by David Jason
I said, ‘Roy Clarke.’
Freeland said, ‘Is he still with us?’ Which was a terrible question to hear, of course. But what can you do? This is where we are.
I said, ‘He was with us the last time I looked.’ (Roy was eighty-three at this point, and in robust good health, where he blessedly remains. I should point out that, relative to Roy, your author is a complete and utter spring chicken – a full decade younger than him.)
I could see Freeland was intrigued by this idea regarding Granville and he promised to go away and have some further conversations about it. Sure enough, he got back to me a while later and, without committing firmly to anything, suggested that it might be a good idea if I got together with Roy Clarke and took the notion a bit further. So I rang Roy and, because it’s simply not done in the business to talk about these things with your stomach empty (it’s considered rude, in fact), we arranged a lunch meeting in L’Etoile on Charlotte Street.
I was in the restaurant when Roy arrived. I hadn’t seen him to talk to properly for about thirty years, but when he walked in the room (he had come down on the train from his home in Yorkshire), it was as though no time whatsoever had passed in the interim. He was the same tall, surprisingly quiet but extremely funny man (the author, most famously, of Last of the Summer Wine) that I had first encountered working with Ronnie B in the seventies. He even had the same satchel.
He was also, it emerged, quietly excited about the thought of revisiting Granville. As we talked over lunch, this rather lovely idea emerged that Granville had sort of become Arkwright, by a process of osmosis. To an extent, Arkwright – his attitude, his manner, his way of life, and above all his penny-pinching shopkeeper’s meanness – would have been imprinted on Granville over the years, simply by their proximity to one another and by Arkwright’s dominance over him. Moreover, when he died, Arkwright might perfectly plausibly have left Granville the shop in his will – a possibility that Arkwright had alluded to frequently in the original series, where it always tended to sound more like a threat than anything else – but only on the condition that Granville kept the place open and continued to run it. In that way, Arkwright would reach out to trap Granville even from beyond the grave. There would be no reason why Nurse Gladys Emmanuel, the object of Arkwright’s fruitless lust all those years ago, couldn’t still be living in the house opposite the shop, assuming that Lynda Baron was up for playing the part; and no reason why Mavis and Mrs Featherstone, the reliably riotous shop customers, shouldn’t still live in the vicinity either, if the same could be said for Maggie Ollerenshaw and Stephanie Cole. Beyond that would lie the opportunity to bring in a range of new customers and passers-by, capitalising on the excellence of the corner shop as a sitcom setting, where fresh life is only ever a clang of the opening door away.
But what about Arkwright’s shop itself? We talked a lot about that, during our lunch. Had it changed at all? Had it modernised? Might it have become more like a mini-supermarket in a service station? These thoughts were temptingly comical, but we kept coming back to the fun that was inherent in the original set-up – this tiny corner shop, years out of date, preserved in aspic and yet somehow clinging on. It’s not like you don’t see them any more. Around this time, I found myself driving home through Kilburn in north London late one night and noticing these still-lit, seemingly never-closing shops, with their thrusts out onto the pavement, their soot-coloured fruit and dirty peaches offered up to the street, their windows pasted with flyers and handwritten cards – little London Arkwrights, still out there. It confirmed for me that we should definitely keep the shop as it was.
Still Open All Hours was pretty much born out of those two lunches. The plan was to bring the show back once, for a Christmas special in 2013, but I think we all knew that, if it played strongly enough and hit home with people, there might be more in it. Gareth Edwards was hired to produce the programme, and Dewi Humphreys, who had worked on The Vicar of Dibley and on John Sullivan’s Only Fools prequel, Rock & Chips, was appointed to direct it, and almost before I knew it, I was heading, along with Lynda, Maggie and Stephanie, back to Balby, near Doncaster in South Yorkshire where, from the mid-1970s onwards, we had shot the show’s exteriors. The original Arkwright’s was actually a hairdresser’s named Beautique (do you see what they did there?) in a street called Lister Avenue which Syd Lotterby, the producer of the original Open All Hours, had scouted. Syd tells a story about how, having secured permission from the owners of Beautique to borrow their salon for a while, he then nipped across the road to see if he could nail down a house to use for Nurse Gladys Emmanuel’s dwelling place which needed to be opposite. Syd was wearing a rather spivvy sheepskin coat which he was particularly partial to at the time, and he’d knocked and rung at about five doors along that terraced row before somebody finally answered. Naturally, Syd asked where everybody else was. The bloke pointed out that, dressed like that, they all thought he was the rent collector.
