David Jason

I've been lucky enough to do this fantastic job now for more than 50 years. To make people laugh, to entertain, create a wide range of emotions - it has always been a tremendous thrill for me, and it still is.

People ask me if I am thinking of retiring. Well, it doesn't occur to me. Different day, different challenge, different way. Lovely jubbly.

In this business, you have to have what they call an idiotic determination to succeed.

My life has been in reverse. It wasn't fame, and it wasn't money, but I always wanted to succeed. The only way I could do that was to try with every job to be better than I was in the last one, and to learn.

You can't make people enjoy what you're doing unless you're enjoying it yourself.

If I want to go out to a restaurant with some friends, I'm more than happy that we go in under the radar, have a little evening on our own.

It seems to me that as soon as politicians get in, they become part of this club, and the rest of us, beneath them, are just ants running about. They become besotted with their position.

I'm an actor, and so of course I want to see TV companies making good dramas. I want that to be a priority.

When you had just three and then four channels, I could always find something that was watchable because the standard of TV was much higher. In those days, they had so much more money to put into so many less programmes.

A show like the 'Only Fool and Horses' Christmas special got 24 million viewers, so practically everyone in the country was watching. But of course it's a different world now, with so many channels. And those kind of figures are really difficult to achieve.

I deliberately decided not to go on Twitter. I've read about how much stress it can cause. I don't think it's healthy.

It's very nice to meet people who just get on, work hard, and don't have things handed to them.

We get the impression through film and TV that Americans are violent gangsters with guns or upper-middle-class people in romcoms. I really liked the people. They were really warm. They could have been Brits. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

One of the things I learned was that I really enjoyed stunt-car driving.

The Christmas of 1965 was a Yuletide with a difference at my parents' tiny terrace house in North London: it was the first time my family had been able to see me on television.

I was 25 when I'd told my parents that I was giving up steady work as an electrician to become an actor. They couldn't have been less enthusiastic if I'd proposed starting a commercial newt-breeding operation in the bathroom.

I was a very shy sort of person, and by acting different characters, I could immerse myself and make them do what, perhaps, I wouldn't do.

I was not driven by fame and fortune.

Journalists are out to trap me with my underwear showing.

Comedy is a funny business, which you have to take seriously.