down how the late writer John Sullivan created flawed characters with their hearts in the right place. “Also it was the sort of programme that any age group, from children to grannies, could watch. It was inclusive, which some comedy today isn’t.”

She’s not seen the Only Fools musical yet, but

‘We were nervous. Even doing a preview wasn’t as scary a prospect as doing it for John Cleese’