Liverpool Sound and Vision 7/10

Cast: David Jason, Lynda Baron, Stephanie Cole, Maggie Ollerenshaw, James Baxter, Johnny Vegas, Mark Williams, Brigit Forsyth, Kulvinder Ghir, Sally Lindsay, Nina Wadia, Barry Elliott, Kathryn Hunt, Misha Timmins, Cathy Breeze, Sally Womersley, Emily Fleeshman, Nadine Mulkerrin.

There are some things in life that are worth re-visiting, even if it just the once. To see old characters move around in familiar ways but know that somehow they have changed, even slightly, is to understand that time must and always will move forward.

To come back to perhaps one of the two greatest comedies set entirely in the North of England and completely away from the mass sprawl of London takes some doing but when the star of the previous show was the legendary Ronnie Barker, then to see how life in the corner shop in Rotherham, with a till that was as lethal and as snappy as a Yorkshire Terrier, the array of people using the shop, not just as a convenience store but in a way to be part of community that is forever under threat by bigger and more soulless shops, is to revisit a place that was comforting as was gentle a humour as you could ever wish for.

Open all Hours may not have been the most sophisticated of comedies and this, perhaps, one off special and sequel Still Open All Hours is even less so without ‘The Governor’ stalking the shop but it still had the charm and elegance that so many modern comedies fail to capture.

Granville, played the ever likeable and trustworthy David Jason has inherited not only a shop crammed with everything you need and some things you had no idea you ever wanted, but there is now a young Granville, a young man whose success with the ladies supersedes the non-exploits of his father, whose love life revolved around fantasising about the milk lady in the morning and Mavis in the afternoon. Leroy, the product of a one-night stand in the heady atmosphere of a wet and windy February day in Blackpool, has all the same worries that his father had nearly forty years ago but is in touch with the modern age, no delivery bicycle for him when he can cadge a lift off one of the many Northern lasses willing to lend a hand and a kiss.

Unsophisticated it may be but Roy Clarke’s indomitable style of writing catches the eye in a way that many comedies today don’t. Far from relying on the exhausting joke a minute with characters that don’t feel real or someone you would even want to share five minutes with in the outside world, let alone in the confines say of an office building, Still Open All Hours revels in the seemingly mundane and finds something polished and rather beautiful in the day.

With guest appearances from some of the people that frequented Arkwright’s over the course of four seasons, including the great Lynda Baron as the undisputed queen of northern hearts Nurse Gladys Emmanuel, the wonderful Stephanie Cole as a rejuvenated Mrs Featherstone, who now sees Granville finally living up to his Uncle’s legacy and the superb Maggie Ollernshaw as the indecisive Mavis but who has also got more than a twinkle in her eye for the man of the shop, Roy Clarke and David Jason have recaptured a slice of magic that had perhaps been left on the shelf far too long.

Somewhere, wherever he is, Ronnie Barker would be smiling.

Ian D. Hall