The sitcom received negative reviews in the newspapers, and Peter Davison acknowledged that it was perhaps instrumental in his fall from the limelight during the 1990s. In his 2016 autobiography "Is There Life Outside The Box?", Davison confessed:
"If I had to pinpoint a job that sent me spiralling into my dark decade, it might be Fiddlers Three, a sitcom for Yorkshire Television written by Eric Chappell. It was funny enough, but somewhat similar, I discovered later, to his series The Squirrels, made ten years before. [...] The lure of Fiddlers Three was the money which I desperately needed at that moment. We were living unhappily in an eight-bedroom riverside house with mortgage debt and interest on unpaid tax rising by the day. [...] I'm probably being slightly unfair to Fiddlers Three. We had a very good cast, Paula Wilcox played my wife, Charles Kay was my boss, and Tyler Butterworth and Peter Blake my office rivals, and if you judge a job by how much fun you have making it, Fiddlers would be right up there."
"If I had to pinpoint a job that sent me spiralling into my dark decade, it might be Fiddlers Three, a sitcom for Yorkshire Television written by Eric Chappell. It was funny enough, but somewhat similar, I discovered later, to his series The Squirrels, made ten years before. [...] The lure of Fiddlers Three was the money which I desperately needed at that moment. We were living unhappily in an eight-bedroom riverside house with mortgage debt and interest on unpaid tax rising by the day. [...] I'm probably being slightly unfair to Fiddlers Three. We had a very good cast, Paula Wilcox played my wife, Charles Kay was my boss, and Tyler Butterworth and Peter Blake my office rivals, and if you judge a job by how much fun you have making it, Fiddlers would be right up there."
Although Peter Davison greatly enjoyed making the series and socialised with the cast on a regular basis, he stated in his 2016 autobiography that he thought that co-star Peter Blake had a slight resentment towards him.
Davison observed: "[...] I sensed an antagonism between us, as if he really couldn't understand why I was starring in the series. I couldn't blame him for that. I had gone from job to job throughout the eighties, never finishing one without knowing what I was doing next, and appearing in at least two, sometimes three, series a year. It would have made me sick had I not been the one doing it. There was one week, I was reliably informed, when I was on television, in one programme or another, every day. I'm surprised there wasn't a contract out on me."
Davison observed: "[...] I sensed an antagonism between us, as if he really couldn't understand why I was starring in the series. I couldn't blame him for that. I had gone from job to job throughout the eighties, never finishing one without knowing what I was doing next, and appearing in at least two, sometimes three, series a year. It would have made me sick had I not been the one doing it. There was one week, I was reliably informed, when I was on television, in one programme or another, every day. I'm surprised there wasn't a contract out on me."
Fiddlers Three averaged at 44th place in the charts with 7.26 million viewers. The ratings and chart position for each individual episode are under their respective entries.
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