I read a heap of H E Bates books, including this series, before the screen version was made. Mostly they were pre-war stories with an English rural setting. Once I'd read one I was hooked and his name went in my "book book" which I carried on my treks around the second hand book shops. They were hard to find even when there were a lot of shops in the area. This was pre-internet days. The Larkin series were post war. What an inspired bit of casting to have 'Del Boy' David Jason as Pop Larkin, in fact the entire casting was "perfick" as Pop would say, eg Pam Ferris as Ma, ànd Moray Watson as the Brigadier. It's been a good long while since I watched it and it's so fresh and entertaining.
