Only Fools and Horses: David Jason met both Lennard Pearce and Nicholas Lyndhurst before TV show started without realising it

Only Fools and Horses fans will probably know how much the core cast bonded over the show’s seven seasons. Nicholas Lyndhurst, aka Rodney, has previously opened up about how the actors became like “family” to each other working so closely for so long.

So it’s hard to imagine there was a time when they didn’t know each other at all. In fact, when filming began for Only Fools and Horses, star of the show David Jason had actually already met two of his closest co-stars – Lennard Pearce and Nicholas Lyndhurst – without even realising it.

In his autobiography David Jason: My Life, the Del Boy actor explained how when he first met Lennard, who was going to play Grandad, and Nicholas, on the set of the show he shook both their hands like he’d never met them. It was only later that day he realised that he’d actually already met them both, “by a strange twist of fate”.

David had met Lennard first, in a comedy shw, “The Rivals,” at Bromley repertory theatre in 1966, when David was in his mid twenties and Lennard in his early fifties. While David was less well known at the time, Lennard had already been working his way around the acting circuit for a number of years, and had scored the main role of Sir Lucius O’Trigger in the play.

“We only worked that out much later, when we started to reminisce,” explained David. Although the two men didn’t meet again until 15 years later, nine years later, in 1975, David had also met Nicholas without realising it. Nicholas had found fame at a young age, on a children’s TV show on which the kids would interview fairly well known celebrities.

David Jason had gone on the show to be interviewed about his part in Lucky Feller for ITV in 1975, where he had unknowingly been interviewed by “a shiny-faced Nicholas Lyndhurst,” who was in his early teens. It wasn’t until May and June of 1981 that the three men were reunited, when filming began for the first series of Only Fools and Horses. The rest is history.

Reminiscing about the golden years many years later, David said : “On Only Fools and Horses , we were very much a family. That included everyone from the writer and the director to the props boy. We were a family working together to try and make a success of it. We wanted to bring John Sullivan’s brilliant writing to a wider public.”