by David Jason
Still, in every respect, Only Fools and Horses seemed set fair and sailing steadily in the right direction. We could have no idea of the scale of the setback the show was about to endure.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The passing of Lennard. The arrival of Buster. And a wave from the Queen mother.
IN THE FEBRUARY of 1984, we started to make series four of Only Fools. We were a few days into external shooting, in cold and miserable sleeting weather, and we’d taken a much-needed break for the weekend. It was Monday morning, and Nick and I were in make-up, trying to get warm and preparing for the day’s filming. Ray Butt tapped on the door and came in very slowly. He was grey-faced and distraught in a way that I had never seen him looking. He said he had some bad news and that we should sit down. And then he told us what he had just learned. Over the weekend, Lennard Pearce’s landlady, who lived in the flat below him, had found Lennard’s body at the foot of a flight of stairs.
The best that Ray could piece together about what had happened was that Lennard had had a heart attack, and that the heart attack had caused him to fall. Nick and I didn’t know what to do or say. Obviously, filming was immediately cancelled. We all went home in a state of utter shock. Lennard was not, essentially, a well man – and I guess we knew that. He had smoked heavily all his life, and was still smoking when we worked together. Yet the thought that he was gone produced only disbelief. That disbelief was stubborn. It stayed with us and wasn’t dispelled even by the reality of Lennard’s funeral, several days later. The funeral was a small and humble affair. Lennard seemed to have very little in the way of family. His landlady and her daughter seemed to be the closest people to him. Those of us on the show had grown to think of him as family too, though. We mourned his loss as you would mourn the loss of a family member.
In due course, we had to turn our minds to the question of what to do about Only Fools and Horses. Gareth Gwenlan, who had recently been appointed the head of comedy at the BBC, called a meeting with Ray Butt, John Sullivan, me, Nick and a couple of others connected with the show. The episode that we’d been working on had, of course, been cancelled. What we now had to discuss was how – if at all – to proceed in the future.
We started to talk about it. John, who was still shaken up by mourning and clearly upset about having to have these discussions so soon, made it clear very early in the meeting that he couldn’t write for just Nick and me because the whole mechanics of the piece demanded the interplay between the generations. He didn’t think we really had a show without that.
Somebody then tentatively floated the idea of getting in another actor who looked like Lennard and simply carrying on with the Grandad character as if nothing had happened. This was absolutely the wrong thing to suggest. John, in particular, was horrified. Both Nick and I joined in the chorus: we couldn’t do that to Lennard’s memory.
Somebody else then said, ‘I know – let’s introduce a female character. We could make an old aunt arrive, or something, and she could become the third member.’
At this point, I pitched in and said I wouldn’t want to go with that. I pointed out that there had been a lot of physical antagonism between Del and Grandad and that this had been an important source of the comedy. Del could push and shove Grandad into the back of a van and tell him, ‘Shut up, you old twonk,’ and the audience allowed for it and found it funny. I said I didn’t think this would work if the person that Del was bullying in his irritation was an elderly woman.
John had been silent for quite a long time, and he now said, ‘Look, it does happen that people in a family die. It’s happened to us. What I want to do is to write a funeral for Lennard – a script in which we acknowledge that Lennard has died and take that on board in the show.’ I remember thinking, ‘Right: how the hell is he going to make that work, in a comedy series?’ But John said he would go away and write something we could look at, and with that, the meeting ended.
A while later, I got a call from Ray Butt, who wanted me to go in and see him. He said, ‘I’ve had this letter arrive, with a picture.’ I had a look at the letter. It was handwritten and it said, ‘I understand that Lennard Pearce has died and without wishing to be disrespectful to his memory, if you were thinking of replacing him I would like to offer myself as his replacement.’
And there, in the accompanying photograph, was this guy with bright eyes and pink cheeks and a bushy Captain Birdseye beard. He wasn’t actually wearing a sailor’s cap, but when you looked at him, you felt he ought to be. The letter was signed ‘Buster Merryfield’.
