Larry Lamb lets slip return for Art Detectives series two
Larry Lamb has revealed he will reprise his role as art forger Ron in the second series of U+Drama’s Art Detectives, following the show’s strong audience response after its debut in October 2025.
Larry Lamb will return in the second series of Art Detectives later this year.
In series one of the compelling U+Drama crime show, the 78-year-old actor played Ron, a "highly-rated" forger of paintings, alongside his son, Mick Palmer (Stephen Moyer), who is a Metropolitan Police detective in the Heritage Crime Unit solving murders linked to stolen art, forgeries and treasure.
Appearing on the latest episode of the Beyond the Title podcast, he told host Josh Barry: "That's coming back in, I think, the latter part of the year."
Larry loved the concept of Art Detectives.
He said: "My son in the story, the central character, he got to know about art because he'd spent a lot of his younger years around his dad, the character I play.
"And the character I play is a really, really highly-rated forger of paintings. So the boy is on the other side of the law.
"The father's been hiding away over the years, and he comes back into the son's life."
Larry added: "It's a good, entertaining show. It's a bit of a mystery, and it's a bit of a whodunit. But yeah, it worked really well with audiences, so they're going to go again with it."
As well as Larry and Stephen, Art Detectives - of which the first six-part series aired in October 2025 - also starred Nina Singh (DC Shazia Malik).
Another TV show credit Larry has to his name is the beloved BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey.
The comedy series - in which he played Mick Shipman, the dad of Gavin Shipman (Mathew Horne), a Billericay, Essex, resident who falls in love with Barry Island, Wales' Stacey West (Joanna Page) - ended on Christmas Day 2024 after a 17-year run.
The finale raked in over 20 million viewers, and the show is still constantly being repeated and streamed.
And Larry believes the secret to Gavin and Stacey's success is that the viewers feel as though they are part of the Shipman clan, and pals with Gavin, Stacey, Neil 'Smithy' Smith (James Corden), and Vanessa 'Nessa' Jenkins (Ruth Jones).
Discussing why he thinks the show is so popular, Larry said: "It’s because it’s all about love.
"When Ruth and James wrote Gavin and Stacey, they created a family that everyone can belong to. Because everybody wants to be part of a big, loving, extended family, and you can belong to this, right?
"And that's what it was, it was totally inclusive, because it wasn't about people who are, you know, who are pretending to be something. There was no pretending there at all.
"It was so carefully put together with all those characters, and people would say, ‘Oh, it always feels like it's real.’ And that's the skill.
"Another one of these totally unknown skills is that people have to put together a cast of people. They think they just get a bunch of actors. But it's about slotting those people to go in it.
"Finding that couple for playing Gavin and Stacey, who had to fall in love on camera, and you had to believe them falling in love. And if you didn't believe them, there was no story there.
"Well, finding those two people who didn't know each other, never been in a room together, and get them together, and then looking at them thinking, ‘Yep, that's it, we've got Gavin and Stacey there.’ That’s extraordinary.
"They just got it right because they are so canny, those two [James and Ruth]."
