Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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were broadly satisfied with what they read, and they gave the green light for the show to go into production.
Gilbert, however, although he found the scripts ‘really very funny indeed’,16 still had one specific reservation he wanted resolved: he did not like the title of the show. It sounded, he said, far too odd and too obscure. ‘John actually gave me the impression that, originally, it had mainly been Ray Butt’s idea,’ Gilbert would later recall. ‘I suspected that John would still have preferred Readies, but he was now standing up strongly for the new name. I just told him that I wondered if Only Fools and Horses, as a title, would really mean that much to the viewers.’17
Sullivan had actually used the phrase ‘Only Fools and Horses’ once before, as the title of an episode of Citizen Smith (the third episode of the third series, broadcast on 27 September 1979), and was now adamant that it was ideal for his new sitcom. He liked the traditional expression ‘only fools and horses work’, and the delicate irony of Del spending all hours of the day engaged in the tough and tricky business of not working.
Once again, the genial but extremely diligent Jimmy Gilbert reacted with scepticism. ‘What does it mean?’ he asked Sullivan. ‘Oh, you know,’ the writer replied, ‘it’s a London saying.’18 In fact, after the doubtful Gilbert (who had heard of a similar saying – ‘Only birds and idiots fly’ – during his days in the RAF) had asked around, it was discovered that the origins of the phrase were contentious: some claimed that it dated back to the late nineteenth century in Australia, where a notoriously unscrupulous Sydney-based racehorse owner called Jim ‘The Grafter’ Kingsley was said to have coined the term, while others argued that it had originated during the same era in American vaudeville and then crossed over the Atlantic via visiting music-hall performers. The phrase had actually first started popping up in British newspapers a little earlier in the Victorian era (The Morning Post, for example, reported in 1857 on a court case in York in which several men, on trial for a local burglary, had been seen buying a great deal of beer in a pub with gold sovereigns, boasting: ‘only fools and horses work’19), and by the middle of the twentieth century it was being cited as a relatively familiar saying.20
None of this did much to reassure the Head of Light Entertainment. The key point, as far as Gilbert was concerned, was that it would probably puzzle quite a few people in Wick.
This, according to John Sullivan, was the Edinburgh-born Gilbert’s litmus test for anything that struck him as in danger of appearing obscure: as some of his family hailed from in and around the northern Scottish town of Wick, and he associated the place with good, wholesome, commonplace British tastes, he supposedly reacted instinctively to anything out of the ordinary by exclaiming, ‘But will they understand it in Wick?’21 Gilbert objected to Only Fools and Horses, therefore, because he doubted that the title would stand up to scrutiny from the good citizens of Wick. Gilbert himself would later clarify his position apropos ‘the myth of Wick’:
I used to have in my office a photograph which I’d taken as a joke. Because we used to go up to Caithness to a farm near Wick, where my wife comes from, and there was a broken-down crofthouse there, which had tinkers in it. And it really did look an absolute wreck. But out through the roof was the biggest television aerial you’ve ever seen! So I took a photograph of it, put it on display in my office, and, if there was ever something proposed which I knew was not going to be universally approved of or understood, I used to show them this photograph and say: ‘He’s paying his licence fee too!’ So that’s how the ‘Will they understand it in Wick’ stories came about. It was just a light-hearted way of getting people to think a little bit harder about their audience.22
Sullivan was sufficiently rattled by this reaction to propose as an alternative title Dip Your Wick, which he knew, as Jimmy Gilbert was a Baptist with a pronounced aversion to smut, would go down as badly as possible. ‘I almost got the sack on that one,’ Sullivan later recalled.23 Among the other, serious suggestions that the team went on to consider, the most popular title was probably Big Brother, but that ended up being rejected because of the possible association with George Orwell’s 1984. Time was now pressing heavily, and Sullivan was due to meet Jimmy Gilbert and John Howard Davies at the start of the following week to agree on a definitive title, so he spent the weekend trying hard to come up with something that sounded right to him as well as right for them.
He typed and Tipp-Exed but still ended up drawing a blank. Some invaluable advice arrived shortly before the meeting from Gareth Gwenlan, another experienced executive producer in the BBC’s Comedy department, who had heard of the Only Fools idea and was eager to offer, discreetly, his support. ‘I told him to say he wanted to use [Only Fools and Horses as the title],’ Gwenlan would recall, ‘and they would need to think of something else if they didn’t like it.’24
It worked. Sullivan sat down, shrugged his shoulders, said his mind was a blank and passed the buck across to Gilbert and Davies. The two executives exchanged glances, somewhat anxiously, and realised that neither had anything constructive to say, so they then said to Sullivan: ‘OK, you can have it.’ After several weeks of haggling, therefore, the team went back to the future: the show was going to be called Only Fools and Horses after all.
The last obstacle had been overcome. Everyone was now committed to pushing the project on.
The sense of relief, mixed with excitement, was immense. After suffering the crushing disappointment of seeing Over the Moon cancelled at such a late stage in the planning process, John Sullivan and Ray Butt could now celebrate the fact that a new sitcom was about to be created. The next stage, however, would be crucial: they would have to ensure that it was properly cast.
CHAPTER THREE
If You Want The Best ’Uns . . .
Très bien ensemble.
The most promising of sitcoms can be compromised at the casting stage. The wrong actor in the right role (or the right one in the wrong role) will ruin its prospects of realising long-running success.
What makes the casting process so exceptionally hazardous is the knowledge that some of the best sitcoms in British television history, overseen by some of the shrewdest producers, only stumbled on the ideal actors after the supposed first (and sometimes second and even third) choices had dropped out of contention. In the case of Dad’s Army, for example, Arthur Lowe only came to be offered the chance to portray Captain Mainwaring after first Thorley Walters and then Jon Pertwee had opted not to take on the part, while Warren Mitchell only won the role of Alf Garnett after Peter Sellers, Leo McKern and Lionel Jeffries had passed on the part.1 Good judgement is essential, but history teaches those who cast such shows that one also needs rather more than one’s fair share of good luck.
Ray Butt, in this sense, was facing a formidable challenge – and he knew it. As the man now appointed to produce Only Fools and Horses, he was still, by the very high standards of the BBC, a relatively inexperienced figure, so the pressure was on for him to gauge not only quickly but also correctly which of the many risks would be worth running. He was, nonetheless, very confident about his ability to prove himself as a senior programme-maker. Having worked under the likes of such masterful producers as David Croft (for Are You Being Served?) and Dennis Main Wilson (for Citizen Smith), he believed that he had received an excellent education and now, in the late spring of 1981, felt ready and eager to shape a sitcom all on his own.
Butt, however, was not the only person who expected to contribute to the casting process. Apart from the writer, John Sullivan (who had been consulted about such matters by Main Wilson during the planning for Citizen Smith, and now expected to be so again), some of Butt’s bosses were also determined to have their say.
It was fairly conventional for certain executives at the BBC to get themselves involved in matters of casting – whether or not their input was expressly requested. This was not merely because of anxiety about how the process was evolving, but also, more pertinently, because many of the key figures high up at the BBC in those days were people who