by David Jason
CHAPTER SIX
Houston, we don’t have lift-off
AMID NO GREAT fanfare, the first episode of Only Fools and Horses went out on BBC1 on Tuesday 8 September 1981 at eight thirty in the evening, wedged between The Rockford Files (James Garner’s American detective series, famous for messages recorded on self-destructing tapes) and the Nine O’Clock News (a British and international co-produced reality show, starring Jan Leeming and frequently featuring far worse problems than tapes that self-destruct). By all accounts, the nation’s television viewers were more excited that week about the launch of The Day of the Triffids, a six-part sci-fi drama adapted from the John Wyndham novel, which attracted a lot more publicity than our show, and perhaps understandably so. Carnivorous plants on the rampage across Britain, terrifying a population struck blind by meteorites? Or a slightly dodgy geezer from Peckham in a naff shirt, trying to flog a batch of plastic combination-lock briefcases whose combinations have ended up locked inside them? You took your choice.
Still, whatever The Day of the Triffids had going for it (and I must confess, I didn’t tune in), I would hazard that it didn’t have an exchange as slick as this one, from that opening Only Fools episode, ‘Big Brother’, when Del, down at the Nag’s Head, watched by Rodney, negotiates to take those briefcases off Trigger’s hands.
TRIGGER: To you, Del Boy, seventeen pounds each.
DEL: You know what happened to the real Trigger, don’t you? Roy Rogers had him stuffed.
TRIGGER: All right then – fourteen.
DEL: Fourteen? Leave it out! Five.
TRIGGER: Twelve.
DEL: Six.
TRIGGER: Ten.
DEL: Nine.
TRIGGER: Eight.
DEL: Done!
TRIGGER (to Rodney): That’s the way to do business, Dave.
That classic piece of dopey wheeler-dealing was to set the show’s tone in so many ways. It also instantly established the character of Trigger – profoundly slow-witted and yet, by his own reckoning, a sage. (You will recall, perhaps, the Peckham road-sweeper’s considered verdict on Mahatma Gandhi: ‘He made one great film and then you never saw him again.’) In place right from the beginning, note, was Trigger’s habit of persistently, and despite all protests and demonstrations to the contrary, calling Rodney ‘Dave’. Forgive me for removing my trumpet from its case at this point and giving it a quick toot, but that little quirk of Trigger’s was my suggestion to John. I said, ‘He should call him Dave, all the time, regardless.’ John ran with it utterly brilliantly, seeding a running joke that would build and build and wouldn’t reach its absolute peak until a whole decade later, in series seven, the final full season, when Trigger is charged with discovering the intended name for Del and his wife Raquel’s imminent baby. ‘If it’s a girl, they’re gonna name it Sigourney, after an actress. And if it’s a boy, they’re going to name him Rodney. After Dave.’ Ten years in the making, that line. Sometimes, with gags, you have to be prepared to play the long game.
Judged on the number of lines he got, or on the relative amount of screen time, it would be conventional to describe Trigger as a secondary character. But that doesn’t wash in my reckoning – and not only because so many of his lines were just so plain great. (Sample: ‘What’s the name of that bloke who invented the Dyson vacuum cleaner?’) Trigger wasn’t a secondary character for the simple explanation that John Sullivan didn’t do secondary characters – not in Only Fools. Trigger, Boycie, Denzil, Mickey Pearce, Mike the landlord – there was nothing remotely secondary about these characters, they were just characters, full stop, and proof of the imaginative commitment with which John was prepared to people his fictional world. It wasn’t only Del, Rodney and Grandad (and then, later, Uncle Albert); everybody in that extended Only Fools family seemed to resonate in no small measure with the audience and would continue to resonate long after the show had gone.
Certainly it takes more than a ‘secondary character’ to slip loose from a comedy programme and make it into the pages of the philosophy books. In ‘Heroes and Villains’ in 1996, Trigger gets a medal from the council for managing to keep the same broom for twenty years. It subsequently emerges that the broom has had seventeen new heads and fourteen new handles over that period, but never mind. This, apparently, is an example of Theseus’s Paradox – which I used to think was some kind of extra-powerful bathroom cleaner with the capacity to fight limescale, but which I subsequently learned is a Greek conundrum from ancient times. The conundrum is this: if you take an object (a ship in the original Greek case, though there are later versions featuring an axe, too) and individually change its component parts, in what sense is it the same object thereafter? In other words, can you still technically call it Trigger’s broom once it’s had a new handle and a new head? There are potentially hours of fun here for your brain cells. The main point is, since Trigger won his council medal for broom conservation, some philosophers now happily shove Theseus aside and refer to ‘Trigger’s broom’ as the textbook illustration of this mental quandary. Whatever you end up concluding about the newness or otherwise of his road-sweeping equipment, the fact that Trigger, of all characters, has come to sit at the heart of an academic philosophical enquiry seems deeply satisfying to me – surely one of John Sullivan’s rarer and finer achievements.
