‘Real recognises real’: How Sir David Jason and Jay Blades became friends – and now colleagues
Do we have to do this together?’ asks Jay Blades, as he sits down for an interview next to Sir David Jason. ‘Funny you should say that. Get out of my shot,’ retorts Sir David, before leaning in close to the tape recorder to whisper: ‘Just remember it’s Sir David Jason’s show…’ Blades leans in further: ‘Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ And then they both hoot with laughter, and settle down with their cups of tea.
To Del Boy and Rodney, Granville and Arkwright, we can now add the comedy pairing of Jason and Blades. In an unexpected commission, they have joined forces for a BBC Two teatime series in which they tour the country’s air shows, steam rallies, craft fairs and vintage festivals. It’s called David and Jay’s Touring Toolshed, and in each episode they meet members of the public who show off their skills at making or restoring, and get advice from experts. ‘There are tinkerers everywhere. This nation is full of people that make stuff,’ says Blades.
It has shades of The Repair Shop, the series that made Blades a household name, and of Antiques Roadshow. But each episode of the new show also includes laughs, from gentle slapstick to the kind of repartee that peppers their real-life conversation. ‘You hear about people who work together on TV shows and can’t bear to be in the same room – naming no names,’ says Jason. ‘But I couldn’t do it.’
Seeing Blades on a show that involves repairing is no surprise. But Sir David Jason, actor and comedy legend? What’s he doing here? ‘Well, I found out that David loves tinkering,’ Blades says. ‘So it was a simple idea: let’s go on the road and do something together.’
How did the friendship develop? Blades starts to explain that he was appearing in the 2021 Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special, doing the jive to the Only Fools and Horses theme tune, and the BBC asked Jason to record a good luck message. Jason interrupts at this point: ‘Dancing? Ha! I saw it…’ ‘I was attempting to dance,’ Blades continues. ‘Basically he did that video for me, and I did a video for him, and then he came down to The Repair Shop and that was it.’
Jason and Blades, 83 and 53 respectively, have chemistry. And they can’t stop taking the mick out of each other. It’s a winter’s day at the Lassco architectural salvage yard off the M40, where they browse the treasures in between posing for the photographer, but they never complain about the cold and the banter is nonstop. Any use of the title ‘Sir David’ is in jest.
They call each other ‘DJ’ and ‘JB’. An impish Jason, sprightly after a ‘bionic’ hip replacement, pokes fun at Blades, himself an MBE, for having friends in high places: ‘He’s now got the King on his shoulder!’
This is quite true, as Blades and the monarch get on famously. The King appeared in a special episode of The Repair Shop, filmed before his accession, and Blades attended the Coronation. They bonded over the King’s love of craftsmanship. There is a notable lack of formality about their encounters. Or, as Jason splutters in mock indignation: ‘Jay just goes and puts his arm around him. The effrontery!’
Jason was rather more reverential when he met the late Queen in 2005 to receive his knighthood. ‘I felt such a wally because she said, “What are you doing at the moment?” and I said, “I’m making a Christmas special of Only Fools and ’Orses, Your Majesty.” It was so East End working class, and as it fell out of my mouth I was just thinking, there’s no way on planet Earth that she would watch that sort of show.’ Actually, you can imagine the late Queen being a fan; her favourites reportedly included EastEnders and The Bill.
Besides a dapper dress sense – both are smartly turned out in caps and well-cut woollen coats – a humble background is one of the things Jason and Blades share. As Blades puts it, being serious for a moment, ‘Real recognises real.’ By which he means they’re not showbiz luvvies, they’re not demanding – filming this new show involved long days, and a lot of travel around the country with Blades at the wheel and Jason goofing around with a map, fuelled by a diet of bacon butties – and they hail from the same part of the world. ‘We’re two working class geezers,’ Blades explains.
He grew up in Hackney, east London, Jason a few miles up the road in Finchley. Ask Blades when he started making stuff and he’ll tell you it was as a child, but it was out of need rather than for fun. ‘I liked taking stuff apart but for me it was a necessity, because we were poor. You didn’t have money to buy a wardrobe so you just made one. I got some milk crates – and I did half-inch them, but the milkman didn’t mind, he didn’t even notice – and just put a broom across the top and there’s your wardrobe, sorted.’
