Nicholas Lyndhurst: 'The golden age of television is over' The actor Nicholas Lyndhurst has issued a damning verdict on the state of the television industry, saying the "golden age" of broadcasting is over. The 52-year-old, best known for playing Rodney Trotter in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, said executives were no longer prepared to invest in "quality" shows and gauged all programmes in terms of the standard set by talent competitions, such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. In an interview with The Telegraph he said, "I think we're now conditioned to the fact that if a show hasn't got Simon Cowell in it, it's not good. Or if you're not in the gossip columns, you don't exist. I don't think it's any great surprise that channels like UK Gold and Yesterday are being watched more avidly now than they were when they started up because they're showing all the quality shows - that's what people want to watch. Of course there are still some nuggets out there on TV but there aren't as many as there used to be. It used to be there'd be something every night of fantastic quality, be it a sitcom, a drama or current affairs. Now it's maybe once a week, which is a shame. The golden age has gone. Lyndhurst, who this week joins the cast of long-running BBC One drama New Tricks, said the problem was one of priorities. "They say [making good programmes] costs too much money," he said. I don't know that it does. I think we could cut down on some staffing levels as well at management level. Only Fools and Horses, which first hit television screens in 1981 and ran for seven series, is one of Britain's best-loved sitcoms. A Christmas special in 1996 attracted 24.4m viewers, the country's biggest ever audience. In the interview, which appears in The Telegraph on Wednesday, Lyndhurst also admits he used to walk around his village when Only Fools and Horses was on and peer through neighbours' curtains to make sure they were watching. "I never got caught," he said.