- I've been fascinated by deep sea diving since watching Jacques-Yves Cousteau's TV programmes as a lad.
- Marriage is like throwing yourself into a river when you only wanted a drink of water.
- I've never ever 'felt my age', whatever that means. I think that there are a lot of people who feel 22 when in fact they're 62, and there are a lot of youngsters out there who behave as if they were four times their age. It's an attitude of mind, isn't it?
- I've done my fair share of waiting on tables in restaurants, cleaning cars, whatever. I was even an electrician at one time, and I've done my fair bit of decorating, too. But slowly my fortunes changed.
- It was a long time before TV wanted me - I would have had to commit murder to get a part on the box at one time.
- Perhaps being a character actor on radio was, in retrospect, the best training I could get.
- When you had just three and then four channels, I could always find something that was watchable because the standard of TV was much higher. In those days they had so much more money to put into so many less programmes. I feel sorry for ITV, who are finding it difficult because of the recession and lack of advertising and they're in a bit of a spiral. One thing follows the other, of course, and if you don't have advertising revenue, you can't put it into programmes, so you end up with the shows that will generate the most ads, like The X Factor UK (2004) and Britain's Got Talent (2007). Personally, I'm not sure if I like those shows, but other people do, so I suppose, from ITV's point of view, it's good programming. But I'm an actor and so of course I want to see TV companies making good dramas. I want that to be a priority.
- A show like the Only Fools and Horses (1981) Christmas special got 24 million viewers, so practically everyone in the country was watching. But of course it's a different world now, with so many channels. And those kind of figures are really difficult to achieve. It doesn't help that channels try to split the audience by putting their best shows head-to-head. Recently the BBC moved Strictly Come Dancing (2004) to compete with The X Factor UK (2004) which, quite rightly, annoyed a lot of people. Why play silly buggers with the audience, especially in the case of the BBC, who don't need to do it at all? In the end the motive is just plain power hunger and empire-building and it's unnecessary; it doesn't serve the audience.
- When I worked with Ronnie Barker, who was very well known himself at the time, I always remember him saying, 'You don't have to be a shit to be a big star, David.' I've always tried to remember that.
- When we did Only Fools and Horses (1981), it was a five-day week. You'd rehearse for four days and record on a Sunday, but it was much more laid back. The Royal Bodyguard (2011) has been extremely intensive. I think that's because today's budgets are so tight, not just at the BBC, but for everybody. It's been really hard work.
- [on missing out on the part of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army (1968)] Bill Cotton was having drinks with Clive Dunn and hired him. Co-writer/producer David Croft protested. But Cotton said, 'David Jason? Who's he? Clive Dunn has a much better reputation.' What a blow that was, I tell you. I was bitterly disappointed, but that's showbusiness.
- Everything I've done has been a pleasure, touch wood. I love my job. Ronnie Barker said to me, 'Aren't we lucky: being paid very well for making ourselves laugh?'
- John Sullivan's scripts were always very funny, and cast and crew got on well. You can't convince an audience if you're not enjoying it yourself.
- The trouble now is we have stand-up comedians who have forgotten about innuendo. In music-hall days, and especially at the BBC, you were never allowed swearwords, so they came up with brilliant wheezes in Beyond Our Ken, The Goon Show and Round the Horne - 'Hello, I'm Jules and this is my friend Sandy'. Everyone knew what it was about and the audience filled in the gaps.
- Today they push down barriers. Take the 'f' word. It's become commonplace. Stephen Fry - I'm a great fan and think he's clever - puts up a good argument for using all swearwords as a rich part of our language. But he couldn't persuade me. Language has implications and it's offensive if it's meant to denigrate something or someone. Only Fools had nothing unpleasant, really. I shouldn't be telling you this, but when Del Boy calls Rodney a dipstick, BBC executives thought it was OK because, 'He's so tall and thin, how terribly funny,' so it slipped past. Had they known the cockney rhyming slang they might have taken it out.
- Comedy is a funny business, which you have to take seriously. It requires a lot of thought, energy and adrenaline, so when you return home you want to calm down, recharge your batteries and not be the life and soul of the party.
- I'm not perfect, though. Any woman who takes on someone in this business has a bit of a handful.
- People have high expectations. You enter a room and know they're thinking, 'He'll be funny,' and you go, 'Leave it out, love. I'm having a day off.' You then become a disappointment.