Jason didn’t grow up in such straitened circumstances but the wartime ‘make do and mend’ ethos was strong. His real interest in making things came when he left school at 15 and got a job as an electrician’s apprentice. ‘You’re in a building and you’re putting the electrics in, and you start to learn things. “No, no, no, you can’t knock that brick out because you’ll collapse the whole thing – you have to put a concrete or a wooden beam across.” All of that became a fascination to me, and I just got more and more attracted to making and building things.’
If the cards had fallen differently, perhaps Jason would have carried on in that profession. But he wanted desperately to be an actor – ‘I burned with it’ – and got his lucky break when he was spotted in an am-dram show and offered his first job, in a production of Noël Coward’s South Sea Bubble at Bromley Rep. He had a very small part as the butler but the director had noted his comedic talents and instructed him to do something funny in the background of a scene. ‘All of the other actors, mature actors and some of them quite well known in the business – suddenly this Mr Nobody at the back got a big laugh. They all went, “Who the hell is he?” It got the best laugh of the whole show. That was it, I was off and running.’
Jason honed his comedy skills in various programmes before Ronnie Barker cast him as errand boy Granville in Open All Hours, which ran for a decade from 1976. Greatest hits include Only Fools and Horses and The Darling Buds of May, with plenty of serious roles too: he was acclaimed in A Touch of Frost.
Around this period, Blades was drifting between jobs and, for a time in his 20s, living in a Salvation Army hostel. He eventually set up a charitable social enterprise working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, restoring salvaged furniture, with his first wife. It has not been a straight road – the charity lost its backing, their marriage ended, and he has told how nine years ago he contemplated suicide. But a video about his work had caught the eye of TV researchers and eventually led to The Repair Shop, which proved such a hit that it moved from the BBC’s teatime schedule to primetime. Famous fans don’t end with the King – Dame Judi Dench appeared in a Comic Relief special pretending to be overcome by the sight of Blades.
And, of course, throughout his life, Blades was watching David Jason on TV. ‘Come on. Who didn’t grow up on Only Fools and Horses?’ he asks. Now they’re working together. ‘He’s a legend,’ says Blades, who in his serious moments speaks to Jason with a deep sense of respect. ‘Are you looking in the mirror when you say that?’ asks Jason. And they’re off again.
‘I’m the understudy,’ says Blades. ‘He isn’t half learning fast though,’ Jason chips in. ‘Jay has got this wonderful ability to accept whatever I say to him and to come back with something. That is the basis of a good comedy duo: the cut and thrust. We play off each other.’
Blades is equally complimentary: ‘This is the first time DJ’s done unscripted television, but he took to it like a duck to water.’ As a dyslexic who left school at 15 with no qualifications, Blades thrives on playing it by ear. ‘I can’t do scripts because I can’t read that well. I love unscripted.’
While most of their interactions were off-the-cuff, Jason did put some time into thinking up little skits. ‘Because I’ve spent my life doing it, so it was lovely to be able to think and invent things to put in. But we didn’t have time to do them all. So, if we do any more, we would need a day or two to go through the bits and pieces and have time to make some of the ideas.’
‘You keep saying “if”,’ Blades says, ticking him off. ‘I’m up for it, you’re up for it, but we’ve got to convince the BBC,’ says Jason. ‘Oh, I know!’ he says, then instructs me on what I should write in this piece. ‘Say that if the BBC don’t come up with it, we’re going to ITV! Because I know people at ITV. You can write that down.’
Blades says people were surprised to see Jason at the fairs and festivals, ‘but then they were very warm to us, everywhere we went’. ‘I think they accepted me, didn’t they?’ Jason asks. Do people recognise him constantly and quote Del Boy’s lines at him? ‘Well, yes, but mainly after I’ve gone,’ he chuckles, explaining that speed is of the essence. ‘As you walk past, somebody will look at you and go’ – he does a comedy double take – ‘“Oh, that was…” but by then you’re gone, you’re running.’