John Sullivan came in and we all sat in the office looking at this photograph and saying, ‘What do you think?’
John said, ‘He looks like a sailor. I could see him being a long-lost relative, who’s been at sea, maybe. I could get him to come to the funeral.’
I said, ‘Why don’t we interview him then, and see how it works?’ Deep down, I was pretty convinced it wouldn’t work at all, but I couldn’t see that we stood to lose anything by trying.
So Ray arranged for Buster Merryfield to come to the BBC. Buster had been a bank manager, formerly in charge of the Thames Ditton branch of NatWest. He was now living with his wife in a bungalow in Byfleet. Much like me for a while, he had combined a day job with amateur dramatics and he became a bit of a leading light in his local group. He always lusted after turning professional and (again, like me) he had picked up a couple of bits and pieces by responding to ads at the back of the Stage. He didn’t have an agent, or anything sophisticated like that. He just had his enthusiasm.
He turned up at Ray’s office wearing a blazer and grey flannel trousers, a shirt and a neatly knotted tie. We asked him to read a passage from an old Only Fools script. Sure enough, he read extremely confidently, and very well. He was funny by instinct and he knew where the laugh was and how to get it. Plus, of course, he had that amazing look about him – an eccentric face, the face of someone whom you immediately wanted to like. He convinced us, and we convinced ourselves. So, without further ado, Buster was hired. It’s an incredible story, really. Buster must be just about the only person who wrote away for a role in an established television sitcom and got it.
In the happy years to come, we went after Buster relentlessly to try and get him to tell us what his real name was, and only after ages and ages of pressure did he eventually weaken and inform us: it was Harry. He would only ever answer to ‘Buster’, though. He had been a fit young man and a big boxer during his time in the army, which is when the nickname was bestowed upon him. The other thing we constantly tried to do was to get him to show us a picture of himself without his beard. In that area, alas, he never weakened.
John went ahead and wrote with Buster in mind to play Del and Rodney’s Uncle Albert, who was going to turn up at Grandad’s funeral as a long-lost relative and then never go away. The resulting episode was ‘Strained Relations’. I remember being very nervous when I read it for the first time. I desperately wanted John to get it right – and I could see how the whole future of Only Fools and Horses depended on him doing so. Yet I just didn’t see how it was possible that he would.
I should have trusted him more. When I turned through those pages encompassing the funeral scene, I realised he had completely nailed it. I knew John wasn’t frightened of hitting things head on, but what I hadn’t realised before was just how extraordinarily adept he was at moving from comedy to drama and pathos. The scene was dark and sad and yet it was shot through with these bright shafts of humour, right from the beginning, with the flowers at the cemetery and the note from Del and Rodney, marked ‘Always in our foughts’, through to the superb kick at the end, when Del hands what he believes is Grandad’s hat to Rodney and encourages him to drop it into the grave in one final, moving tribute, only for it to emerge that the hat actually belongs to the vicar. When I read that, I collapsed. It was just so … Trotters.
Of course, then we had to film it. What a bleak day that was. The weather matched our moods and it fed into the scene
: the drama of the dark glasses at the graveside; the turning to the gravedigger, as he begins to shovel soil onto the coffin, and saying, in a fiercely protective way, ‘Gently!’ It was all very hard to do, with Lennard’s memory so fresh. I know we were just playing around in front of cameras, but trust me: it didn’t feel like that. I was very emotional. It was an episode written by John out of respect for Lennard. So I wanted to get it right for Lennard, and, at the same time, I wanted to get it right for John. He just wouldn’t let television dismiss Lennard’s passing, in the way that television might have done, if television had been left to its own frequently fickle devices. It was a wonderful thing – and something that nobody had done in situation comedy.
