Sir David Jason, Lord of Denton and Peckham

One evening in 1996 I jotted in my diary this observation about David Jason: “How come he’s so bloody good in everything he does!” The same could be said for all my Treasures but what sets Jason apart from most mere mortals is the sheer breadth of work over such a long period. There’s also the inescapable fact that he appeared in some of the biggest ratings-grabbing shows of the Eighties and Nineties. 

Generations of kids may look back him with fondness as the voice of Toad, Count Duckula and Danger Mouse and for those slightly older he was in Do Not Adjust Your Set in the company of various Pythons. I’ve no solid proof but it’s probable that my first televisual encounter with the former David White of North London was at the age of eight in an episode of ITV’s Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) which used to follow The Big Match on Sunday afternoons. 

I think I also saw him play Dithers, a doddery old hotel employee, in His Lordship Entertains and a few other early Seventies comedies starring Ronnie Barker but there’s no doubt whatsoever that I witnessed his performance in another Barker vehicle starting in 1973. That year, just for a change, David Jason portrayed a younger character, Granville, in the pilot episode of Open All Hours. Although he usually played second fiddle to the One Ronnie’s mean-spirited Northern grocer Arkwright, Granville did occasionally command a whole scene to himself. As with writer Roy Clarke’s other long-running hit sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, I found Open All Hours increasingly cliched and boring, and IMHO whoever persuaded Jason to reprise Granvllle as Arkwright’s septuagenarian successor in Still Open All Hours right up to the present day needs a fresh job appraisal. Not that Jason is bad in it; that’s an impossibility. It’s just the script and studio setting which are so outdated and, judging by the episode I sampled, totally devoid of humour. 

Still in his mid-thirties, David Jason was back in geriatric mode with Ronnie Barker for some episodes of Porridge. His loveable old lag Blanco wasn’t a regular but was one of my favourite and warmest characters in one of the most wonderfully written and beautifully acted comedies of all time. 

During the Eighties his sitcom career really took off but he also played a few less sympathetic characters in longer-form comedy-dramas. In this period, Tom Sharpe’s satirical farces became really popular in print, and one of the TV adaptations which followed included Channel 4’s Porterhouse Blue. As usual, it lampooned the pompous and pretentious, in this case the stuffy academics running a Cambridge college, while Jason’s character was the porter, Skullion. He was the little man we were meant to root for, yet I found him rather unpleasant, the actor imbuing him with both humour and a streak of venom. Then in 1989 David was part of an ensemble cast in David Nobbs’ A Bit of a Do. It wasn’t a big hit with ITV audiences but I enjoyed the vignettes following the trials, tribulations, affairs and plots involving two Yorkshire families in the context of social events such as weddings, parties and dances. Jason was a working-class philandering social climber cheating on Gwen Taylor with the younger, posher Nicola Pagett. You couldn’t help but like him, although my favourite was the young David Thewlis playing his slobbish son. 

A few years later, he struck ITV gold with their adaptation of HE Bates’ Darling Buds of May.  It wasn’t a comedy as such, but a gentle, soft-focus dollop of rural ‘50s Kent nostalgia, attracting almost twenty million viewers each week. How many of them were, like me, only really watching to drool over the then-unknown Catherine Zeta-Jones is unknown but it was Jason’s Pop Larkin who dominated and gave us the catchphrase we were all repeating for years: “Perfick”. 

There was another strong performance in a WW2 drama The Bullion Boys but it was David’s entry into crime fiction which enhanced his reputation as Britain’s biggest TV actor bar none. A Touch of Frost took him back to Yorkshire for roughly ninety-minute single-episode detective stories spanning 42 episodes and eighteen years. As an irascible old-school copper sporting greying moustache and grubby trilby, he hogged every scene, especially in the relatively light-hearted scenes when that well-honed comic timing reaped dividends. No wonder I made that laudatory comment which opened this account; he was outstanding.

Which brings me finally to the role with which David Jason is most closely associated: Del Boy Trotter. From an inauspicious start in 1981 to become the most loved sitcom ever, Only Fools and Horses has seeped into our nation’s psyche, from teenagers to pensioners. Extended to fifty minutes in the late Eighties, every episode was an absolute gem, superb John Sullivan scripts and comedy acting in perfect harmony. 

You didn’t have to be a Peckham street trader living on a high-rise estate to ‘get’ the working–class characters: the good-natured family banter, daft conversations in the ‘local’ and Del’s short-sighted entrepreneurial schemes doomed to failure all flowed naturally. I also appreciated the way the scenarios also reflected Britain’s changing social outlook, first in Thatcher’s get-rich-quick landscape and also the more serious political issues of the day like unemployment and crime. 

I had been an occasional visitor to Romford market and, in the early days, David Jason’s quickfire sales patter was utterly credible and even a straight, law-and-order upholder like me would cheer Del’s flights from the hapless constabulary. Perhaps most memorable of all were the series featuring his transformation into an unlikely yuppie, complete with Austin Reed suits, Filofax and brick-shaped mobile phone. Del became more self-centred in his pursuit of fortune, women and status but Sullivan and Jason ensured that he was always brought down a peg. I cannot possibly exclude as an example the famous ‘through the bar’ pratfall scene. Poor old Trigger! 

Only Fools continued with sporadic Christmas specials until 2003 but with digital channels broadcasting repeats ever since, the series has never truly gone away. There were no bad episodes, no duff characters and it has turned the yellow Reliant Robin into a cultural icon and star of the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony! Besides that, David Jason would frequently utter words and phrases which have entered our everyday vocabulary and stayed there for decades. “Cushty”, “Lovely jubbly”, “Plonker” live on, and are a permanent reminder of David Jason, his delivery, mannerisms and acting greatness. It’s no coincidence that, without him, the Only Fools spin-offs didn’t quite catch on. He is just too perfick.