Also by Graham McCann
Cary Grant: A Class Apart
Morecambe & Wise
Dad’s Army: The Story of a Classic Television Show
Frankie Howerd: Stand-Up Comic
Bounder! The Biography of Terry Thomas
Spike & Co.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EHI ITE
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
Copyright © Graham McCann, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 054 5
eISBN 978 0 85786 129 0
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In memory of John Sullivan
Contents
| Prologue | |
| One | This Time Next Year |
| Two | He Who Dares |
| Three | If You Want The Best ’Uns . . . |
| Four | Setting Up |
| Five | Slow Business |
| Six | The Great Escape |
| Seven | Hello, Goodbye |
| Eight | New Depth, New Hype |
| Nine | The Sitcom Soap |
| Ten | The Long Goodbye |
| Epilogue | |
| Episode Guide | |
| Acknowledgements | |
| Notes | |
| Bibliography | |
| Index |
PROLOGUE
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
DEL BOY: All the things that we’ve ever got out of life have come from my intelligence and my foresight.
RODNEY: Well, I’m glad somebody’s owned up!
The yellow van. The little man with the flat cap and gift of the gab. The taller, younger man with the permanently puzzled expression. The deals, the dreams, the scams and the calamities. The grand chandelier crashing to the floor. The gap where the bar flap should have been. The repeated affirmation that ‘This time next year, we’ll be millionaires!’ These are just a few of the things that come to mind when we think of the great British sitcom Only Fools and Horses. Surely only a twonk, a plonker, a wally or a dipstick would fail to rub their hands together, when thinking of this show, and exclaim ‘cushty’, ‘lovely jubbly’ or perhaps even ‘joie de vivre!’
Only Fools and Horses is one of those sitcoms whose appeal transcends mere cult comedy fandom and engages with all of those who appreciate good acting, good writing and good television. Many sitcoms simply arrive, amuse and then fade away, providing us with nothing more than a pleasant but evanescent distraction. The special few, however, creep deep into our consciousness, capture our imagination, engage our emotions and never, ever, let us forget them. Only Fools and Horses, like Hancock’s Half-Hour, Steptoe and Son, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and a few others, has earned its place in such a pantheon.
Only Fools and Horses was the real deal. All of us knew of characters like Del Boy and Rodney Trotter, and most of us also knew of one or two people like Grandad and Uncle Albert, and Trigger, Boycie and Marlene. The life that they lived in and around that high-rise council flat at Nelson Mandela House in Peckham seemed authentic as well as funny. We watched the show not to escape from reality but rather to be entertained by it. As with all of the finest British sitcoms, it was a case of the British laughing at certain defining characteristics of the British.
Only Fools made us laugh at our amateurishness (the Trotters are ‘self-unemployed’ salesmen who try to flog a strange range of faulty goods), our parochialism (most things strike them as exotic whenever they venture a mile or two outside of Peckham), our dogged nostalgia (Del’s for his mother, Grandad’s for his youth, Uncle Albert’s for the war and Rodney’s for the promise engendered by his precious two GCEs) and our adamantine and ineluctable preoccupation with capital and class (one way or another, with unshakeable belief in the principle of ‘he who dares, wins’, Del is determined to drag his family up the social ladder). It also tapped into that inexhaustible well of contrariness – mixing idealism with cynicism, producing bubbles of pretension that are then rudely pierced and popped just as soon as they appear on the surface – that has driven so many British partnerships