David Jason lifts lid on devastating career news and says 'it's the hope that kills you'

After meetings to discuss two lead roles, discovered Jim Broadbent and Michael Caine had bagged the parts he wanted.

Being pipped by Jim was particularly ironic as the Moulin Rouge star famously auditioned to play Del Boy, but turned it down due to theatre commitments.

But he was glad the part eventually went to Sir David, who played the market trader from 1981 to 2003.

Broadbent said: "Luckily David Jason was available so my biggest contribution to British culture is not being available."

Sir David, however, has never had quite the same impact on the big screen.

He said: "I would love to be able to declare that my collected film work on DVD would make an elegant shelf of high-class cinematic experiences to browse among an evening.

"I fear, however, that it may look more like the contents of a box pulled out from under a table at a car boot sale".

The actor was up for lead roles in two 2023 movies - The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry and The Great Escaper.

Broadbent beat him to the first, which he found out via a newspaper.

And Sir Michael Caine pipped him to the role of a Dunkirk veteran who flees his care home to attend a memorial across the Channel in The Great Escaper.

Writing in his new book This Time Next Year, out now, Sir David says: "I thought it was going to be me escaping from the care home and going to look for my Dun-kirk chums.

"It's the hope that kills you."

The star also put to bed any rumours of bad blood between him and Only Fools co-star Nicholas Lyndhurst, Sir David clarified in his memoir how what appeared as a "feud" may well have been misconstrued. That stemmed, he said from an anecdote in a previous book.

He wrote: "With Nick, I feel slightly to blame for some of this fake 'feud' news, because what's often used as supporting evidence in these stories is a tale I told in an earlier volume of these memoirs, about Nick and me having an enormous fight during a location shoot for Only Fools.

"And we did have a huge row that day - a truly spectacular one. The kind of all-out, shouting, swearing, object-throwing barney that relationships often don't come back from.

"The only thing being, it was a play-fight - a wind-up, a practical joke we played on the rest of the cast and crew. It was raining, the cameras hadn't turned over all morning - it was one of those frustrating days.

"Nick and I had already exhausted the wide variety of entertainment opportunities available to us at such times - which is to say, we'd read the papers and then we'd used those papers to have a paper-plane-building competition and seen who could fly their plane the furthest. We were bored stiff, frankly, and the devil famously makes work for idle actors."