The first series of any show is you're finding the way.
You're finding the template for the...
if you're serious about doing a television series, for the next five years.
I think five years is a good, round number.
Uh, because, I mean, American television has always done more than England,
but we insisted, Allan and I, on doing at least 12 a year with a special.
So we ended up with 75 hours of television,
which for an English series is remarkable.
I mean, you think that Fawlty Towers only has, what, eight.
People think it's always more.
But we had 75 hours. I think there were about three or four specials,
and then 70 hours of regular programs.
Erm...
And, er, luckily when we came back again in 1990,
Dudley and Chris and Phyllis were all available.
And I think it was kind of nice. In some ways, it worked for you.
We knew each other very well, we'd had three years away, we all loved it,
and came back, and it was...
(Clears throat) Excuse me. ...how we came back.
So obviously we put him in prison.
He'd been away... For a crime he did not commit, obviously.
Lovejoy is not a criminal.
He's a bit dodgy but he's on the side of the angels.
And, er, that first episode when we came back was with Anthony Valentine, terrific,
who played the... who had put me in it, as they say.
Then we were off and running again. And it gave us the ability to discover Phyllis again,
and the house, and get him a new car,
because in the first series I'd always hated that Volvo.
That was... The Volvo. When I...
It was funny, I'll never forget. The first series, I came out,
and I was filming something in America,
so I only got to England three weeks before the show started, the first series,
cos I was involved from a distance then,
it was just contractually it was impossible to get over there before then.
And, er, they got this Volvo.
I said, "A Volvo? Oh, God, no."
And, of course, most English antiques people drive...
They do, it's true, it's the old Volvo station wagon.
Anyway, I hated it. I haven't got anything against Volvo,
it's just one of those cars that has an image.
So we spent the entire series trying to find a way to kill it,
which we finally did and drove it over a cliff in episode ten, or whatever we did.
And then we had...
The following time we came, when we came back in 1990,
we discovered Lady Jane's old car,
which is the Morris Minor convertible, which I think was a stroke of genius.
I think it was La Frenais came up with that, and calling it Miriam, it was its name.
That was just one of those things that just works great.
We auctioned it off after about three series,
when she finally came back again,
as a nice gift for somebody.
I think it's fair to say that Tink is Lovejoy's conscience.
At times, I remember...
maybe three or four episodes a year, Lovejoy would do something which Tinker would...
shy away from,
and would point out the moral obligations that he had,
through his haze of alcohol.
Er, and there's a deep love there.
You don't know whether it's...
He could be his older brother, his uncle...
The relationship is never defined, only in terms of the affection that they feel for each other,
and they're bound together by a mutual love of antiques
and by the restraint that sometimes Tinker's personality can put on Lovejoy
when Lovejoy would be rash and would charge...
Of course, he doesn't succeed all the time, Tinker, but he puts forward the argument.
One thing we tried to give Lovejoy that, erm...
the ease of being with anybody.
Erm...
that Lovejoy could mix with hoi polloi, middle-class, commoner,
whatever class distinction you like to put on anybody,
Lovejoy was there being himself.
Which is the one where he had the wedding,
we said, "What's he gonna wear for the wedding?" And Lovejoy's idea of dress...
which of course has now been copied, I'm glad to say, by haute couture,
was we gave him an evening jacket with jeans and cowboy boots.
But at the time, that was Lovejoy's idea of dressing up -
kept his jeans on but just put a quick After-Six and a bow tie and a cowboy...
and that was it.
Before we started Lovejoy series two in 1990,
yeah, I was... I did a stint on Dallas here
and got to know... Nice people, all of them.
And I worked a lot with Linda Gray,
so in the second year when we came back in '91 and '92 and did Lovejoy,
it was a two-hour special,
erm, invited Linda across to play the character.
She was great. And we also had Ken Kercheval two years later.
Ken - Cliff Barnes as he's better known,
to come and play the plantation owner when we did the show set in North Carolina.
Both good actors, both two nice people.
I mean, that's great, that's the nice thing,
if you've worked in other shows you remember people from the past and you can call them.
Like we got, I mean, we had Sir John,
one we had Frank Finlay, we had some great guest stars.
Not just in the specials but in the regular shows.
I mean, that was it, the quality of actors you got in that show was quite terrific.
I think we paid quite well as well.
Erm, but it was written well,
and the guest stars were written... rounded characters.
Brian Blessed, the only man that could play that part.
He'd just come back from climbing Everest, or nearly climbing Everest for the second time,
and Brian's always useful to have on a set, there's never a dull moment.
He was wonderful, he was with Linda Gray.
He played the, erm...
I think he was a... Was he a Greek or a Russian? He was a mixture.
Anyway, he was terrific.
Tom Wilkinson, played the painter Ashley Wilkes.
He goes around painting cottages and that's his in with the women.
He was a character close to Lovejoy's heart, another Lothario.
A Lothario with his oils.
And that was the famous scene in the bar where we all sang Tara's Theme, I think.
I remember a particular episode when we had three great guest stars
which was The Italian Venus, which apart from being beautifully written
was beautifully performed by Patrick Malahide and lan McNeice and Celia Imrie,
which is a very class-ridden episode.
And wonderfully... Because it was in the garden
and it was in bits, the shell was in one...
There's certain episodes that stand out. That...
The first one I ever directed, which was Eric Of Arabia,
which was about Brough motorcycles.
We had these Broughs on the set, these motorbikes, which were incredible.
I mean, they were worth a quarter of a million dollars each,
we had about four of them,
one of them that T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia...
I mean, I would have flogged it as the one that he actually killed himself in, but it wasn't,
but those are the bikes he rode on.
So you got to explore a whole... I mean, antiques, not just...
I mean, we did some shows about architectural antiques,
we went down and did a show about...
Another particular favorite when we did the submariner one,
we went down to Portsmouth and filmed aboard the submarine from World War II.
There were some fantastic things. So you got to learn a lot on that show.
He's too obsessed and he's also a television character,
which you've got to keep him... you've got to keep him a solitary guy,
so you've got all the options every year to do with what you want.
So you try and make... What we tried to do was make him a father that loved his daughter
but obviously he was feckless, hopeless with money, which is...
married out of his class, cos we tried to make him obviously...
Lovejoy does like a bit of upper-class totty, as they say.
I've always wanted to give the impression of Lovejoy, you look at the guy and you think,
why is this guy with long hair and a leather jacket living in Suffolk?
He must be hiding from something.
And that was what I... Give him the sense of being an outsider at the same time,
that he wasn't a regular kind of, you know, erm...
your suede-booted, yellow-sock-wearing, tweed-jacketed, "Hello, yes,"
typical antique dealer or one that you'd see on Antiques Roadshow.
Somebody different who came to it another way.
And that was one thing from the books.
In the book, he's a rough character.
He knows a lot of people in various areas, which is...
So he's an outsider, and keep him the outsider quality,
which gives you the chance to do all sorts of other things within the context of the show,
without seeming suddenly, "Why's he suddenly doing that?"
So you give the character the outside quality,
and have him been married, you've introduced his wife,
he's not a terrible father, he's just not cut out for it. Tries his best, it doesn't work.
But he's a nice... He tries to do his best.
When we had the series with... when his daughter...
Wasn't it the pornographic?
When his daughter's public school...
They're involved with pornographic pictures, they have this pornographic collection.
Which is very... It's erotic, it's a very funny idea,
the school that has this wonderful pornographic collection. It's a girls' school.
Makes for a... Makes for great fun.