Jason plays Del Boy in the hands: the cuff tugged, the collar squared, the glass raised to nobody. A comic actor of exact timing, he spent a decade as Ronnie Barker's foil and then made one part so well it followed him everywhere.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Del Boy does when he is not talking. He tugs a cuff, squares a collar, lifts his glass to nobody in particular, and the camel coat goes on like armour before he steps out to be laughed at. David Jason plays a man who knows the schemes will not work and has decided that admitting it would be worse, and across twenty-two years of Only Fools and Horses he never once asked us to pity him. That is harder than it looks, and it is the whole performance.
He came to acting late and sideways, an electrician who went through amateur dramatics and repertory theatre and was on television by Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967). Then he spent the best part of a decade beside Ronnie Barker: Blanco in Porridge (1974), Granville in Open All Hours (1976). We gave Porridge 89 and did not mention him, which is not a slight. Barker's shows were built so that the star had somewhere to put the jokes, and Jason's job was to be the somewhere. He learned there how a laugh is set up and who gets to finish it.
Only Fools and Horses (1981) let him finish it. The chandelier in the second series and the bar flap in the sixth are two of the most famous falls in British television, and we knew both were coming and laughed until it hurt anyway. Some of that is John Sullivan's writing and some of it is Butt and the directors who followed him holding the shot rather than cutting away. Most of it is Jason, who understands that a gag has a shape and that the actor's job is not to hurry it. Nicholas Lyndhurst's Rodney gives him someone to be found out by, and the late-night scenes in the flat, the two of them with the jokes run dry, are where Del stops being a turn and becomes a brother.
The part cost him, or he has said it did: Del Boy followed him into everything, and he has talked about the shadow. His answer was Jack Frost in A Touch of Frost (1992), a rumpled detective played straight, which we have not reviewed and will not judge here, except to note that it ran until 2010, which is not what happens to a man nobody will accept as anything but Del. There was voice work, Danger Mouse (1981) among it, and then, in Still Open All Hours (2013), Granville again, behind the same counter, nearly forty years on. For a man who worried about being one character, he has spent an unusual amount of his life going back to two of them, and we do not think that is a failing. He has said, "My approach has always been through the character, finding what it is that makes them tick." Once he has found it, he sees no reason to let go.
Biography
Sir David Jason, born David John White on 2 February 1940 in Edmonton, London, is an English actor. He is known for playing Blanco in the BBC sitcom Porridge (1974) and Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter in Only Fools and Horses (1981).
Jason trained initially as an electrician before entering repertory theatre. Other television roles include Granville in Open All Hours (1976), Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May (1991), and Detective Inspector Jack Frost in A Touch of Frost (1992). He has voiced characters in animated series including Danger Mouse (1981) and Count Duckula (1988).
He was appointed OBE in 1993 and knighted in 2005 for services to acting and comedy. Jason has received multiple BAFTA Television Awards and other honours.