It seemed too much to hope that the shop and the street would still be there for us to use again. But they were, almost exactly as we had left them. The running of Beautique had passed from mother to daughter and once more they agreed to put their business on hold and let the BBC’s set designers convert their premises into a corner shop. Driving from the production base up to Lister Avenue that first morning, in the autumn of 2013, and getting out of the car and standing on that street again and being welcomed back so warmly by the local residents, some of whom had been children the first time and now brought their own children … well, it was just the most extraordinary experience. It was like I had been shot backwards in a time machine, and it made me feel joyful and sad and also bewildered, all at once, because so much time had gone, and I didn’t quite know where, and because nothing had really changed and yet so much clearly had. Trying to process all of that was really pretty difficult, I have to say. There was a line of Arkwright’s from the very first episode of the first series which was running around in my head and which seemed now to carry so much extra weight. That was the story in which Arkwright was trying to get rid of a batch of tins without labels, holding them up to his ear at one point and shaking them to try and determine their contents (‘M-Mulligatawny and Leek … Beefy Chunks in Gravy …’). It was also the episode in which he said: ‘Listen, Granville, just remember that, as my nephew, all of these old tins will be yours, you know, when I’m gone.’
Now I was back on that same street, in that same space, and Ronnie was gone, but so much was unaltered and the ghosts and echoes of those days were everywhere. My mind was ceaselessly travelling back. I was pulling on a brown shopkeeper’s coat, like Ronnie wore, and recalling a picture Ronnie had of his father in a coat exactly like that, which must, in some way, have been an inspiration for Arkwright. I was remembering shooting the breeze in the cast hotel in Balby with Ronnie and Lynda and Syd Lotterby and Syd’s trusty assistant, Judy. I was remembering Ronnie getting recognised a lot, because he was a giant TV star at that time. But I was remembering how much Ronnie defied and redrew my expectation of people who were giant TV stars – that they had to be somehow far above us and unreadable, when, like him, they could just be so rooted and thoroughly pleasant. I was remembering the time an Open All Hours shoot coincided with my birthday and Ronnie – resisting the urge to ignore the occasion all day, as I did with Nick Lyndhurst that time – took the whole lot of us out to a Chinese restaurant in Doncaster and presented me with a model of Granville’s famous shop delivery bike. I was remembering how much I learned about rhythm and timing from my interactions with Ronnie on this show and the extent to which it had stood in, belatedly, for a formal dramatic education for me. I was remembering how I chafed sometimes at the role of Granville because I was desperate to star in something and I was already in my forties and nothing seemed to be in sight, and how Ronnie said to me, ‘Don’t worry – it will happen for you eventually.’ I was remembering how great I used to feel when Ronnie told people that Open All Hours was his favourite of the sitcoms he worked on
, even more than Porridge, because of the fun he’d had with me in the making of it. I was remembering that emblematic moment for me when Ronnie and I had invented some bit of business which had caused the pair of us to crack up completely, and then Ronnie had looked at me and said, ‘We’re lucky, aren’t we? We’re getting paid to make ourselves laugh.’ Lucky indeed. Beyond lucky.
For the new show, we hung a framed photo of Ronnie as Arkwright in the backroom of the shop for Granville to commune with at various points in the episode, and I found it a difficult thing, being confronted so clearly by his presence and, at the same time, his absence. Even harder, though, was taking on the role of the show’s traditional closing monologue, with Granville out there in the street as Arkwright used to be, putting things away at closing time, in the dying light, recapping the events of the day in a voice-over that always seemed to me to have just a tiny flavour of a bedtime prayer about it. Too much symbolism there for me.
