As Time Goes By Is Clocking Off:
Interview with Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer

The hours are counting down for BBC One's popular romantic comedy As Time Goes By. After clocking up 64 episodes over a decade, the very last series winds up on Sunday 4 August - but there's a special, post-script programme in the future timetable to keep fans both here and across the Atlantic ticking over.

Its stars, Dame Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer, who play reunited - and now married - wartime sweethearts Jean Pargeter and Lionel Hardcastle, take a break from rehearsal to share their feelings with Doreen Brooks as the curtain falls on Bob Larbey's captivating comedy.

Stephen Fry famously declared that he was proud to share a land mass with her and that "railings should be built around her so that all may admire her in an orderly and respectful fashion" - but Oscar-winning actress Dame Judi Dench erects no barriers as she contemplates the end of an era.

"It's sad, but I think that probably it's time," she says candidly, her white trousers and top and feathery cap of silver hair emphasising her piercing blue eyes. "I only go by the fact that the last episode we did, somebody said to me, 'Wasn't the dog good and where did you get your luggage from?' I thought, oh well, it's time we packed this up now!" she laughs. "But it will be sad not working together."

Dame Judi's citrus-sharp observations as Jean, served up with Geoffrey Palmer's dry wit as Lionel, have provided an irresistible feast for viewers, and Geoffrey remains sanguine about continuing his off-screen friendship with his co-star, with whom he also starred in Mrs Brown. He played Private Secretary Henry Ponsonby to her Queen Victoria, which earned her a Golden Globe and a first Oscar nomination.

"I've been asked if we'll see each other again and I'm sure we will - we shall go out and have raucous lunches," he says decisively. But, in response to Dame Judi's wondering if an amalgam of the team will stay in touch, he isn't quite so optimistic.

"You kind of know that will never happen," he declares. "In this business, you can work with people and then never work with them again, so there's a great chance that we won't work with a lot of the crew again, whom we've been very close to for 10 years and they're lovely people. That, I think, is the over-riding sadness, apart from the fact that something that has been very enjoyable is coming to an end."

As Time Goes By, produced and directed by Sydney Lotterby, has a huge following, both in the UK and in America, where fan club websites dedicated to the "Britcom" have proliferated at an astounding rate. Recently, 65 fans, aged from 16 to 87, jetted across the Atlantic from the USA and Canada especially for one of the recordings at BBC Television Centre in London.

"It's surprised everyone that it has grown and grown and grown in its appeal in the States," says Geoffrey. "I imagine it's the essential Englishness of it."

"And I think it's quite quaint to them," adds Dame Judi. "The two main characters in it aren't young and maybe that's got something to do with it, too. You don't often get a series about people who are after 50, shall we say."

The series is also one whose content will never make a maiden aunt suffer a fit of the vapours.

"Nobody says anything nasty, nobody swears," explains Geoffrey. "That, to middle 9 England or whatever, does have a great appeal, I think."

Geoffrey is a fan of Men Behaving Badly, which he maintains is "one of the great situation comedies, but admits: "A number of people who I would consider to be my friends said it was revolting, with people always getting drunk and being sick, although I wondered why they couldn't see through that to what it was about. But As Time Goes By doesn't do that, so it appeals to kind of mainstream audiences, which may make it sound deeply boring.

"There's also the fact that it's not about the young. I'm old enough to remember when there was no such thing as 'teen culture'. My generation grew up and nobody took any notice of young people. People were children and then they grew up - there was no teen market or anything like that," he says, warming to his theme.

"People who wrote songs - George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern - they didn't write songs for kids. They wrote songs for grown-ups who were falling in love. I think, for older people, it's a huge relief that it isn't about 20-year-olds or 18-year-olds," declares the genial actor.

It's now impossible to imagine anyone other than Dame Judi and Geoffrey in the roles of Jean and Lionel, which cloak them like a second skin. But neither had any inkling that the series would take such a limpet-style grip on viewers.

"I don't think you ever know," reflects Dame Judi, who last year received Bafta's highest accolade of an Academy Fellowship at a star-studded tribute to honour a career which has spanned more than 40 years. "You don't know that anything is going to be a success, ever, whatever your feelings are.You just react to whether you want to play the part or whether you want to work with so-and-so.You just instinctively know about whether it's a part that you think you could bring anything to, or interpret in some kind of way."

In the beginning, both Geoffrey and Sydney had doubts about pinning the series on such a seemingly-fragile idea as a missing letter separating two sweethearts for almost four decades. Then Bob Larbey, who had written the gentle comedy A Fine Romance, starring Dame Judi and her late husband, Michael Williams, came on board and solved the problem with one incisive stroke.

