But for a really different ice-cream you must turn to English Seafood Cookery It's made with anchovies

But for a really different ice-cream, you must turn to English Seafood Cookery It's made with anchovies.. It's official David Jason is bigger than Princess Diana. The final (for the time being, anyway) episode of Only Fools and Horses on BBC1 over Christmas netted a staggering 24.38 million viewers - well ahead of Di's "Queen of Hearts" Panorama. At the moment, he could run for Prime Minister and it would be a shoo-in.

He is huge enough to be able to turn down a reported pounds 500,000 for a day's work on an advert for Typhoo, and a project with his name attached will get green-lighted before you can say "record ratings". His Darling Buds of May was the first programme in history to reach the top of the charts with its very first episode. "There isn't anybody more popular," is the assessment of Martyn Auty, Jason's producer on ITV's A Touch of Frost, the high-class detective series which returns tomorrow. "The sort of figures he got for the last Only Fools haven't been seen since the early 1970s, when there were only three channels." Only half-joking, Jason tells me during our interview that "Even now the chief executive of Yorkshire TV is waiting outside to twist my arm up my back about certain things," before adding, as if to emphasise his clout, "but I'm not allowing him to make me do something I don't want to do Good parts just don't fall off trees. I try to be very careful about what sort of projects I attack.

There's an audience out there that expects high standards from me."So just how has he reached such giddy heights? Why does he attract viewers like moths to a flame? Up close, in a dark check jacket, and blue shirt and tie, he looks competely unremarkable, like an Ordinary Joe - which may well be the secret of his success.Obviously uncomfortable with publicity - a virtue, some would say- he nevertheless flashes the odd Del Boyish twinkle once he loosens up. Belying his own description of himself as "thick", he possesses a native wit and a wicked sense of humour. Pre-empting questions about the distinguished grey beard he is currently sporting, he quips: "I've grown it because I'm looking forward to getting the smaller parts that Sean Connery is going to turn down. Mr Connery does turn them down, and there's a smaller, uglier version ready to help him out."Auty reckons that "He has great empathy with characters. The audience think that he's just a regular guy, the bloke who lives down the road, and forget that he's an actor - which is the best definition there is of being a supreme actor. You don't sit there watching a performance, you have a window onto a character called Pop Larkin or Jack Frost. You start to live the whole experience with him."Malcolm Bradbury, who wrote screenplays for Jason with A Touch of Frost and Porterhouse Blue, comments on "the skill with which he takes on the next thing.