Sometimes Granville would mimic Arkwright. ‘I was t-t-t-trained by the m-m-m-master,’ he would say, as he operated the famously vicious till (worked by an invisible assistant, in fact, yanking hard on a piece of string to bring the tray clattering shut at the appointed moment). I was indeed trained by the master. Roy Clarke hadn’t written Arkwright with a stammer, by the way. That was Ronnie’s idea, and some people thought he shouldn’t have acted on it – that he was making comedy from affliction. Personally, when Ronnie played Arkwright, I could hear no mockery in it. Mockery wasn’t Ronnie’s thing in any case; he was a far warmer comic than that, and I know for a fact that there were people with stammers who told Ronnie that they felt he was representing them in some way, standing with them rather than against them. Stammering just seemed to intrigue him, like a million other aspects of life. After Ronnie died in 2005, Joy, his wife, who had been going through his things, sent me a clipping she had found that Ronnie had obviously seen in a magazine and decided he needed to keep. It was an advert for ‘Fur-Felt Hats’. Ronnie had written in the margin, ‘Stammering advert.’
Clearly the thing to do, up there in Doncaster, was to redeem the melancholy and make a show that Ronnie would have approved of. It was certainly fun to go back and be Granville again – or rather to be Granville as he might have become. To see Lynda, Maggie and Stephanie recapture and adapt their old roles so adroitly was an inspiration, too. We were getting the band together again, but there was no pressure on us to force the clock back and be the people we used to be; we could unashamedly and even proudly be the age that we all were and there was something very liberating about that. Roy Clarke had also created a new shop boy, Leroy, played with great ease and natural charm by James Baxter, who had done a couple of years before this on Emmerdale but for whom this was a first big comedy role. So, in a sense, the baton had been handed on and if I could end up being even a fraction of the influence on James that Ronnie B was on me, then I would feel I had contributed something.
It struck me on the set one day, when I was fixing a ‘Farm Fresh Eggs’ sticker to a box of eggs that were clean out of the factory: Granville is a kind of Yorkshire Del Boy – a chancer, being wildly inventive to try and sell something. ‘Farm Fresh Eggs’ are basically ‘Peckham Spring Water’ in another form. Certainly, just as the Trotters’ junk-filled flat was fertile ground for incidental bits of comic business, so the shop yields opportunities aplenty to try and find the extra laugh. One day, for instance, I was doing a scene with James by the sweet rack and it suddenly occurred to me, in the middle of our dialogue, to take a packet down, open it up, pop a sweet in my mouth, reseal the packet and replace the sweets on the rack. It just seemed like a very Granville-via-Arkwright thing to do. I also knew it would get a laugh from the studio audience, which it duly did. Unfortunately, it also got one from James, who corpsed, which in turn set me off, so we had to go again. Still, the routine with the sweets stayed in.
For all that we might have nurtured some fond hopes for its future, I don’t think any of us was expecting Still Open All Hours to take off the way that it did. I certainly understood that it was an old-fashioned piece in so many ways – muted, melancholy, given to the pleasures of innuendo, the kind of sitcom that doesn’t really get made any more. Yet the first inkling that we were involved in something people wanted to see was the fact that there were 360 seats available for the studio shoot of the initial Christmas special, which took place at the BBC unit in Manchester, and there were 28,000 applications for them. Maybe we should have done it in a football stadium. When that show went out on Boxing Day, it was watched by 12.23 million, which was the biggest audience for any programme on any channel that Christmas season, and the largest audience for a comedy show on British television since 2007. A month later, to nobody’s particular surprise, the BBC commissioned a six-episode series, and then two more after that. Each of those series has generated audiences around the seven or eight million mark, by which I am apt sometimes to feel a little disappointed, as the veteran of the Only Fools 20-million-plus days, but which cannot be deemed in any way shabby at this particular point in the twenty-first century. So, to my delight, it turns out that there still is an audience for this kind of television. And on it goes. At the time of writing, in the summer of 2017, I am getting ready to shoot Still Open All Hours series four. I never suspected the boy Granville would come back to serve me so royally all this time later, though I suppose Arkwright, in his own curmudgeonly way, was always suggesting it would be thus.
Incidentally, I should mention that when we wrapped the 2016 series, the cast and crew gathered, as ever, for a few farewell drinks and, in a moving ceremony, I was called forward to be presented with a special Golden Sausage award for my unstinting work in supplying innuendo throughout the making of the series. Well, you know what Groucho Marx used to say: love flies out the door when money comes innuendo. The trophy was, as described, a golden banger, mounted, as it were, on a plinth by those fine craftsmen in the BBC props workshop, who really do know how to make a sausage stiff, and, as I made clear in my necessarily moved and bashful acceptance speech, I shall treasure it always. ‘It will remind me,’ I said, staunching a tear in the corner of my eye, ‘of days gone by.’
