Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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. . ‘It couldn’t get no worse’1). With one man gazing up hopefully at the stars and the other one glancing down anxiously at the gutter, Britain’s traditional comic–drama dynamic was re-enacted all over again. ‘We’re fifteen minutes from the West End and fifteen minutes from London,’ declares Rodney brightly from within the confines of their tower block council flat. ‘Yes,’ comes the sardonic reply, ‘and fifteen minutes from the ground.’
The success of the show was, and continues to be, extra-ordinary. It attracted huge audiences during its 22-year run, making it the most-watched British show of two consecutive decades, eventually reaching a peak at 24.3 million – still a record for an episode of a UK sitcom.2 It also won numerous awards, including three ‘Best Comedy Series’ BAFTAs. It was voted ‘Britain’s Best Sitcom’ in a major BBC poll3 and came forty-fifth in the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Television Programmes.4 It has been sold to many countries throughout the world (including Australia, Belgium, Bosnia, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Republic of Ireland, Israel, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Pakistan, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa and Spain) and it continues to inspire spin-off shows and frequent weeks and weekends of repeats on various satellite channels.
What is, if anything, even more extraordinary is the enduring affection that the programme still commands. A remarkable number of people remain eager to watch the old episodes, discuss them, savour them and cherish them. A whole new generation is now discovering them and delighting in them. An older generation is finding new reasons to re-visit and re-view them. Even in a culture that is now, at its broadest and most prosaic, so robotically and neurotically restless and forgetful, there is still a strong fondness for a sitcom that ended, as a series, in 1991, and then reappeared for the last time as an occasional special in 2003. It came as no real surprise, therefore, when a 2008 OnePoll survey found that Only Fools and Horses was the television series that Britons would most like to see return to their screens.5
The sadly premature death of the show’s gifted creator, John Sullivan, on 23 April 2011, dashed such hopes definitively, but also underlined how keenly so many people still care about the greatest of his numerous achievements as a writer. Included among the countless warmly respectful obituaries and encomia about the man himself were many words of praise for Only Fools and Horses in particular. The critic, writer and broadcaster David Quantick, for example, remarked that ‘anyone seeking to write comedy who is even only slightly aware of sitcom’s lineage’ would be well advised to study the show and ‘see how it is done by a master of popular, populist, intelligent and witty comedy’; the BBC’s Creative Director, Alan Yentob, praised the ‘beauty’ of the programme’s scripts and predicted that ‘the Trotter family would provide enjoyment, tears and laughter for generations to come’; and another of Sullivan’s fellow writers, Maurice Gran, said of Only Fools that ‘the richness of characterisation, and indeed the number of vivid characters, leaves most other sitcoms looking sparse and underpopulated’.6
A substantial celebration of this remarkable show, therefore, is something that it richly deserves, but, nonetheless, it needs to be done in the right spirit. Great sitcoms, in this day and age, remain available at the flick of a switch. There is thus no need to retrieve them via an elaborate and painstaking excavation. What is worth attempting, however, is to reach out to those – probably the vast majority – who simply watched the episodes when they first went out and then, when the show finally ended, moved on before the ubiquitous repeats could wear out what had always been most welcome. These are the people who still have an appetite to awaken.
What an appropriate celebration should seek to do, therefore, is to revive the old inclusive enthusiasm for the show. A great comedy programme is something to treasure because it brings so many of us together in pleasure.
Only Fools and Horses is a particularly important comedy show to celebrate, because it not only engaged with us as a nation but also with the sitcom as a genre. While reflecting, and sometimes responding to, our various fashions, follies and foibles, the show also explored and challenged what a sitcom is supposed to be and should strive to achieve. It was, in its own sly little way, a revolutionary show, as well as a very funny one.
The story of this sitcom’s evolution is thus actually a story of real risks and worries and great triumphs and achievements. It is a story of a brilliant team of hugely talented individuals working together incredibly hard to realise a very special dream. It is a story of ordinary viewers finding something on the screen that genuinely impressed, amused and moved them. The endless loop of repeats, well-intended though it is, can sometimes distort or obscure most or even all of this rich and remarkable story. That is why it is worth going back to the beginning, and seeing it unfold all over again through a fresh pair of eyes.
This book, therefore, will aim to remind the broader audience of how it came to fall in love with Only Fools and Horses. The experience of discovering, following and being fascinated with the show will be reanimated by telling the full story of this sitcom’s eventful life, and how it became such a positive and pleasant part of the lives of those who watched it.
CHAPTER ONE
This Time Next Year
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It is September 1980. This time next year . . .
This time next year, a writer called John Sullivan will begin a labour of love, a producer/director called Ray Butt will commence an extraordinary adventure, a trio of actors named David Jason, Nicholas Lyndhurst and Lennard Pearce will take on the roles of their dreams and a brand new sitcom entitled Only Fools and Horses will start to enrich a great comic tradition. Nothing seemed inevitable back in September 1980, but, this time next year, something will arrive on British television that will end up being seen as very special indeed.
In 1980, however, the immediate future, to many British people, seemed bleak. The new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was busy reassuring her monetarist minions that she was most definitely not for turning. After wrongly attributing her implausibly tolerant initial sentiments (‘where there is discord, may we bring harmony . . .’) to the medieval theology of St Francis of Assisi (they actually came from an obscure 1912 French prayer), and wrongly associating her modern amoral economics with the eighteenth-century moral philosophy of Adam Smith (she favoured the free market for its own sake; he favoured it because he believed good and decent people would not abuse it), she proceeded to brand any colleagues who possessed more logic but less blinkered conviction than her as ‘wet’, and set about causing as much discord as seemed politically possible. There were bitter industrial disputes and violent riots, rising inflation and falling factories, and, while two million or so freshly ‘unfettered’ Britons remained miserably unemployed, self-interest was celebrated at the expense of civic virtue. Council tenants were invited to buy their own homes, so even if they were stuck on a low social rung they could at least console themselves with the thought that they now owned a tiny splinter or two of the ladder, and a few individuals who feared being stuck in dead-end jobs began to buy into the dubious entrepreneurial dream of class-free upward mobility, but in any other sense most ordinary working people were left alone to deal with the mounting mood of despondency and desolation.
British comedy failed, for a while, to be of much help. The Prime Minister herself had wasted no time in demonstrating that she had no real sense of humour (even before her election triumph in 1979, when handed a light-hearted line – ‘Keep taking the tablets’ – to mock her Labour rival James Callaghan’s likening of himself to Moses, she attempted to ‘improve’ the joke by saying ‘Keep taking the pills’ instead1), and many in the comedy industry seemed to respond to such tin-eared forays into funny business by losing their own invaluable talent to amuse.
While most of the old bow-tied brigade now appeared more energised by the prospect of playing a round of golf than they were by the challenge of making people laugh, and several much-loved but ageing greats (including Morecambe & Wise, The Two Ronnies and Tommy Cooper) had already slipped into a slow but inevitable decline, the only notable sign that a younger generation of comics might one day be ready to take up the reins was the