Jan Francis - more than just good friends

I’ve already waxed lyrical about the attraction of Cherie Lunghi. No, I haven’t changed my mind. However, when it comes to the eye department, Jan Francis had won me over long before I’d ever heard of the Manageress star. In the early Seventies she was a TV regular in children’s drama. I probably first saw her in Anne of Green Gables although this was more my sister’s bag than mine. Later in 1972, I’d just started secondary school when The Long Chase began a thirteen-part run.

Following Blue Peter on Monday evenings, homework had to take a back seat because this adventure serial starring Francis and another children’s TV regular, Simon Turner, became essential viewing. I can’t recall the plot, other than the stars were either on the run or in search of something around the country trying to evade the sinister attentions of the leather-clad Hilary Minster on a motorbike.

They were supposedly teenagers although Jan Francis, then sporting long dark hair, was already well in her mid-twenties. It didn’t matter in the slightest, at least not to an eleven year-old. It was quite an exhilarating ride, with high production values for a children’s show. This was hardly surprising given it was created by prolific Seventies BBC uber-producer Gerard Glaister and written by regular collaborator NJ Crisp, who together at the time were also responsible for Colditz and The Brothers.

Apart from guest appearances in a few series such as The Duchess of Duke Street, the next time I watched Jan Francis in a major role came five years hence in another Glaister production, Secret Army. We watched every week without fail, following the trials and tribulations of the wartime Belgian Resistance running an escape line for Allied airmen under the noses of Nazi forces. Francis played ‘Yvette’, who ran the operation using the cover of a popular café, owned by Bernard Hepton’s ‘Albert’. With all manner of intrigue, conflicts within as well as between the Resistance and the Germans, and an excellent cast it was a beguiling blend of suspense and melodrama. However, it was so earnest that it provided rich pickings for a send-up. Come the Eighties, Allo Allo mercilessly ripped the piss out of Secret Army, from the basic set-up, costumes and characters. Personally I will never again see Jan in her raincoat and beret without hearing Kirsten Cooke uttering her immortal catchphrase: “Listen very carefully, I shall say zis only wurnce”….

It’s not unusual for actors to work with directors, producers or fellow thesps on several projects over the years. Jan Francis is no exception. Between 1985 and 2007, I saw her in three dramas, each of them starring Dennis Waterman. I recall her playing the posh girlfriend of Waterman’s ‘Terry’ in Minder (obviously their on-screen relationship could never last!) then the two of them topped the bill in ITV’s Stay Lucky. This continued the theme of an unlikely emerging relationship involving a dodgy geezer and posh totty and ran for four series between 1989 and 1993.

Good old Dennis was still “singing the feem tune” in the Noughties on New Tricks and in one 2007 episode, he and Jan Francis were reunited, along with ageing Minder co-star George Cole. Jan’s hair may have boasted highlights appropriate to a fashionable sixty year-old but those blue eyes were as intense as ever. 

Two years had passed when she portrayed another well-spoken lady of a certain age in Mistresses. She was mixing it with four brilliant female leads including Sarah Parish and Orla Brady, and I could imagine her younger self being similarly successful in the series. Nevertheless, her career as chic, smart, shrewd but somewhat uptight young women reached its apogee in the Eighties sitcom Just Good Friends.

Essentially it was a love story. Jan’s Penny Warrender was one half of another ‘will-they-won’t-they?’ relationship with a jack-the-lad, this time in the form of her ex-fiance Vince, played with an understated knowing twinkle by Paul Nicholas. It was sweet without being cosy, intelligent but not up itself, and the likeable leads brought a freshness to the John Sullivan script. At the time Just Good Friends was even more popular than Sullivan’s contemporary masterpiece Only Fools and Horses, commanding audiences above twenty million. The 1986 climactic Christmas episode was wrapped up with the inevitable wedding and left the series on a high.

It didn’t establish itself in the manner of Only Fools, and it’s perhaps sad that we can’t enjoy Jan Francis endlessly on Dave or UK Gold in the twenty-first century. Perhaps an enduring catchphrase might have helped but JGF wasn’t that kind of comedy. Nevertheless for a few decades she was a regular feature on our screens and worthy of a place in my pantheon of TV treasures.