And it will. Yet, at the same time, it’s a pointer to the future. Another series awaits and another occasion dawns for competitive innuendo. Do I have another Golden Sausage in me? I can’t wait to find out.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
And the award goes to …
NEVER MIND THE Golden Sausage. In late March 2017, I was asked to attend the National Film Awards in London with Nick Lyndhurst, so that the pair of us could be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the UK National Film Academy in recognition of our work together in Only Fools and Horses – our ‘contribution to drama’ as the Academy’s citation put it.
Proof once more: it’s the show that never goes away. At that point, getting on for thirty-six years had passed since the first episode of Only Fools was screened; twenty-six years had passed since the filming of the last series proper; and getting on for fourteen years had passed since the final Only Fools Christmas special had gone out. Yet still people want to return to the show, to remember it, to celebrate it, to vote for it in polls designed to rank the best British comedies of all time, to hand it awards.
What a piece of luck to land up at the centre of a television programme which really came across to people, in the way that Only Fools clearly did – and then kept coming across to them, long after it had finished. What fortune to have been involved in something that keeps finding new audiences, across generations. What a thing to have been part of a show that seems to have lodged itself so firmly in the pages of television’s short but colourful history book – or, if you prefer, in the pages of television’s short but historical colouring book. I was forty-one years of age when I first came across Derek Trotter. Now here I was, more than a third of a century later, at seventy-seven, and he was still showing no signs of letting me go.
Still, having read this
far, you will be well aware what my first question should have been, when the invitation to this event was initially relayed to me. ‘Is the ceremony taking place in Afghanistan, or in any other, similar war zone where combat gear will be obligatory and where rebel torpedoes are even a remote possibility?’ But it only goes to show how quickly the toughest lessons are often forgotten. Or perhaps it shows how rapidly the spirit of human optimism and the desire to greet fresh challenges rise to conquer even the most intimidating memories of the past. You decide. Either way, as it happened, ‘Is the ceremony taking place in Afghanistan, or in any other, similar war zone where combat gear will be obligatory and where rebel torpedoes are even a remote possibility?’ was only my second question. (To which the answer, incidentally, was, ‘No, it’s at the Porchester Hall in London.’ I must say, I couldn’t quite picture that venue at this point, but I knew enough about it to realise that it was nowhere near Camp Bastion, so all clear on that front. Stand down the Hercules.)
In fact, in all seriousness, my first question on this occasion was, ‘Is Nick doing it?’ I hadn’t seen Nick for a couple of years – not since we’d been hanging out with David Beckham that day back in 2014, doing the Only Fools sketch for Sport Relief. Would Nick be likely to say yes to receiving this Lifetime Achievement Award? I very much doubted it. I was sure that he would have felt flattered to be asked, as I was. But I know that Nick shares with me a certain amount of reluctance to delve back into the Only Fools days. It’s not that we aren’t fiercely proud of what we did on that show. It’s not that a giant trove of happy memories isn’t to be found back there. It’s not like we wouldn’t defend the work, or rush to the work’s assistance if it was ever in trouble and needed our help.
However, for both of us, I know, to revisit that work these days is to open ourselves up to a fair old amount of melancholy, in among the warm recollections. How could it not be so, when so many members of the tight family that we formed when we made those programmes are no longer with us? As well as John Sullivan, the genius who wrote the show and who was the greatest writer I ever knew, who died in 2011, and the properly clever Roger Lloyd Pack, who died in 2014, dear old Buster Merryfield – our Uncle Albert – died in 1999. Kenneth MacDonald, that sweet, kind man, who was Mike, the landlord of the Nag’s Head, died of a heart attack while on holiday with his family in America in 2001, at the unfairly premature age of fifty. Plus, of course, we lost the magnificent Lennard Pearce, who played Grandad, merely twenty-three episodes into the show. People talk about the so-called ‘curse of Dad’s Army’ – which is to say the seemingly unusually heightened mortality rate among the cast of that great show – but surely the less noticed ‘curse of Only Fools’ runs it a close second. Nick actually once said to me: ‘The only time we see each other these days is when another one drops off the perch.’