He loved working on TV after several years away. Apart from voice work for the children’s cartoon Pip Ahoy!, his last significant appearance was in Still Open All Hours in 2019. ‘Oh, it’s lovely. The creative juices come flooding back and you enjoy it so much.’
Finding an audience is a lot harder than it was in his heyday, he acknowledges, when there were no streaming services and shows could draw more than 20 million viewers. ‘Because you’ve got thousands of channels now, you’ve got to attract them in the first place. So what happens is they go, “Oh, that Jay Blades bloke is on. With that other little squirty bloke who was in Only Fools… Right, we’ll have a look at that then.” You’ve got to remember they’re sitting on the settee and they’re nudging each other and going, “Did you see that?” “No, what?” “When he went like that, behind his back.” It’s little things like that. And then you start to build an audience.’
On the day we meet, Ofcom has published research in which working class audiences said the BBC had become too dry, serious and, to some, politically correct, with its once world-leading comedy content replaced with ‘edgy’ stuff aimed at modern tastes. ‘Many of our participants… miss the “fun” element of the BBC’s programming,’ the regulator said.
I ask Jason for his views on this, because Only Fools and Horses is surely the most beloved BBC comedy of all time, and he immediately volunteers his thoughts on the spread of political correctness and the way it has curbed humour. On David and Jay’s Touring Toolshed, he watches his words. ‘We’re constantly being made aware of what you shouldn’t say, you’ve got to be careful, because you’ve got to be inclusive,’ he explains. ‘You should be able to say a few things that [make] people go, “Oh, he said that, that was quite funny, really.” And that’s the end of it. Throw it away, it’s not important. But today what would happen is, you say something and it’s on the internet and blown up out of proportion.’
With drama, things have gone the other way. ‘Interestingly enough, in drama you’ve become much more non-PC, and very insulting towards your audience. In other words, you’re effing and blinding all the time. The reason is because now we’ve got rid of censorship. What they will say is that now it’s common language, it’s everyday language to swear graphically. “We’ve got to put the swear words here because we’ve got to make it realistic, because that’s how real people talk.” Well, when I did [A Touch of] Frost, we had a couple of moments when they said, “What you should do, you should get so angry you should swear here.” And we’d go, “No, no, no! We don’t swear.” Because if the script is good enough, you don’t need to.’
Jason remembers a scene in which DI Frost got so annoyed he said, ‘Oh, for f… crying out loud.’ He chuckles: ‘That was part of the comedy thing. The audience would say, “Did you see that? He nearly swore there!” You’ve got to include your audience but you’ve got to do it in such a way that you don’t offend the rest of the audience.’
The late Mary Whitehouse, he explains to Blades, ‘kept her finger on the pulse of rudeness’. Blades, perhaps finely attuned to television mores because he now runs his own production company – the one that has made Touring Toolshed – smoothly sums up the tone of this new show as ‘old-school comedy but with new values, so we don’t offend anybody’.
As for serving a broad audience, ‘I think it’s a show that can appeal to everyone, whether it’s working class, upper class, whatever,’ says Blades. ‘If people want feel-good TV, this is the one to watch.’ And while there are plenty of women in the programme, he acknowledges, ‘I’ve got to say this and I don’t mean it in a sexist way – almost every man has a shed.’
Doing this for a living, Blades has upgraded from a shed to a workshop, where he always has pieces of furniture on the go. He lives in Shropshire with his second wife, Lisa, whom he married in Barbados in 2022. I tell him I’ve seen the inside of his house, on one of his documentaries, and it was so spotless that I can’t picture him taking things apart at the kitchen table. ‘That’s the missus,’ he laughs. ‘She tidies up. Say I’ve got a cup of tea and I want to use the same cup, I go to get that cup and – bosh, it’s in the dishwasher already. But I’ve got a workshop. She’s not allowed to tidy that. It’s messy as God knows what.’ At the moment, he’s having fun making candelabras out of snooker-table legs.
