David Jason
David Jason is an actor, born 1940.
Jason spent the 1970s as dependable British comedy support: Blanco in Porridge, Nogood Boyo in Under Milk Wood, a mayor in Royal Flash, and Granville, the put-upon shop boy in Open All Hours. Granville is the one worth noticing, because the whole later career is already visible in him. Jason was very good, very early, at playing men who are quietly certain they deserve better than their circumstances.
Only Fools and Horses gave him the definitive version of that man. Del Boy Trotter is a small-time dealer who talks in bad French and believes, in every episode, that this time next year they will be millionaires. Jason plays him at full volume and then lets you see the fear underneath, which is why a broad sitcom about a failing market stall kept getting more affecting as it went on.
The second act was drama, and it worked. A Touch of Frost gave him a grumpy detective he carried for years and proved he could hold an ITV hour with the jokes filed almost all the way off. In between came Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May and a parallel career as a voice: Danger Mouse, Count Duckula, the BFG, Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, The Water Babies, The Snow Queen. Terry Pratchett fans got him twice, as Albert in Hogfather and Rincewind in The Colour of Magic.
He was knighted, and by the mid-2000s had become the kind of national fixture who narrates dinosaur programmes and vintage car restorations, because the voice on its own is enough to carry an hour.
Movies (7)
TV (11)
Books (1)
Where to start with David Jason
Only Fools and Horses is the obvious door and the correct one, though the early series are broader and slower than the episodes people quote at each other. Give it time to work out that Del Boy is a sad man as well as a funny one, because that discovery is the making of the show.
If the sitcom rhythm is not for you, A Touch of Frost is a completely different performance, a procedural lead with the comic timing turned down to almost nothing. The Darling Buds of May sits between the two moods and is the sunniest thing he did.
For the voice work, Danger Mouse and Count Duckula are the ones a generation of British children can still do impressions of, and The BFG uses the same instrument tenderly. Discworld readers should take Hogfather over The Colour of Magic: he is better used as Albert, sour and long-suffering, than as Rincewind.