Out of adversity, of course, grew something really positive. The arrival of Buster led John Sullivan into a new rich vein – all these stories of Uncle Albert’s naval derring-do, none of which you ever quite trusted, and all of which seemed to terminate in disaster and destruction. One of my favourite lines was when Buster was telling a story about being in the crow’s nest, on lookout, and crashing into an aircraft carrier. ‘Blimey, they would have been better off with Ray Charles in the crow’s nest.’ But there were hundreds like it.
The slightly tricky thing was that Buster had no experience whatsoever of television. During the first recording sessions, in an environment that was completely new to him, he wound himself up more and more with nerves. The pressure on you in front of an audience and cameras is very high and if you’ve never done it before it can really get to you. He kept crashing into the audience – delivering his lines without waiting for the laughter to die down, so that they were lost, which meant we kept having to stop and go back. It got to Buster badly. He was drying and losing his words, and the more he dried, the worse it got for him. The situation was becoming more and more tense. Buster was in danger of breaking down altogether and not being able to cope. So I stopped the recording. I told the audience, ‘We’re just going to take a little break.’ I think I blamed it on the lighting crew, or the director, or one of ‘them’, in a conspiratorial way to keep the audience onside. Nick and I then took Buster behind the set and we had quite a long talk. He was very upset. He was saying, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t know how.’ I explained to him that it was only a lump of tape. It didn’t matter. ‘Look at me,’ I said. ‘The number of mistakes I make. But every time I do, I blame someone and make it into a joke. If you can make the audience think you don’t care, the audience relax and they like you and they feel part of it.’ Buster, bless him, listened very intently, and he came back out and I think that cracked it. It took a lot of the pressure off and he got better and better and relaxed more and more into the part. And we forged a new partnership and he became the lovable Uncle Albert that we know.
The audiences continued to climb. The fourth series, in 1985, averaged nearly 15 million viewers. Late in that series, there was a scene where Del did some fly-pitching in the local market – flogging super-deluxe trimming combs and urging people to save a fortune by cutting their own hair at home. Such scenes were surprisingly rare, given that fly-pitching was ostensibly Del’s core business. I loved doing them – the patter, the banter, the rhythm. The time I had spent watching the illegal street traders on Oxford Street, while walking from my flat to whichever theatre I was playing in, finally paid off as research in those moments: ‘Come round a bit closer, would ya? At these prices, I can’t afford to deliver.’ ‘I haven’t come here to be laughed at, charffed at or generally mucked about. I’ve come to sell my wares. They’re guaranteed to cure hardcore, softcore and pimples on the tongue.’ These were the sort of lines I’d picked up on the street and filed away, for some reason, and now I could throw them into my ad-libbed sales pitch.
That year saw the annual and now traditional Only Fools and Horses Christmas Special pitched deliberately against ITV’s Minder, with George Cole and Dennis Waterman – a show which, of course, was also a comedy-drama about the black market in London, so a kind of rivalry between the two programmes was easy to confect by the press. Minder was a show I loved to watch, so the rivalry didn’t feel particularly hostile to me, but I guess it was a good story for the papers. For what it’s worth, we won the ‘battle of the ratings’, as it was billed, with an audience of nearly 17 million – a number I simply couldn’t get my head around when I tried to think about it. What those nearly 17 million people saw was a feature-length escapade about a dodgy diamond deal involving a rogue trader in Amsterdam, although, to be perfectly frank, my most vivid memory from that show is of Nick and me following Ray Butt out of the chuck wagon one night after a location shoot. It was cold and Ray was wrapped in an anorak the size of a duvet, the hood of which made him look from behind like some kind of gnome in a horror film. This was funny itself, but what more particularly caught our attention was the noise of chinking as he walked. Nick and I caught up with him and I said, ‘Ray – what is that noise?’ He stopped and showed us his pockets, crammed full of little miniature bottles of gin and tonic. Ray had loaded himself up with supplies for the night. He did love a gin and tonic, that man. Purely recreationally, of course.
