Open All Hours Open All Hours Open All Hours is a British television sitcom created and written by Roy Clarke for the BBC. It ran for 26 episodes in four series, which premiered in 1976, 1981, 1982 and 1985. The programme developed from a television pilot broadcast in Ronnie Barker's comedy anthology series, "Seven of One" (1973). "Open All Hours" ranked eighth in the 2004 Britain's Best Sitcom poll. A sequel, entitled "Still Open All Hours", was created in 2013. The setting is a small grocer's shop in Balby, a suburb of Doncaster in South Yorkshire. The owner, Arkwright (Ronnie Barker), is a
Ronnie Barker best light entertainment performance four times, among other awards, and received an OBE in 1978. Later television sitcoms such as "The Magnificent Evans" and "Clarence" were less successful and he retired in December 1987. The following year, he opened an antiques shop with his wife, Joy. After 1999, he appeared in smaller, non-comic roles in films. He died of heart failure on 3 October 2005, aged 76. Barker was born on 25 September 1929 at 70, Garfield Street, Bedford, Bedfordshire, the only son of Leonard William (inexplicably, but always, known as "Tim") Barker and Edith Eleanor (née Carter; known as