Open All Hours creator talks making legendary sitcom: "It would never happen again"

Fifty years ago this month, a little corner store opened for business. Quintessentially northern but universally popular, Open All Hours was a hit for its stars and spawned a successful sequel, but in fact the bell above Arkwright’s door first tinkled in a pilot episode three years before in 1973. RT was lucky enough to gain a rare interview with its creator, Sir Roy Clarke...

Last of the Summer Wine, Keeping Up Appearances and Open All Hours are just three of the hit shows that have kept Roy Clarke busy over the years. And so beloved are those comedies that he was recently appointed a Knights Bachelor for services to entertainment. Did the recent honour come as a surprise? “You can bet your bottom dollar!” says Clarke, 96.

But what of the other birthday boy, Open All Hours: how did that come about?

“The BBC put Ronnie and I together for a lunch to see if we could come up with something,” explains Clarke, “and in the course of that, Ronnie said, ‘I’ve always wanted to play one of these small shopkeepers.’ Well that clicked for me because my wife’s father was a grocer, she was raised in the trade, and when we were first married she ran a little shop, so I was comfy with the material and I went away quite happy with working on that.”

The show was created specifically for Ronnie Barker for his 1973 comedy anthology series Seven of One, which also gave rise to Porridge. There was a three-year gap between pilot and series, so why the long wait?

“Well, it was always Ronnie’s commitments.” As well as The Two Ronnies, Barker was also becoming established as “habitual criminal” Norman Stanley Fletcher in said cell-mate sitcom. So in Open All Hours, his skinflint shopkeeper Albert Arkwright, paired with David Jason as his naive nephew Granville, was a comedy dream come true.

“It would never happen again,” says Clarke. “David happened to be just starting in his fame. At no other stage in time would it have been possible to have two stars of that magnitude in one show. So that was a huge bonus for me.”

The team wasn’t quite complete, however. Nurse Gladys Emanuel, the focus of Arkwright’s permanent infatuation, was played in the pilot by Sheila Brennan and only subsequently by Lynda Baron. “The production didn’t think it worked, so they recast. Absolutely nothing to do with me.”

It's not the only thing to change after that first instalment. Outside scenes of Arkwright's shop were initially filmed in Ealing, west London, but afterwards in Balby near Doncaster.

The foundation was now in place for four series of fun, with ardent Arkwright constantly rebuffed by no-nonsense Nurse Gladys, and wet-behind-the-ears Granville perpetually thwarted in his own dating games by his accident-prone nature.

It’s a tribute to Clarke that so many pre-fame actors queued up to play customers on the show, including Yootha Joyce (George and Mildred), John Challis (Only Fools and Horses), Liz Dawn (Coronation Street) and Barbara Flynn (A Very Peculiar Practice).

“That was part of the gift of the idea, that in effect with the shop you’ve got a theatre. You’ve got the two regulars, Ronnie and David, keeping things always on a comedy level, then you’ve got your customers walking in. It was like old variety acts coming in, doing their turn and then going off again. It was a wonderful gift.

“I think Ronnie, when he said that’s what he wanted to do, he sussed that, somehow. The instinct was there, telling him it was a good idea.” In fact, Clarke wrote another pilot for that springboard series Seven of One. It was called Spanner's Eleven and followed the misfortunes of a terrible football club. "Yeah, we won’t talk much about that!" he laughs.

Open All Hours mixed slapstick, verbal dexterity and end-of-pier gags, as well as a smidgen of melancholy in Arkwright's end-of-episode ruminations. The show ran for four series and 26 episodes, until 1985. So what were some of Clarke's comedy inspirations, growing up? "I loved George Formby. I liked the American humour, I liked Crazy Gang and that sort of stuff."

Clarke famously wrote all his early scripts in longhand. "I did. I used to when I had a legible hand, because typewriters in those days... I mean, if you had to make an alteration it was a huge labour. With pencil, at least you could soon scrub out and rewrite in a balloon or something, so it was easier."

The show's “hero”, miserly, crotchety Arkwright, could easily have been unlikeable, so Clarke and Barker gave him a stutter. “For which I make no apology," says Clarke, "because he was big enough to handle that. In fact, he was so big a character, I think, Arkwright needed a little flaw.

"Without a little humanity he would have been an appalling character, and that’s one of the wonders of people like Ronnie Barker that his decency came through, even with the terrible bloody things I gave him to do!”

The decision to revive the show for Still Open All Hours in 2013 was a brave one, bearing in mind Barker’s death in 2005, but it was upheld by more than 13 million tuning in, and the show running for six series and 41 episodes – longer even than the original programme. “You tamper fearfully with a success,” says Clarke, “and it could have gone badly, but again, with David, you’ve got the talent that rescues it."

Jason's turn as Granville, taking over the store following Arkwright’s death, was another winner for Clarke. It brought back running characters such as Wavy Mavis (Maggie Ollerenshaw) and Mrs Featherstone the "Black Widow" (Stephanie Cole), and introduced viewers to more comedy royalty in the shape of Brigit Forsyth, Johnny Vegas, Tim Healy, Sally Lindsay, Nina Wadia and others.

In many ways it overcame Barker's absence by making his presence strongly felt. "Yes we did, that was deliberate. His photo was always there, and his presence was pretty huge, I think." Not to mention Arkwright's famous snapping shop till. "Of course," laughs Clarke.

Although the BBC axed Still Open in 2023, Clarke has written a coda for the show in a documentary about Open All Hours and its legacy, to air on U&Gold later this year. "It's not a script really, it’s a piece to finish off the documentary, and it kind of winds it up."

Two of his biggest successes, Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine, are both comic portrayals of northern life, but Clarke views them as separate entities: "Summer Wine is all expansive and hillsides and things, the shop’s a tiny theatre. And they both worked."

Favourite episodes? “I liked Ronnie and the nurse going to a wedding... I like the funeral one, too, with Ronnie putting the buns in the hearse. But I like most of them, to be honest. It was such a pleasure working with that talent.”

An official biography of Roy Clarke, Writing All Hours by Andrew T Smith, will be published by Ten Acre Books later this year.

Roy Clarke Remembers... is on BBC Four on Tuesday 10 February at 7:30pm and afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

Add shows to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more.

Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.