Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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also remembered a boy in his class at school who later ‘went round acting like he was Einstein’ because he had just passed two GCEs. This undying pride in a couple of humble O levels thus became the foundation of Rodney’s own chronically friable amour-propre.
In order to tie this odd couple more closely together emotionally, Sullivan came up with the more detailed ‘back story’ that their father had deserted them a long time ago and their mother had died when Rodney was aged just three, leaving Del to act partly as older brother and partly as a surrogate parent. Sullivan then added an older, semi-detached observer to the mix: Grandad. The older character provided a view of life that stretched from the end of the First World War, rooting the younger Trotters and taking the edge off the vicissitudes of their lives with his stoical ‘seen-it-all’ armchair view.
The next step, as he developed the potential sitcom, was to invest this trio with their own distinctively, and believably, dynamic relationship. He not only had to draw them together; he also, crucially, had to find a reason to keep them together.
Sullivan proceeded, therefore, by making sure that each figure kept bouncing off the others: Del had been forced to grow up quickly – probably too fast – and his responsible side was tempered with boyish enthusiasms and ambitions; Rodney was young but socially aware, matching himself against his older brother and finding his own way within Del’s waning parental authority. One had to feel obliged to take notice of the other. Grandad, meanwhile, was there as the one who would keep the other two feeling young while providing them with a sense – albeit unreliable – of historical perspective. Combined, the three ages gave the situation a sense of balance.
Preparing to record his initial impressions on paper, however, the writer struggled for a while to conjure up his pilot script. ‘I don’t look forward to that first day when you sit down,’ he would explain. ‘“We’re off!” That’s the worst day of the lot.’ He thus had to find unconventional ways to make the project progress: ‘That idea of just “Page 1” is a killer, and I advise everyone I ever talk to who wants to write, if you start on Page 1 and it’s not working, well, go to Page 30. Start anywhere. Just start, start getting a flavour, start getting a taste of the thing for yourself.’12
Easing himself slowly into this fresh comic world, therefore, he accumulated the corroborative details: various biographical notes were composed about the late mother and the absent father; Del Boy’s formal full name was recorded as ‘Derek Edward Trotter’, and Rodney’s was ‘Rodney Charlton Trotter’ (the middle name coming from his mother’s love of Charlton Athletic FC); Grandad was provided with an eventful past with plenty of potential for rambling anecdotes; the humble Peckham tower block was awarded the topically worthy name of ‘Nelson Mandela House’, given twenty-six levels, and the Trotters were installed in a tiny flat on the twelfth floor; their living room was decorated with cheap and cheerful wallpaper, an assortment of tacky bric-à-brac and boxes of dodgy merchandise; the title coined for their unofficial and unregistered company was ‘Trotters Independent Traders’; and everyone was given a vocabulary rich in contemporary Cockney slang. There were also three basic places planned for where these characters would most often move about and interact: the flat, the pub and the market.
Sullivan also felt certain that he wanted Del Boy, in particular, to embody the strangely ebullient mood that some members of Britain’s lumpenproletariat, in spite of the many widespread social and economic problems, were now exhibiting. ‘In London, at least,’ he would later explain, ‘there was this incredible tidal wave of confidence for the future, and I wanted to write about it, because no one at the BBC or on TV was writing about it then.’13 This defiantly upbeat spirit, in short, would supply the sitcom with its heartbeat: no matter how bleak or shambolic the circumstances might be, Del would always remain convinced that, ‘This time next year, we’ll be millionaires.’
With some of the background now settled, Sullivan’s attention moved on to the foreground. Action had to happen. The important thing was that it had to happen primarily due to the nature of the characters rather than purely through the power of the plot; viewers had to keep coming back mainly because of the comic potential they could see in the key personalities. Del had to be pushing and pulling, Rodney had to be pausing and pondering, and Grandad, sitting lazily in the middle, had to be equally unconcerned and unconvinced by either side’s position. Any particular storyline that followed would thus proceed from strong personalities and plausible problems rather than anything laboured and contrived.
The more that Sullivan contemplated the kind of schemes and scams that this trio might pursue, the more promising the project seemed. As he began to write the first few scenes and exchanges of dialogue, he already felt convinced that he could conjure up something that would strike an audience as not only funny but also engagingly real.
A couple of weeks after that initial conversation in the pub, therefore, it was an optimistic John Sullivan who turned up at Ray Butt’s office at Television Centre with a completed draft script for the new sitcom whose working title had been Readies (‘People like Del never dealt in cheques or credit cards; everything had to be ready cash, so the title seemed to be appropriate’14) but had now been given the more unusual and hence eye-catching name of Only Fools and Horses (a phrase that Sullivan felt captured Del Boy’s outlook on life very neatly). Butt read it, liked it and sent it on to the BBC’s then-Head of Comedy, John Howard Davies.
Davies (a tough, imaginative and very experienced programme-maker who had produced and/or directed such hugely successful comedy shows as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Goodies, Steptoe and Son, The Good Life and, most notably, Fawlty Towers before rising up the ranks as an executive) read it, quite liked it, but sent back a memo saying that he doubted that the script would work as an opening episode. In spite of his misgivings, however, Davies saw enough potential in the basic idea to go ahead and commission enough scripts for a full series, although there was still no firm guarantee at this stage that the project would end up on the screen.
Davies’s decision might have had something to do with the fact that, as Sullivan was still under contract, it made sense to at least keep him working for his wages. More positively, however, Davies was also shrewd enough to note that there were some encouraging signs that, all of a sudden, Sullivan had arrived with the right idea at the right time.
In terms of popular music, at least, London’s working-class themes and scenes had not received so much telling attention since the era of The Kinks in the late 1960s. Upminster’s Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the Deptford-based band Squeeze and Camden Town’s Madness had all come to prominence at the end of the 1970s with a succession of clever, playful and colourful songs about local characters and their culture (including Dury’s Essex-born ‘Billericay Dickie’, who ‘ain’t an effing thicky’; self-styled Jack the Lad ‘Clever Trevor’, who protests that ‘things have got read into what I never said till me mouth becomes me head which ain’t not all that clever’; and – in ‘This is What We Find’ – DIY expert Harold Hill, who ‘Came home to find another gentleman’s kippers in the grill/So he sanded off his winkle with his Black & Decker drill’15). The self-styled ‘rockney’ music of Chas & Dave was another recent phenomenon, with such hits as ‘Gertcha’ and ‘Rabbit’ bringing other old Cockney phrases back into fashion. After years of American-accented preoccupations and pronunciations, therefore, a growing number of British songwriters and performers were looking to London for inspiration.
More pointedly, as far as any proposed television project was concerned, there was also a new show on ITV that featured a working-class London milieu and was beginning to build a large and loyal audience: a comedy–drama written by Leon Griffiths called Minder. First broadcast in the autumn of 1979, Minder followed the fortunes of Arthur Daley, a dapper but devious ‘importer–exporter’, and Terry McCann, his young and dimmer-witted bodyguard and sidekick, as they pursued a variety of get-rich-quick schemes in a colourful black-market environment. Its growing popularity augured well for a sitcom that promised to tap into the same kind of contemporary context.
Within a matter of a few more weeks, Sullivan had written the rest of the episodes and completed the series, and Butt took them to the BBC. John Howard Davies