- The most important thing for me is that I can sit back and watch it with my ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, without thinking, 'Whoops, why did they say that? Oh blimey' - and then unable get to the 'off ' knob fast enough. I try to protect what she sees on television, but you can't. Take the adverts: I was watching SpongeBob, a favourite cartoon of ours, but suddenly a scent advert came on with this girl stripping off as she walks towards the camera. It's done for mums but they forget a lot of girls are watching these powerful images. There wasn't much on telly the other night so with Sophie and her friend we watched Laurel and Hardy, made in the 1930s, and these kids laughed like drains. That's humour - doing what funny people have done since comedy began without being edgy and pushing boundaries.
- [on amateur theatre] This was where I cut my teeth - the first stages of my acting journey.
- [on his first job center interview] The whole setup felt fantastically, bowel-liquidisingly intimidating to me. When asked what kind of thing do you have in mind for yourself, my answer was I don't know.
- Hell hath no fury like a man spurned and on a motorbike.
- [on needing stitches several times as a boy] I probably only needed to go one more time to qualify for my own set of needles.
- [on the late 1950s] A period I remember with great affection. My life seemed to be coming together in this period, or settling into a rhythm.
- [on failing his first audition] It was dead man walking - one of the longest walks I'll ever make. I felt about as foolish as I have ever felt.
- I was a person who rather liked his home comforts.
- Learning wasn't really my thing, and it was fairly clear from an early stage that I would be unlikely to be troubling the scorers at Oxford.
- Many of the world's leading film stars are shorties, mentioning no Tom Cruises.
- I was going to do the unsteady thing. I was going to become an actor.
- The real dream for me was acting. I felt time creeping on. I couldn't bear the idea of getting to 35 and not having given it a shot - and then maybe living with the regret and the sense of what if for the rest of my life.
- The self-taught among us have our own particularly strong strain of the common actors' virus - and somehow no amount of success and acclaim ever quite squeezes it out of you.
- [on his first audition] My tongue had taken on the thickness of a can of Spam.
- Comments about my height were water off a not very tall duck's back.
- One thing which I definitely had in my favor was determination.
- My two favorite activities in the world: diving and flying. I am rarely happier than when deep in the water or high in the sky. Psychiatrists: help yourself.
- I had been one of those people who didn't quite have the courage or the know-how to take the future into their own hands, but who were waiting for it to happen - waiting to be discovered. And waiting to be discovered wasn't necessarily going to work. You needed to find to make it happen, or you needed something, or someone, to give you a shove.
- [on returning to work as an electrician when acting dried up during the early years of his career] It kept my feet on the ground.
- [on his height] I was made to realize very early that however this acting life of mine panned out, romantic leads were probably going to be hard to come by.
- All actors are a mix of confidence and doubt - of bulletproof self-belief one minute, and trembling insecurity the next. Its what makes us such a joy to be around.
- [when his first agent got him work in an ad] Visions of Hollywood movies danced in my mind, but Hollywood would have to wait.
- [on his first professional role] I could hardly breathe with the thrill of it. But it was completely tiddly. And I was completely green and oblivious.
- I was in the traditional catch-22 that traps so many performers when they first set out on their fumbling way towards a career: you can't get any work unless you've acted before, and if you haven't acted before, you can't get any work.
- If you're a comic actor, the idea of people laughing at absolutely anything is actually rather worrying. You want to know why people are laughing. You want to be in control of the reason they laugh. You want to know it's coming from something you've done - something you could do again if you had to.
- (Alan) Ladd was one of my earliest cinema heroes.
- Lots of actors wait tables while 'resting' between jobs. Not me. I did electrics while 'resting', and waited tables while I was working.
- Sometimes you take your life in your hands just walking up the street.
- [on his first car] I thought that was going to be the passport to international jet-set pleasure with members of the opposite sex. In fact, I mostly ended up playing taxi driver for all my car-less male mates.
- [on telling his parents that he was going to drama school] They couldn't have been less enthusiastic if I'd just proposed setting up a commercial newt-breeding operation in the bathroom.
- [on going to drama school] Performing what we might call a reverse Nelly, I unpacked my trunk, metaphorically speaking, and said hello to the circus.
- No actor, to my knowledge, has ever been described as steady.
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