2 days Ago By Jess Phillips
Only Fools and Horses star Sir David Jason was melancholy as he shared the one thing that “bites him” about his sitcom co-stars. The comedy legend, who played Del Boy for a solid decade before reprising the role for various BBC specials, acted alongside stars like Nicholas Lyndhurst, Buster Merryfield, Lennard Pearce and John Challis. But this on-screen camaraderie on set came at a price.
Sir David admitted in his autobiography This Time Next Year that he was looking at a behind the scenes snap taken on the episode The Jolly Boys’ Outing, which Carol Challis – John’s widow – rediscovered and presented to David. The picture, he wrote, showed “Nick, me, Buster, John, Roger and Ken, plus a stupid inflatable dolphin, all in a line with arms linked and laughing our heads off.” He admitted there was “nothing special” about the “blurry” image.
But in an emotional moment, the Del Boy actor confessed: “Maybe partly because of that ‘family album’ feel to the picture, it takes me all the way back there [...
] and as I’m looking at it, here’s the thing that comes up and bites me: Nick and I are the only two of the group that are still around. “Ken, Buster, Roger, John – they’ve all left us in the meantime. Lennard, too, before any of them.
All these great performers [...
] all gone.” Grandad star Lennard Pearce was the first major member of the Only Fools cast to pass away in 1984, while the BBC programme was still in production. He was just 69 years old but sadly “became frail” in his later years.
In 1999, Buster died at the age of 78, then Trigger star Roger Lloyd-Pack in 2014 at the age of 69. Buster had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, while Roger battled pancreatic cancer. It wasn’t until 2021 that John Challis followed, at the age of 79, after a two-year battle with cancer.
Now aged 84, Sir David has highlighted the career change he had to make after finding it more and more difficult to learn his lines. Speaking on the Full Disclosure podcast, he admitted he has no further acting dreams “as long as I can still work”. The star continued: “One of the great things that I would like to do more of is making characters out of cartoons I think.
I really enjoy that. It's characters like that I really would like to play because at my time of life it's not as easy to learn the lines as it used to be.”.
