I was going back to Europe in the early '80s to do a miniseries,
I was living in America at the time,
and, erm...
I'd received from a fan a couple of scripts.
One on the life of Boswell,
and one was this slim book saying, "If you're ever interested in a character,
"you might wanna read this book." It was a Lovejoy book.
Lovejoy novel. I'd never heard of them.
I read it on the plane over and was struck by its relevance as a TV show.
It had the qualities, that I think they still look for now,
of a comedy drama, which is a great genre that appeals to all ages of a family.
And, erm, I read it, liked it,
and I went and had lunch with the author, Jonathan Gash,
which is a pseudonym.
He's a very well-respected, known doctor of tropical medicines.
And, er, so, we had lunch, and he was fascinated by it,
and I knew who I wanted to write it, a friend of mine, lan La Frenais,
and Dick Clement who I'd known for years who worked with a producing partner at the time
who was also a friend of mine, Allan McKeown.
And I sent the script to Allan,
and lan sat down and dashed out an outline,
you know, the bible for the show.
The book had charact...
The only characters that were in the book originally were myself and Tinker.
Eric was an invention of lan's which I think is great, which is the idiot you can use at any time
but he's really a good guy, he'll do the errands, you can teach him things about the business.
And the Lady Jane character,
which was an amalgam of certain characters in the books,
who is like the posh bit of stuff who...
they really love each other, will they, won't they?
They never do because once you do it you've broken that spell between you and the audience.
And we were lucky enough to get three terrific actors,
Dudley Sutton, Chris Jury and the lovely Phyllis Logan,
to play those characters.
And the other character which is in the books originally
but we only did three series with and because...
I don't quite know why now... Of Gimbert,
who is the man you love to hate, the villain,
the new-money guy, who only likes antiques because of what he can get out of them.
Whereas Lovejoy is in it because he's a divvy,
he has this romantic attachment and his heart flutters and he gets excited
and he's not in it for his own gain, he's in it for the love of the chase
and the love of the antique area itself.
And, er, so, we did the first series in '85,
and then, er... with Jonathan Powell.
And then there was a hiatus - contractual problems came in - after that,
and Allan and I decided to lay back on it for a few years.
Then Jonathan Powell was made controller of BBC1
and asked us back in '89
and said, "Listen, that show, I really don't think we explored it fully.
"Are you both free?" And we said yes, and we went back in '89
with the same cast again, 1990,
and did a further five successful seasons
and that's why we're sitting here today talking about it.
It was on around the time that Antiques Roadshow had been on for a while.
It sort of invigorated that program and gave us a boost.
We used to do a little tie-in now and again.
But it was also the first ever real independent show done with the BBC,
because they didn't own it.
When we did it, then we set the template for an independent production
and then they came more and more in the '90s.
But it was funny. I mean, God bless 'em,
one thing, once you do a show, when we did the second, they left you alone.
They didn't ever interfere, they let you do what you wanted.
They didn't overlook you in editing or whatever.
I think when we made the first series, I don't think anybody knew what to make of it.
I think we were just making a ten-part series in England.
And the nice thing about being in England is there's a lot less...
Well, there was then, back in the '80s,
a lot less celebrity madness than there is now,
which is anybody... you know...
appearing on television, everybody's appeared on television, or everybody should do.
So, you were working, you were just doing a TV show,
and, erm... and it came out...
I think when it came out the following year, I was already back here doing something else,
and contractually we ran into kind of a snafu,
which wasn't resolved for three years until we could take up the series again.
So series one was, in a way, a great unknown dry run.
It came out, it did fine,
but it wasn't given by the BBC a kind of a big hoopla,
I didn't go over there and do a lot of press for it.
It came out and was already kind of...
We were working towards other areas.
But it was always at the back of our mind, it was an experience, we'd done it,
it gave me a background in producing a show.
I hadn't directed one then.
But when we came back again in 1990, it was the knowledge that...
And then it... The first... The second series showed again...
They showed the first series again, then they showed the second series '91,
and of course it took off and we had, like, the first series went into 15, 16 million viewers,
which was... And you felt...
I felt...
Yeah, you've been... you've been...
your faith in the show was well-founded
and we were all very happy by it and we went on from there.
And I don't think we got...
I don't think we became slack about the show, we tried to change the show each year,
make the characters funnier.
We didn't just rely on the same kind of...
Churn out the same show all the time.
Which may be one of the weaknesses,
cos people do like the same thing all the time.
We didn't, we tried to move location each year,
give him another point of view,
give the chara... Mature the characters a little,
er, bring in the character of Gimbert again, Malcolm Tierney's character.
Erm, but all the time never losing sight of the fact
that Lovejoy, as the quote you gave me before from the New York Times book review,
was basically broke,
was a bit of a conniver, a bit of a liar,
but loved women, but loved above all antiques,
and they brought out in him something else.
Antiques are what brought him to life.
Yeah. And I think that's what he couldn't live without, could not live without that.
I think we managed to capture that in the character in the show,
that that was the love of his life.
They called me and said, erm... I remember saying...
Dudley... They said Dudley Sutton, who I knew, I said he'd be marvelous.
Chris I didn't know, but I went with the instincts of Allan,
and we had a terrific director who did the first shows, which was Baz Taylor.
And Phyllis I'd seen in that wonderful film, where she played...
Another Time, Another... Not Another Time, Another Place.
I think it was about a Scottish housewife
who fell in love with an Italian prisoner of war during World War II.
She's a marvelous actress and I think she brought an enormous amount to the program.
Class and fun. And her quality of being very straight -
an audience could identify with her.
There was nothing...
sleazy about her relationship with Lovejoy.
Although he would have liked to have made it a little more sleazy than it was.