We had a female producer come in who decided, "We want a bit more sex for Lovejoy."
I was quite happy.
She said, "We've got to get him a little more sex. We'll get...
"Joanna Lumley in three episodes."
So they bring her in as a sort of a foil.
0f course, it's all fated to end in disaster, which it does.
She's lovely, cos my wife had done a stage play with her two years before,
which is what made me think of her.
She's gone on and done... She wasn't doing much at the time.
It sort of rebirthed her career in a way.
Friends In High Places, that was right, yes. 0h, yes.
It ended with a very funny telephone conversation to the palace about something,
pretending that one of the members of the royal family was on the other end of the line.
And then we had another great show, which we did with a pop band,
when we had the Irish... very good Irish band, Hothouse Flowers,
who came in, and, erm...
and again, that didn't seem too far-fetched to have a rock band in it.
It was kind of part of the show,
cos they're not really a rock band, they're sort of a multicultural band,
they're very much of origin an Irish band, they just went out into rock and roll.
Erm, no, that was a good show.
A divvy is known in antique circles as somebody who...
who can place an object, if it's real or false,
because it sets off certain emotional or chemical reactions in the body.
Jonathan Gash writes in the books about him sometimes,
Lovejoy gets these, like, the heart tends to beat quicker.
Sudden like... it's like a panic attack, or the head goes off, it's various...
That this... You're in the presence of something from the ages.
That's... And that's a divvy.
Whether they actually do exist or not,
I think they do, but you can make up your own mind.
I don't have that huge an interest in antiques.
I like paintings, I like old paintings...
Old furniture, which is what Lovejoy really loves, never appealed to me.
Lovejoy really loved... In the books, that's his big...
He loves antique furniture, that's his thing,
which really gets his heart racing, when he sees something that's wonderful.
Erm, it gave me an insight into a lot of it.
There was one very funny remark once, we were recceing a location
in a country home,
and it did have some spectacular paintings in,
and we had this funny locations guy from the BBC
with his classic... "Hello, I'm from the loca..."
And he introduced us to the woman who ran the house
and she said very off-hand when we were walking through one room, she said,
"I do hope you'll be careful."
He said..."Madam, the BBC is insured for £50 million."
She said, "Well, that'll cover this room."
And he... (Laughs)
As she pointed to the Velázquez and the Pic... on the walls.
Sort of made you feel... Put him in his place a little.
Chris Jury brought a terrific comedic sense, I thought, to Eric,
the naivety and the kind of...
doltishness but lovability.
But also the character enabled Lovejoy, when he was explaining stuff,
to use the character of Eric, who he took on as ostensibly his apprentice,
because his dad paid Lovejoy to keep him out of trouble and whatever
and gave him free meat. I think he was butcher, wasn't he, his dad?
Erm, and so Lovejoy could explain things which normally...
The device sometimes would work when I spoke to camera,
but the device would sometimes be giving information in the program,
and Lovejoy did give out a lot of information about antiques, but not in a boring way.
It wasn't like saying, "And now we have a 19th-century escritoire which was built..."
He could do it in a way that Eric would say, "What's this?
"Oh, you mean a writing desk."
It would be a conversation,
very funnily written by lan La Frenais or one of the other writers,
that would give information out without appearing that it was just information...
It would be a comedy scene, but within that there'd be light and shade about the characters,
while giving you some serious chat about antiques.
Also because he was learning...
Eric would say, "I'm supposed to be learning from you, Lovejoy.
"My dad's paying you good money to teach me about antiques."
And I think Chris gave it a great... a great boost to my character,
and I could go off on a...
And which brings me back to the camera thing,
which I don't think people realized in the first series, that I did actually...
Well, it's one of the first characters on TV to talk to the camera.
But you always tried to make it as part of the...
as if I'm talking to you now naturally, talking to you off-camera,
then he'd just turn and go, "Blah, blah, blah," and back again.
The audience would say, "Did he just talk to the camera?"
It wouldn't be like an obvious thing of "I'm now going to talk to the camera."
You try and build it into the show.
And that would be another way of giving the audience information
or bringing the audience on your side.
I think Lovejoy was a good example of...
of something that television does very well, which I don't think films can exploit,
that kind of comedy drama.
Which is a difficult genre, and actually more difficult to play than you think.
Drama usually gets all the, "Gosh, it was so marvelous."
But having not...
Having not done at that time...
One of the reasons I wanted to do Lovejoy was to do something that was lighter
than normal, than I was used to.
And I loved it. I had a great time.
It was a good show, the scripts were good, we paid well.
And, erm, I had a good time.
I think it had a good reputation as a show to do, and that's the most important thing,
so people were attracted to it and they came on.
And when you do a show, your guest stars are your bread and b...
You say, "Come on, bring what you do."
Minnie Driver. Now, Minnie, we liked so much that we filmed her scene twice.
It was funny, the first time it didn't come out, they had a technical problem,
so they brought her back again. Gorgeous creature.
And she played my daughter's friend at school.
My God, is it that long ago?
Minnie. I always remember her because she said, "My mum and dad had a sense of humor,
"cos they were hippies, my mum and dad." I said, "Obviously, they called you Minnie."
She said, "Yeah, but my brother's called Laurie."
So, Minnie and Laurie Driver, that's not bad. (Laughs)
That's an appealing story, isn't it?
No, they wrote one in once, I'll never forget, in a letter.
There was a letter addressed to my character.
I said, "What's this E on the front?" She said, "That's your name."
I said, "What do you mean? He doesn't have a name."
"Well, he's got to have a name." I said, "No, no, no."
And there's no address, it's just "Lovejoy, Suffolk".
If you wanna put "Lovejoy, Suffolk" it'll get to him somehow.
No, he never had a name. Apart from when we did a two-hour special
with, er... when we had Sir John Gielgud,
who was wonderful,
in the episode that we went to America on.
And he insisted on calling me Loveboy from time to time,
which I didn't object to, it being Sir John.
But it was very funny, "Oh, yes, Loveboy." "It's Lovejoy."
"Whatever. It doesn't matter really, does it?" Which was sweet.
Pavel Douglas, who played Alexander, Lady Jane's long-suffering husband,
er, was terrific.
He used to say, "You've brought me in again. Am I going to be boring again?"
"No, Pavel, you're gonna be Lady..." Alexander, this uneasy...
He knows nothing's going on. We made him the haughty character he was
but I think we did good by him because they didn't cheat on him.
Lovejoy never cheated on Lady - never cheated on Lady Jane,
they didn't have a relationship, there was nothing to cheat on -
he never... he would have done.
I think they came near it once in Scotland,
and then Eric appeared on his motorbike and sidecar and broke the mood completely
when he and Lady Jane could have been about to do the deed.
Erm...
and I think we made it at the end that...
even though...
he cheated on Lady Jane, actually I think he did in an episode, at the end, yes...
In fact, yeah, he does, she comes back...
They don't... You don't put them together again, which is interesting.
You have a chance to put Jane and Lovejoy together again
after Alexander's cheated on her and left her and...
But no, because it's too late.
It's too late, it's gone past them.
They'll always love each other, Lady Jane and Lovejoy,
but the time has come and the time has gone.