Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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real food.
While De Gaye was designing the costumes, Pauline Cox was planning the make-up. A very experienced BBC make-up artist, with a track record that included programmes ranging from The Morecambe & Wise Show to the 1978 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, she did not take long to sketch out her visions of the key characters.
She wanted Del to sport the kind of long sideburns that seemed to suggest a man who smelt of Brut aftershave and cheap hair oil, but David Jason, once again, proved resistant to the idea, so she decided instead to settle for giving the character a slight but shiny-looking quiff. Having worked with Nicholas Lyndhurst before on Butterflies, she knew him well and was quick to find the right pasty powdering for Rodney’s callow face. Lennard Pearce, though sixty-six, needed to look a little older and much coarser, so Cox drew some thin red spider veins on his cheeks to lend him a weather-beaten appearance, and put greasepaint under his eyes to resemble pouchy bags.
As the characters thus came into sight, so, too, did the actual sets. Tony Snoaden was the production designer who was piecing together the various places in Peckham. His research had begun when he went with Ray Butt to view a row of three more-or-less identical twenty-storey tower blocks near Kew Bridge in south-west London, and another, even scruffier, set just off Bollo Bridge Road, north Acton, in the north-west of the city. Butt said that these were the kind of ugly constructions he thought would serve as models for Nelson Mandela House, and so, after studying the exteriors, they went inside one of the empty apartments and Snoaden made some notes. The tower block that would be shown at the start of each episode was one from north Acton.
When it came to creating the set for the Trotters’ flat, he paid close attention to John Sullivan’s existing scripts, which included such unusually specific descriptions as the following:
The room should reflect their style of business. Nothing is permanent. The settee and two armchairs are from three separate suites as the other pieces were used as make-weights in various other swaps. There are three TV sets; one colour, one black and white, and one with its back off awaiting repair. There are a couple of stereo music centres standing one on top of the other. Various video games, talking chess games, etc., litter the room. Their phone is one of the ornate 1920s type with separate ear-piece on an alabaster base. The décor is clean but gaudy. Dozens of clashing patterns. It should look like the start of a bad trip.4
Acting on such suggestions, Snoaden kept firmly in mind the knowledge that the family had no real taste at all, so he went for the most vulgar and idiosyncratic décor that he and his colleague Chris Ferriday (the BBC’s Props Manager) could find. He covered the walls in a melancholic shade of beige paper and carpeted the floor in what resembled a mixture of mud, sugar and honey, and, as he recognised that this was supposed to be an all-male environment, filled the scruffy living room with an incoherent selection of unlikely objects, including old car wheels, ice buckets, reproduction paintings, a Pirelli calendar, forgotten holiday souvenirs, an ugly wrought-iron guitar, piles of yellowing newspapers and creased magazines, a few empty beer bottles and a wide variety of unsold items of stock. There also had to be a large and diverse range of tables, because the Trotters were the type who were prepared to sell everything – even the table on which they ate their meals.
The initial inspiration for that other locus of activity, The Nag’s Head, came from a pub near Chapel Market in Islington called The Alma, which Snoaden spotted during the early days of visiting filming locations.5 The traditional-looking Victorian frontage seemed ideal, and, once inside, looking at the rather dull and downbeat drinking areas, he realised that ‘the layout was almost like a studio set, which meant I could virtually copy the actual layout’.6
Arguably the most important physical item of all – the battered Reliant Regal Supervan III – was something insisted upon by John Sullivan. It was to be Del Boy’s equivalent of Pinocchio’s nose: the taller the tales that he told, the smaller this silly vehicle would seem. No matter how many times he would boast about how, this time next year, he and his family would be millionaires, they would all still have to squeeze back into the truth of the situation: that tiny yellow van. The make was arrived at through a quick process of elimination: the more sporty options were rejected in favour of a far more functional vehicle with enough space to carry the Trotters’ miscellaneous merchandise, and the fact that it was a three-wheeler struck Sullivan as symbolic of the Trotters’ incomplete lives – even their van had something missing. The ‘New York–Paris–Peckham’ slogan on the side of the van was inspired by the ‘New York–London–Paris’ line on a packet of Dunhill cigarettes, and would serve as another unwitting reminder of just how little the business has really achieved.
Chris Ferriday found the right model, in the right stage of deterioration, at a specialist prop vehicle supplier called Action Cars in Harrow in Middlesex. The BBC rented it for the first series, but would go on to hire several more because their chassis kept giving out and none of them were worth repairing.
Surveying all of these actions and initiatives as each week went by, Ray Butt was very pleased with how the visual aspect was developing, but there were still other matters to which he needed to attend. The sitcom’s characters and structures needed to be shot for the screen, so more support was needed both on the studio floor and up in the production gallery.
He was assisted here, as with many other aspects of the process, by his production manager, Janet Bone. An old colleague from Citizen Smith, Bone was busy scouting for suitable location sites as well as supervising the schedule, but she also helped Butt assemble the rest of his technical staff.
The very reliable and experienced Bill Matthews was brought in as cameraman (he had previously worked on such sitcoms as The Liver Birds), two more former members of Bone and Butt’s Citizen Smith crew, Dennis Panchen and Don Babbage, were installed as sound recordist and lighting director respectively, and John Jarvis (whose credits included a period working on The Goodies) was enlisted as film editor. Their immediate task was to spend the next few weeks filming all of the exterior scenes required for the entire series, before returning to Television Centre to record the studio sessions.
Ray Butt was meant to have taken control of the actual direction himself, but he hurt his back (slipping a disc) just after location shooting began early on in May and was rushed off for what would prove to be a profoundly frustrating three-week stay in Charing Cross Hospital. At the very last moment, therefore, a replacement needed to be found. Gareth Gwenlan stepped in to oversee the first day’s schedule, but, as a busy figure elsewhere within the BBC, he was unavailable to continue (although he would carry on helping out with the production as a whole), so John Howard Davies contacted Martin Shardlow to take over the directorial duties for the remainder of the location shooting and then the studio recordings.
Shardlow was in the process of setting up for another project, so he was somewhat startled to find himself uprooted and moved on so suddenly. When all of the scripts and the location schedule were sent to him in his office at Television Centre, he had a brief amount of time to read and assess them, used a few of Janet Bone’s photographs to complete a very basic shooting script, and then found himself straight out on the streets filming the relevant scenes. Once the combination of shock and disorientation had faded, Shardlow started to enjoy the experience, relishing the opportunity to play such a major part in what soon came to seem like a thoroughly promising project. ‘After a bit,’ he would recall, ‘Ray was able to turn up for the technical runs, and things like that, but on the whole he left it to me.’7
John Sullivan, meanwhile, was watching much of this activity from a greater distance than he would, ideally, have desired. ‘Dennis Main Wilson was all for [me playing an active role in the production process],’ he would later remark. ‘He was all for me coming to editing and everything, being heavily involved, and being on filming, and he talked to me an awful lot. Ray Butt was less so. He was protecting his area more.’8
Sullivan did at least know that, even in absentia, Martin Shardlow would still be properly apprised of his opinions as to how each episode should be shot, because, very unusually, those opinions were already included in all of the scripts. ‘When I joined the BBC,’ the writer explained, ‘I never knew how to lay a script out; I didn’t know what