Jason also has a workshop at his home in Buckinghamshire, where he has an extensive garden. He lives with his wife, Gill Hinchcliffe; they met when she was working at Yorkshire Television and he was making A Touch of Frost, and he became a father at 61 to their daughter, Sophie. His first long-term partner, Myfanwy Talog, died in 1995. Gill has accompanied him to the interview and jokes about his tinkering habit, but you imagine that, like many wives, she’s rather glad he’s got something to keep him occupied at this stage in life. His latest thing is riding boots.
He enthuses, ‘I’ve got these stables that belonged to the house, and they were full of stuff that we’d not done anything about. And I went in the other day and found about 10 old-fashioned riding boots, leather and all covered in cobwebs. So I’ve started to clean them up and dubbin them and I thought, I’ll make a lamp standard out of these.’ He looks immensely satisfied. ‘So I’ve now bought the lamp holder and extension, then I’m going to polish the boot up and put it on a plinth. And then I thought, right, I’ll sell these.’
‘For £500,’ suggests Blades, and Jason snorts. At which point, the phone rings behind us. ‘First order!’ they both yell.
They are evangelical about the benefits of tinkering for both young and old. ‘There’s some people that go to school and they have intelligent minds, all the GCSEs. But what about the people who have intelligent hands?’ says Blades. He concedes that the youngest of his three children, who is 17, is happier on social media, but ‘there are a lot of young people that love making things’.
Jason recently discovered he has a daughter in her 50s, Abi, from a brief relationship with actor Jennifer Hill. Abi wrote to Jason with her suspicions he was her father; a paternity test proved it. She and her son Charlie, then 10, were welcomed into the family and Jason has introduced his grandson to the model rockets in his workshop.
He worries that the benefits of children making things from kits or using their imagination are being lost in our world of smartphones. ‘The thing with these phones: everything is provided for you. The music, the entertainment, pictures, everything. That, to me, is not normal. What is normal is picking up something and entertaining yourself – taking a bit of paper, say, and folding it into a little aeroplane… And before there was television, radio, I imagine you had to entertain yourself. You’d go, “What are we going to do? I tell you what, why don’t we get that thing and put a handle on it and a couple of wheels, make it bigger, then you could sit in it and I could push it along…” That sort of process, we’re not growing up with that now. We’re growing up with everything done for you.’
At the other end of the spectrum, Touring Toolshed features a 94-year-old still working as a volunteer at the Midland Air Museum. ‘Unreal. He had the speed of a gazelle,’ marvels Blades. ‘That, to me, is what making can do for you.’ Jason agrees that it’s important to keep mind and body active as you get past retirement age. ‘Yes, you’ve got to try. Otherwise you vegetate. You just get within yourself and go, “Oh, I can’t be bothered to do that – I’ll just sit there.”’
‘No, I’m not having that,’ says Blades. ‘Nor me,’ says Jason. ‘I’ll keep you going,’ says Blades. Jason leans over to the tape recorder again: ‘So we need another series. Another five series!’
Jason’s pride and joy is the working model steam engine in his garden. We’re past the allotted time for the interview but when I ask about it, he’s away: ‘It’s a five-inch gauge and I built two engines from a kit. They’re in the shed, which is at the end of the railway line, and it’s very hands-on because you have to watch everything: the water comes from the tank at the back and you have a gauge and if the water goes down too low you must pump up the water from your tank, and that cools the cylinder down, so now you’re losing the steam. So it’s quite complicated but that’s part of the fun, part of the learning – hold on, we’ve got to get a bit more water but we can’t start off yet until we’ve got a good head of steam, here she comes, and if you get too much steam you can open the valve and it goes, “Sshhh.”’
He beams. Blades nods happily: ‘See that smile? That’s exactly what we’re trying to inspire with this show. That same enthusiasm.’ ‘And,’ Jason jokes, ‘the next one we’ll be making without any clothes on. To be modern!’ As I leave them, they’re still laughing.
David and Jay’s Touring Toolshed starts on 22 January at 6.30pm on BBC Two