Geoffrey explains: "There was a big gestation period and then Bob made wonderful suggestions. In an early planning meeting, we couldn't get over the idea that the basis of the thing was that, 38 years before, I'd gone off to Korea and sent a letter and it didn't get there. Syd and I both said, come on, you've got to explain this - you can't base something on that dodgy premise. And Bob said, no, you don't explain it at all - the letter simply went astray."

Vital input from Sydney helped to breathe life into the character of Lionel.

"He said early on that Lionel was very bland," recalls Geoffrey. "So he said, use the fact that he's kind of colonial and feels everything's wrong in the old country now. He's been on his own as a man for most of his life, with black servants. Make him a bit crotchety, a bit intolerant, a bit suspicious."

Dame Judi's portrayal of the often-acerbic Jean is much loved by viewers, but she is neither for nor against her character.

"I don't like or dislike anything about characters," she explains. "I just try and behave in the way that the writer requires her to behave. I'm often asked if she's like me - no, she's not at all like me. I'm very different from her. I just happen to be playing her and I don't wear a wig so I look entirely like myself. But I'm not like her and I wasn't like my character in A Fine Romance; no more was Michael, no more is Geoffrey like Lionel. So I don't decide about liking or disliking. I just try and have the foibles of the character."

The duo have a cache of happy memories from their small-screen relationship.

"I remember that we've laughed a huge amount - all the filming has been huge fun," says Dame Judi. "We've had a couple of weddings, we've acted with animals - although I don't think we've acted with children - and we've had such a good time. Then there are all the things that have gone wrong. Geoffrey is right when he says I make it up as I go along!"

"Have I said that?" interjects her co-star with a grin.

It's well documented that Dame Judi doesn't like to watch herself on screen, whether it be large or small, and she adds: "I'm very bad at remembering what's happened to us because I think I've only seen about three of them."

Geoffrey recalls: "There's a great feeling of mutual trust and dependence - nobody's trying to carve you up."

And he pays tribute to his co-star, of whom Iris and Titanic star Kate Winslet said: "I would work with Judi if I had to be a tea lady hovering in the back of frame."

"Working with Judi is extraordinary because she doesn't ["learn her lines!" interrupts James Bond's boss with lightning speed] behave like one of our most distinguished actresses," continues Geoffrey. "She never pulls rank or anything like that - some would. And she never, as an actress, does anything but what is right for the scene. It's very easy, consciously or unconsciously, not to deliver a line too well so that it will mess up your line. She is extraordinary for doing what serves the author, totally."

"It's wonderful to hear - it's entirely from ignorance on my part," is Dame Judi's modest response.

"No, it's not," retorts Geoffrey, "especially with the stresses of situation comedy, which are enormous."

The star of Iris and The Shipping News - during filming of which Kevin Spacey accused his distinguished colleague of cheating at ping-pong, but admitted he was "absolutely in love with her" - is taking a break when filming finishes for this final series. But she's starring again as M, the female head of the British secret service, in the new Bond movie Die Another Day and as Lady Bracknell in a new film of Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest. It's already easy to imagine the imperious hauteur in her throaty voice as she delivers the immortal phrase: "A handbag?"

Later this year, theatre goers can see her in David Hare's new play, The Breath Of Life. It was in Hare's Amy's View that she conquered Broadway, winning a Tony Award.

Geoffrey, who has a sizeable tranche of radio work lined up, quips of his future plans: "I have one long break with occasional bits of work, which is the way I want it."

Viewers will soon have a chance to turn back the hands of time as a special programme, You Must Remember This…, sees Jean and Lionel recalling their decade together.

Geoffrey muses that time really has gone by quickly. "I remember thinking originally that we'd better do this soon, otherwise one had the feeling - not from Judi's point of view, but from mine," he adds chivalrously "- that if there were anything to do with romance, it would become rather obscene if I got any older. And I never thought we'd go on till I'm as old as I am now and maybe it is obscene. But thank God we only just lie in bed together, there's no physical contact. We wouldn't want to make the great British public sick in front of their televisions."

He recalls how, when the pair were due to meet for lunch at l'Escargot to discuss the series, Sydney wondered how to address this grande dame of British theatre, with "your grace" or "your dameship" being proffered. "I think," Geoffrey told him laconically, "we probably call her Judi."

"Anyway," he says now, "we had a jolly good lunch and shared a taxi afterwards and I was frightfully over-excited!" "And I was frightfully aflutter because dropping you at Marylebone Station was very Brief Encounter," says Dame Judi.

For As Time Goes By fans, the encounter of the last decade has been all too brief.