* * *
IT STANDS TO reason, of course, that you can’t go on television over and over again in front of audiences of 16 million people and not get recognised on the street every now and again. Yet it hadn’t really occurred to me that fame would be the inevitable consequence of all this. At any rate, I didn’t realise how fame would operate to restrict my life.
The extent to which my life was changing in this area came right home to me one Sunday afternoon when I was on Dunstable Downs, doing some gliding. I was sitting there, in the glider, waiting in line to be towed up by the powered aircraft. People were walking round – it was a public right of way, so there was no reason why they shouldn’t – when suddenly somebody spotted me … and that was it: people were coming up with their cameras and their kids and, in a couple of cases, even their dogs, and posing beside the glider. And I was sitting, as we all did, with the canopy up, strapped in and unable to move (somewhat symbolically), and silently steaming with embarrassment and frustration. Here I was, preparing to throw myself into the air in what was basically a glorified Perspex tube, and then (hopefully) to bring myself safely back down. The whole deal was pretty risky, what with the absence of that reassuring item, an engine, and when you had people going ‘Look, here he is! What are you doing in there?’ it was a little hard, shall we say, to maintain focus.
‘That’s me finished with gliding,’ I thought. I never went back.
I spoke to Nick about being recognised. It was happening to him, too. He said that his solution was to wear a baseball cap with the brim pulled down. He could pass himself off as some bloke in a hat and go unnoticed. But, of course, when he was noticed, it would be ‘Rodney! You plonker!’ It wasn’t so bad for me. I would generally get ‘All right, Del Boy?’ – and only on very rare occasions ‘You wally!’ For Nick, it was far harder. He got beaten around the ears with a catchphrase. But both of us were beginning to learn some lessons about fame and beginning to make adjustments.
* * *
IN OCTOBER 1986, an episode of Only Fools and Horses achieved an audience of 18.8 million. That episode was called ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’, and it’s the one where Del appears to be about to accept a friend’s offer to emigrate to Australia and go into business over there, only to have a change of heart and return to the bosom of the family, whereupon he reflects, in a classic Sullivan line: ‘If I’d taken that chance of a lifetime, it could’ve ruined me.’ 18.8 million people, though. The show was capturing the nation’s attention to an extent that none of us had conceived it would, even in our wildest and most optimistic imaginings.
On 24 November 1986, Only Fools was honoured with a slot at the Royal Variety Performance. We all got very excited about that. Fancy that – the Trotters on the Royal Variety. John, Nick and I sat around and had a chat. How should we play it? Should we do a piece out of a script, a bit of
the current script? (We were busy on the Dorset coast shooting ‘A Royal Flush’, that year’s Christmas Special, at the time.) Eventually John said, ‘I think we’ve got to have something original. Leave it with me.’
True to the Sullivan style, he came back with a really neat four-minute sketch. In it, Del and Rodney tip up in Drury Lane with Uncle Albert, looking for someone called Chunky Harris, for whom they have a consignment of knock-off whisky bottles in boxes. The idea was that they would slowly realise they were not, after all, in Chunky’s renovated nightclub but, in fact, on the stage of the Theatre Royal, in the presence of the Queen Mother. Between takes on the Dorset coast, Nick, Buster and I rehearsed this piece to within an inch of its life. Here was a scene we most definitely did not wish to screw up.
The tightness of the schedule forced us to drive up from Dorset on the day of the show. There were so many acts at the Royal Variety that the dressing rooms of the Theatre Royal alone could not contain them. Our facilities were round the corner in the Fortune Theatre, which had been commandeered for the night. We had a closed-circuit television screen that showed what was happening in the show and then, as we sat in the dressing room, watching the show on the screen, we worked out that we were the only people on the bill who were doing something original. Everybody else seemed to be doing a tried-and-tested item from their honed act – not a specially written piece which they had never performed publicly before and in which they didn’t really know where the laughs were. A sickly feeling entered our stomachs.
