Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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News. Not even sitcoms – so often the most humorously attuned to their times – seemed quite ready to engage with the start of the Thatcher era.
Some hugely popular and critically praised sitcoms had come to an end in the second half of the 1970s: Dad’s Army and Porridge in 1977, The Good Life and Rising Damp in 1978, and Fawlty Towers in 1979. As the 1980s approached, the genre, slouching down somewhere between the humdrum and the ho-hum, was suddenly looking more than a little jaded.
‘For the past couple of weeks,’ one frustrated TV critic remarked, ‘I have, in the line of duty, been sampling as many of the current crop of comedies as a body, if not mind, could bear without actual pain. I thought I might offer a considered survey of the scene, but in the name of charity, I’ve given that up. A critic cracking at one unlovable comedy risks sounding like a sledgehammer of pompousness descending on a lark’s egg, but with a list a dozen long . . .’2 A few new series were starting – most notably To The Manor Born and Terry and June in 1979 – but they seemed much safer, and more self-consciously and exclusively middle-class, than most of their illustrious predecessors. The great British sitcom was in danger of falling dramatically out of fashion.
All of this, however, was soon to change. All that it would take was a certain combination of talents and ambitions, this time next year.
The writer who would change things was John Sullivan. The producer/director was Ray Butt. The actors were David Jason, Nicholas Lyndhurst and Lennard Pearce.
John Sullivan was a somewhat stocky but rather shy and softly spoken scriptwriter who, by 1980, suddenly found himself at an unexpected crossroads in his career. After working hard to establish himself at the BBC by shaping a popular sitcom, he was now facing his first real professional crisis.
Born John Richard Thomas Sullivan in 1946 to an Anglo-Irish, Kentish-Corkish family based in the south London district of Balham (‘Gateway to the South’, as Peter Sellers’ legendary cod-travelogue dubbed it), he had experienced an upbringing that, as he would later put it, was almost clichéd in its working-class character. His father, also named John, was a plumber by trade, and his mother, Hilda, worked occasionally as a charlady. They shared a small terraced house in the rough and tough area of Zennor Road with another family, and made do with such basic amenities as an outside lavatory and an old tin bath hanging up in the yard.
School struck John Jnr as an unwelcome and irrational distraction from both his early love of football and his mounting impatience to get out in the world and start earning a regular wage. The challenge of the eleven-plus examination therefore came and went without ever threatening to shake him out of his educational apathy. Feeling fated to become mere factory fodder, he reasoned that there was no real point in trying. The only ‘encouragement’ to at least appear to study, as far as Sullivan and his friends were concerned, was the prospect of avoiding a gym shoe being slapped across the backside and a piece of chalk hurled sharply at the head. His nascent gift for using his imagination was limited in those days to twisting the truth in the classroom: selling freshly tailored lies – cash up front – to those pupils in urgent need of plausible excuses to tell the teachers. It was only in 1958, when Sullivan reached the age of twelve while at Telferscot Secondary Modern School in Radbourne Road, that he finally started taking an interest in something academic: English Literature.
The reason for this was that he found a new young teacher – Jim Trowers – who stopped making English Literature seem remotely academic. The Geordie-born Trowers looked somewhat unconventional – his hair was a little longer than the norm, he wore a patch over his right eye (which he would sometimes pretend to take out and clean) and seemed full of nervous energy – and, mercifully for Sullivan and others, he taught unconventionally, too. Instead of the robotic ‘read, absorb and regurgitate’ method employed by previous teachers, which had bored young Sullivan to tears, Trowers took each story and read it out to his pupils, adopting a range of voices and tones and rhythms to bring all the scenes and characters to life. Suddenly, for Sullivan (who had grown up in a home that contained just two books on its shelves – The Bible and a guide to the football pools), literature made sense – and, more than that, it started to matter. Dickens’ David Copperfield sparked a real interest in English as a subject, and in writing. The mid-twentieth-century schoolboy found himself enthralled by colourful descriptions of areas, social groups and characters that were very familiar to him. Dickens became his favourite author, and Sullivan had something other than football to look forward to in his school day.
Structured and paced for the old shilling monthlies, Dickens’ cleverly episodic stories had the kind of social scope, and humour, that engaged Sullivan’s youthful imagination. Each fiction seemed to offer a broad range of characterisations that captured the full richness and complexity of the Victorian social hierarchy. In Bleak House, for example, level after level was acknowledged and explored: there were the lofty Dedlocks in their West End mansion; lesser landowners like Mr Jarndyce and members of older professions such as the lawyers Mr Tulkinghorn and Mr Vholes and the doctor Allen Woodcourt; figures from the middling classes that included the northern ironmaster Mr Rouncewell, the campaigning Mrs Jellyby, the shop owner Mr Bagnet and the moneylender Mr Smallweed; the marginal types, such as the detective Inspector Bucket, the rag-and-bone man Mr Krook and the shooting gallery man Mr George; the servants, ranging from the superior housekeeper Mrs Rouncewell down through the ladies’ maids to the poor dogsbody Guster; and, at the bottom, the manual workers, Neckett the sheriff ’s officer, and the inarticulate and homeless crossing-sweeper Jo White. No part of the community seemed excluded or overlooked; no aspect appeared under-appreciated. Such fictions struck Sullivan as powerful, plausible and persistently vivid visions of real life: ‘Dickens wrote about areas I knew in London; although the writing dated back to the early 19th century, I felt this guy knew where I’d been and I began realising just how special his books were.’3
Sullivan’s sudden interest in such literary works was soon spotted by Jim Trowers, who was intrigued by the kind of work that the boy was now producing. ‘I gave the class an essay to write,’ the teacher would recall. ‘I said to them: “You have the Epsom races. Write me a short piece from any aspect at all. You know, perhaps one of the bookies, or someone laying a bet.” And they all did this. Except John Sullivan. He wrote it as though he were one of the horses running the race. Which I found absolutely fascinating.’4
In spite of this belated academic enthusiasm, however, Sullivan still chose to leave school three years later, aged fifteen, without sitting for any qualifications. This was the norm among working-class families, where the pressure to contribute to the family’s income often outweighed any sense of individual aspiration. Staying on to sit for O levels was still largely a middle-class privilege.
Rather than being forced straight into one of the local factories, Sullivan found his first job instead working as a messenger for the news agency Reuters, in Fleet Street, in the autumn of 1961. A few months later, after a brief spell helping out in the company’s photographic department, he reverted to being a messenger once again, this time at the new and very à la mode advertising agency of Collett, Dickenson, Pearce & Partners (CDP), a small but rather glamorous Mad Men-style outfit based in Howland Street, west central London, where the likes of future filmmakers David Puttnam and Alan Parker would soon be making a name for themselves (the former as an accounts executive, the latter as a copywriter) alongside the advertising wunderkind Charles Saatchi. In 1963, at the age of seventeen, Sullivan, attracted by the prospect of increasing his weekly wage from £3.50 to £20, was persuaded to join his old school friend Colin Humphries cleaning cars for a local second-hand car dealer. He and Humphries then went on to try their hand at selling cars themselves, but Sullivan soon realised that he was not suited to the vocation and drifted off to work for Watney’s Brewery in Balham instead.
It was here during the mid-1960s, stacking crates in a large and noisy hall, that he first started to consider pursuing writing as a more fulfilling kind of career. One of his co-workers was another old school friend called Paul Saunders, with whom he shared jokes and funny stories during the many boring periods of inaction. In January 1968, Saunders told his friend that he had recently read an article in the Daily Mirror about Johnny Speight: the famous working-class boy from Canning Town who grew