Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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was a source of some reassurance for Sullivan, but it did little to dispel the feeling that his influence on the project as a whole was still not as strong as it could, and should, have been.
One particular cause of his frustration was the show’s opening theme tune. Sullivan had always been a keen music fan – ‘As a kid, I was always writing songs’10 – and, when Dennis Main Wilson had encouraged him to write ‘The Glorious Day’ for Robert Lindsay to sing at the start of Citizen Smith, he had snapped at the chance. When it came to making Only Fools and Horses, therefore, Sullivan came up with a new song that he thought would be ideal:
Stick a pony in me pocket
I’ll fetch the suitcase from the van
Cos if you want the best ’uns
And you don’t ask questions
Then, brother, I’m your man.
Where it all comes from is a mystery
It’s like the changing of the seasons
And the tides of the sea
But here’s the one what’s driving me berserk
Why do only fools and horses work?11
The problem was that no one else – and certainly not the producer – seemed to agree about the song’s appeal. ‘Ray Butt didn’t particularly like it,’12 Sullivan later complained.
It was a great disappointment for the writer, therefore, when Butt decided instead to ask the doyen of television theme tune composers, Ronnie Hazlehurst, to come up with something more suitable for Only Fools. Having either written or arranged the music for such sitcoms as The Likely Lads, Not in Front of the Children, Are You Being Served?, I Didn’t Know You Cared, Last of the Summer Wine, The Other One, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Butterflies, Yes Minister and To the Manor Born, as well as collaborated with John Sullivan on Citizen Smith, he seemed the obvious choice to create a theme for this new show, but his finished effort – a ‘jolly’ tune featuring a swooping pub piano, a hyperactive bass guitar and jaunty saxophones – struck many who first heard it as something more appropriate for a cheap ITV game show than a carefully crafted BBC sitcom. ‘John hated it,’ Ray Butt later admitted. ‘I hated it. It just wasn’t right.’13 Unfortunately, however, Butt was still incapacitated at the time with his slipped disc, and, with time fast running out, there seemed no option but to go with what they had.
More positively, the music was set to be accompanied by an opening title sequence created by the talented Peter Clayton, whom Butt had hired as his graphic designer. After discussing the nature of the sitcom with his producer, Clayton had proceeded to go out on to the London streets and take pictures of those places that he felt were most evocative of the environment envisaged for the Trotters: a busy market, the inside of a pub, a large second-hand car lot, a scruffy-looking wine bar and a couple of run-down tower blocks. He then devised an animated sequence that saw each actor’s name arrive on a piece of paper shaped like a bank note, which flapped on, peeled back and flew off the screen, symbolising the vicissitudes of the fly-pitcher’s existence, getting hold of cash only to see it slip swiftly away again. In order to introduce each character’s distinctive personality as quickly as possible, Clayton took some stills of Del Boy (smiling cockily while waving around a wad of cash), Rodney (pulling out his empty pockets and looking puzzled) and Grandad (sitting down munching idly on a pie), added an establishing shot of the rust-ridden Reliant Regal parked outside the building, and then, in the painstaking way that was necessary in those pre-computer graphics days, linked them all together frame by frame via a rostrum camera.
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