Only Fools and Horses. Graham McCann
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on both Sullivan and Butt more or less immediately: this character could work brilliantly as the catalyst for another sitcom. The context of the black market seemed to fit the early Thatcher era in Britain rather smartly, with countless stories already being circulated in the media about dodgy would-be entrepreneurs attempting to exploit the confusion that came with deregulation to make fast and fluid fortunes, and the fly-pitcher in particular suddenly appeared emblematic of the new breed of working-class free riders. Butt, Sullivan later recalled, was quick to advise his friend to test this project’s potential: ‘Ray said: “Why don’t you have a crack at that?”’3
Sullivan went home from the pub that afternoon with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. The ideas were suddenly coming together, quickly, and he knew what he wanted to do with them. He wanted to write the kind of vivid and rich sitcom that really engaged with contemporary life instead of evading it. He was eager to write something that cut through the clichés about ordinary working-class life – especially the life in his native London – and write about the community from the inside. He wanted to explore, for example, the ambiguity of the black market (‘When I was a kid the black market fed and clothed us a lot better than the Common Market does now’) and depict a more balanced view of the contemporary cultural mix (‘In the pubs where I drink, there are people of all races and they’re not at each other’s throats. If there’s a fight, it’s between two drunks, not between racial antagonists’).4 Sullivan’s London was the pubs, clubs and tower blocks – working-class, multi-racial and vibrant. He realised that he could write about such an environment with real authority, capturing the key details with a high degree of realism and sensitivity as well as plenty of playfulness and humour.
As far as the situation of the sitcom was concerned, he elected to set it in Peckham, because it was an area of London that he knew well, and it was also, in those days, one of those multi-racial, high-crime areas of the city that seemed redolent of the current confused social mood. Among some of the recent reports in the newspapers, there had been one about a high-profile clash between the National Front and the Anti- Nazi League, monitored by 3,000 police, outside one of the area’s many derelict houses,5 as well as countless other stories and opinion pieces relating to instances of urban decay, vandalism, arson attacks, robberies and muggings. More positively, the district had also become known for its role as a centre of underground dance, rock and reggae music (championed by a group of squatters, based ironically enough at a former DHSS building in Collyer Place, who dubbed themselves ‘The Dole House Crew’), thus acting as a catalyst for the many diverse elements of urban and travelling culture then under threat from restrictive laws.
More specifically, John Sullivan wanted to focus on one of Peckham’s cold and drab-looking brutalist tower blocks that seemed to loom high in the skies as sad and lonely relics of an outdated architectural vision of the future. Most of them erected in the early 1950s, they had elevated countless working-class people physically while the social world below kept them stuck in the basement. By the start of the 1980s, many of these so-called ‘streets in the sky’ were under attack not only for their ugliness but also their insalubrity (Sir John Betjeman, for example, branded them ‘inhuman things’6), and their image as incubators of alienation and social unrest had become notorious.
‘In those days,’ Sullivan later explained, ‘I had a lot of mates who lived in tower blocks. The lifts never worked and you always had to walk up to the seventeenth floor to get them to go to football. One of the things I wanted to say in it was: The lifts don’t work in council blocks. Will somebody do something?’7 The man who had been so engrossed by the comedy and drama of Dickens now saw the chance to emulate that social and literary spirit within a sitcom that tapped straight into the zeitgeist. While the likes of Terry and June fussed about inside their strangely timeless and placeless suburban abode, this show would find humour in the grit and the graft of the here and now.
As far as the comedy of the sitcom was concerned, it had to seem organic. Sullivan wanted the laughs to come more from the quality of the characters than from the quantity of the one-liners. All of the great sitcoms that he admired had proceeded in this subtle, truthful manner: Galton and Simpson’s Hancock’s Half-Hour and Steptoe and Son, for example, had worked hard to draw humour from within the individuals and their relationships rather than merely from a few funny things they were given to say, and even Johnny Speight’s more overtly topical and dialogue-driven Till Death Us Do Part still tried to lock the laughter into the logic of a particular life. Unlike lazily traced stereotypes or clumsily constructed caricatures, these keenly observed comic creations seemed real enough to belong to the complex community within which all of the audience existed. It was this thoughtful precision and attention to detail that had helped make the likes of Anthony Hancock, Albert and Harold Steptoe, and Alf Garnett seem so strongly iconic for the culture and society of their time. It was this achievement that John Sullivan was now so eager to emulate.
He was getting particularly excited about the potential of the central character of the fly-pitcher. Dubbing him Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter (‘I’d worked with a guy called Trotter, while Del was one of those names I loved, like Del Shannon’8), he proceeded to draw on his memories to add some flesh to the basic fiction.
One of the specific inspirations for Del was a man Sullivan had known called Chicky Stocker. He was a hard and often aggressive working-class Londoner, but always took great care over his appearance and was fiercely loyal to other members of his family. It was this ‘tough and tender’ combination that served as the template for Derek Trotter. Sullivan also drew on a couple of other characters he had observed in the car trade, who used to flash their gold signet rings, wave wads of borrowed money around and buy other people drinks that they often could not really afford.
A more general idea that the writer dreamed up for Del was to make him a kind of verbal jackdaw, complementing his readiness to collect a wildly disparate range of commodities with a penchant for accumulating a similarly bizarre bricolage of exotic-sounding phrases. As Sullivan later explained:
By then we were part of the European Community and I noticed all the products you bought, whether they were British or foreign goods, had ingredients and other bits of information written in different languages. I regarded Del as an entrepreneur, also someone who thought of himself as worldly wise, yet he was living within his own personal society with people who weren’t. I thought he’d most probably read, for example, a foreign statement on the back of a pair of tights and used it to try and impress people, not realising what it actually meant, and the fact that he was impressing no one.9
Del already seemed real to Sullivan, but the writer wanted to find a way to constrain the figure in order to keep him from straying beyond the boundaries of this particular sitcom. At a time when the Government’s Employment Secretary was urging people like Del to ‘get on their bike’ in search of better prospects, Sullivan had to ensure that this particular character would stay put in Peckham.10 He wanted to root the free rider within some kind of family unit.
The decision was taken, therefore, to ‘trap’ him, emotionally, inside his situation. Just as the young and socially aspirational Harold Steptoe, for example, had been stuck with his old-fashioned working-class father, Albert, so Del needed to be fastened tightly to his own flesh and blood. After toying with the idea of linking him to a cousin (which, on reflection, did not seem intimate enough), he was given a dependent younger brother, Rodney, and an otherwise isolated and semi-helpless grandfather.
Rodney was inspired mainly, once again, by Sullivan’s own memories of real-life figures:
I knew a couple of guys. One is a fellow who works for me now, a mate of mine from my old street; he’s got a brother who’s about twelve years older than he is, and the brother has naturally guided him and led him and looked after him. And I knew another set of brothers, the same situation. And my sister is fourteen years older than I am, so as a kid she was never like a normal sister, she was kind of an auntie. It took me until I was twenty to really take her as a sister. I thought, I can do it in a way that he’s got this kid brother: the mother dies, and he brought him up. People will look on him as a hero because he didn’t let the kid go into care or an orphanage, he brought him up. Even though he’s a bit of a toe-rag, Del, and he’ll