“The idea of people in their sixties, seventies or eighties having a sexual life is often staggering or repulsive to young people,” says Tessa Peake-Jones. “But there’s no reason any of that should stop if you want it to continue.”
The 68-year-old – still probably best known as Raquel in Only Fools and Horses – pauses, and the adamance slips from her voice. “The problem is that as you get older, you have less confidence about getting yourself out there, and so much of that stuff is now done online now, which is more challenging if you’re not a digital native.” The “hesitancy” older people have about taking their sex lives online is in constant battle with an equal element of “fuck it, what have I got to lose?” spirit.
This is certainly the case for Lynn, whom she plays in a new production of Invisible Me at London’s Southwark Playhouse. Bren Gosling’s play follows three working-class Londoners who re-enter the dating scene in their sixties. Lynn is the kind of woman who feels nobody notices her. She jokes that her sex life expired in 1987, and now she’s stuck in a dreary, grey rut cleaning Travelodge rooms by day and rattling around her late mother’s house by night – until a chance encounter with a heavy-tipping hotel guest nudges her into new lingerie and onto the internet, where she is confronted by a confusing mix of renewed power and brutal dismissal.
Lynn’s surprising sexual reawakening runs alongside the stories of Jack (Miranda star James Holmes), a recently widowed and HIV-positive gay man, and Alec (former EastEnders actor Kevin N Golding), a straight divorced man who still feels the anarchy energy of his punk youth. Although the three lonely characters live minutes from each others’ homes, they don’t meet until towards the end of the play.
In ‘Invisible Me’, Tessa Peake-Jones stars with James Holmes (left) and Kevin N Golding (Photo: Harry Elletson)“We’re more and more isolated these days,” says Peake-Jones, “all staring down at our screens.” There’s a weary tut. “We’re not reaching out, not joining clubs. We don’t go into pubs and meet people the way we used to. But this play is about looking up, looking around you and making connections… if you want to.”
Chatting warmly over the phone, the actor has a direct, maternal tone. I can picture her popping the kettle on and pulling a cardigan around her shoulders – though this is probably because I’ve seen her playing direct, maternal roles on telly for most of my life. She starred as vicarage housekeeper Mrs Maguire in the hugely popular ITV detective drama Grantchester from 2014 to 2024, but the world first saw her rolling her eyes and hoicking around laundry baskets as Del Boy’s partner Raquel in Only Fools and Horses.
The BBC’s soft-hearted sitcom about a social-climbing family living on a Peckham council estate is arguably the most popular British comedy of all time. Its 1996 Christmas special, “Time on Our Hands” (in which Raquel’s parents come to dinner to meet the Trotter family for the first time), drew a massive 24.3 million viewers. Peake-Jones says the late Queen had advance tapes of the Christmas specials sent to the Palace, and chuckles that it’s still “always streaming somewhere on TV”. “We still all get letters from teenagers just discovering it. It’s amazing that people are still watching. But I think that it endures because John’s [Sullivan, the series writer] writing has got so much heart. Some of the comedy today seems to be having a go at other people. It can be quite cruel in a way that I don’t find funny personally.”
Raquel was also a strong female character who was never pushed around by men. Del Boy had to get over his issues with her part-time job as a stripper. “Yes,” agrees Peake-Jones. “They wanted to write an equal for Del Boy. A woman who stood up to him. And she had her share funny lines too.”
Peake-Jones in the 2003 Christmas special of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ with David Jason, Nicholas Lyndhurst and Gwyneth Strong (Photo: UKTV /BBC)Although she doesn’t discuss her romantic life in public, Peake-Jones divorced actor-director Douglas Hodge in 2013 after 29 years of marriage and raising two children. She’s one of an increasing number of the “silver splitters”. The number of couples parting ways in their fifties and sixties has doubled since 1993, with the number of people over 65 living alone rising from 3.5 million to 4.5 million between 2014 and 2024 according to the Office for National Statistics.
“I think we’re all afraid of being alone, and many people are afraid of their own company,” says Peake-Jones. But she’s found that “in your older years, you also really come to appreciate having some time on your own, for your own thinking and also to just not have to bother about anyone else, not have to compromise”. That’s where you learn to embrace the ‘f**k it’ spirit? “Yes. I think you do, blissfully, come through that phase of worrying about what others might think and allow yourself to ask: what would please ME today?” That’s the time when, she says, “you get to remember old facets of yourself you’d lost or find entirely new interests”.
Peake-Jones notes that the long journey towards shaking yourself free of external expectations and judgement might be even harder for future generations who’ve grown up on social media. “Thank God I didn’t have to go through that as a young woman because it’s so punishing, isn’t it?”
Not that Peake-Jones had it easy. Born in Hammersmith, London, in 1957, she was illegitimate and never knew her father. “So I was raised by two women: my mum and my Auntie Renie.” The sisters had very different personalities. Her mother – a huge supporter of her daughter’s stage school dreams – was “flowery and demonstrative and hugged everybody”, while Renie was much more reserved but reliable. When Peake-Jones was seven, her mother began seriously struggling with the bipolar disorder that would lead her to be repeatedly hospitalised in psychiatric wards throughout her daughter’s childhood. Had it not been for Renie, little Tessa would have been taken into care.
Peake-Jones spent 10 years playing Mrs Maguire in ‘Granchester’ (Photo: Patrick Redmond /ITV)“I’m writing a book about my mum, about the pros and cons of being raised by a bipolar parent at the moment,” says Peake-Jones today. “Mum was a huge theatre person. She would have loved to go into that world herself had it not been for the Second World War. So she was very supportive of my career. But there were gaps. I didn’t have someone watching me in the first school play I did and I didn’t have some of the costumes I needed.” She says her mother was “always critical” and “entwined” in her life in quite a complicated way. “She came into the studio when I was filming Only Fools and Horses,” she says, “and loved meeting people at the bar afterwards. She didn’t watch the show though. It wasn’t her cup of tea.”
But she credits both her mother and aunt for “giving me a great sense of self” in early childhood. “It’s not a parental duty,” she mulls, “but it really helps if you can give your child a deep-rooted confidence.” She suspects that “so many of the mental health issues younger kids are suffering from at the moment might be about not having that absolute 100 per cent support early on. If you can have that, then you’re incredibly blessed. I feel very grateful to my mum because, you know, even when she was ill, I never doubted that she loved me and she believed in me 100 per cent”.
Peake-Jones says that she had just heard her mother had 24 hours to live, back in 2014, when her agent phoned to tell her she had been given a part in Grantchester. “I was able to go in to see my mum and say thank you to her. Because it felt like the part was a parting gift from her, in some way.” Saying goodbye to the Grantchester cast a decade later felt like another bereavement “because it was one of those shows where you really did all feel like family. That doesn’t always happen.”
Since Grantchester finished, Peake-Jones is leaning into the future with “an open mind and an ability to enjoy the moment that I think it’s harder to grasp when it feels like so much is ahead of you and you’re rushing towards a career, children, a family or whatever.” She hopes that those who come to see Invisible Me are uplifted and inspired to do likewise. “Just GET OUT THERE,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be dating, necessarily. But look up, leave the house, be curious.”
Invisible Me is at the Southwark Playhouse, London, until 2 May (southwarkplayhouse.co.uk)
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