Trigger was played, of course, by Roger Lloyd Pack, an immensely capable, RADA-trained actor, and as down-to-earth a bloke as you could hope to meet. He was far from dopey, too: he had A levels and everything. Ray Butt spotted Roger when, during the development phase for Only Fools, he went to the West End to see a Bernard Slade comedy called Moving, on the pretext, I believe, of having a look at Billy Murray as a potential Del. I’ll let that slide. But it was Roger’s big-featured face that stayed in Ray’s mind on that particular night. He could see him unmistakably as Trigger and, in due course, millions of people would come to agree. Like all of us in the show, Roger had no idea when he signed up how much appearing in Only Fools would convert him into public property, and how much he would be required to wrestle with that. Off the set, Roger took to wearing a battered trilby in the hope of avoiding recognition, but it rarely worked. Once, with his hat firmly on his head, he travelled to Iceland with his friend, the actor Kenneth Cranham, in the hope of seeing the Northern Lights. Instead, they somehow got lost in a blizzard on the outskirts of Reykjavik. However, as they wandered the frozen tundra in their confusion, they were relieved to see a figure emerging from the ice and darkness ahead of them who could perhaps offer them some guidance out of this remote region. So they approached him. The figure took one look at Roger, shivering in his hat, and said, ‘All right, Dave?’
Roger was to die too soon, of pancreatic cancer, in 2014. He was sixty-nine. We were all at the funeral – Nick Lyndhurst, John Challis, Tessa Peake-Jones, Sue Holderness, Paul Barber, Patrick Murray – and we were all hollowed out, although Roger had done his best in advance to lighten the burden of the day for us. At his insistence, the coffin, his battered trilby atop it, arrived in a bright pink hearse. Stylish to the last.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. After Del bought Trigger’s briefcases in that classic piece of series-opening bartering, it would be nice to relate that nothing afterwards was ever in doubt: that Only Fools surfed smoothly onwards, amid rapidly gathering acclaim, and rose untrammelled to its inevitable place in the comedy firmament. Alas, nothing in television is ever simple – apart, possibly, from Trigger. Only Fools, certainly in its early years, rode a sometimes bumpy road dotted with obstacles, ranging from blessedly temporary inconveniences, at one end of the scale, to one occurrence in particular that could have terminated the show altogether.
Only Fools was born in chaos. Indeed, it almost stopped before it started. It’s amusing to reflect on that from a secure position, sat here on the sunny uplands of my posterity, as it were. But I can remember not finding it especially funny at the time. We were only three days into shooting the first episode when Ray Butt, who had been inst
rumental all the way down the line in putting the show together and who was slated to produce and direct all six of the episodes that would comprise the first series, woke up and wondered why he could barely move. Somewhere in his sleep, with scant respect for the job at hand, he had contrived to slip a disc, and the only thing he could do was go to hospital and get himself fixed. There he was to remain for three weeks, removing him as director from the entire first series which he had developed, nurtured, cast, planned … Credit to him, though: he phoned John Sullivan to tell him about the back situation before he even phoned for an ambulance. Proper priorities there, of which today’s emerging programme makers would do well to take note: the production first, medical emergencies requiring surgery second.
Gareth Gwenlan, who would later become the BBC’s Head of Comedy, stepped in to cover for Ray as producer and – because we couldn’t lose our shooting days without jeopardising the schedule for the entire series – to hold the director’s baton for a day or so until another director could be found. This was Martin Shardlow, who had done some episodes of Last of the Summer Wine and Terry and June, but who was requisitioned without ceremony or notice from a BBC drama production and had the shortest time in which to get his bearings. Credit to him: he found those bearings faster than anyone could have reasonably expected him to and went on to do a classy job with the rest of the series. Nevertheless, there we were, a matter of days into production, and we’d already had three different directors. Which doesn’t do much for your sense of stability, I probably don’t need to say. That first week was a glorious old mess – amateur hour, really. I remember standing on the set and being comprehensively deflated. I’d had such a good feeling about this show, going in, and had a really firm sense that I was on the verge of making something strong and funny. Now I was thinking, ‘Oh, here we go again. Another bomb. More hopes dashed.’
In due course, though, the ship steadied and by the time we had finished filming those initial six episodes my anticipation for the success of the show had recovered to its previous levels. It was really solid work, I thought. John Challis, who is such an easy guy to get along with, had superbly nailed the character of Boycie, the second-hand car dealer, in an episode that allowed Nick and me the pleasure of tooling around in a Jaguar E-Type, which was not to be sniffed at. There was the ‘A Slow Bus to Chingford’ episode, with the Trotters running a wonderfully crappy open-topped bus tour of south London, taking in the glories of the Lea Valley viaduct and Croydon by night. There was ‘The Russians Are Coming’, where Del and Rodney construct a DIY fallout shelter against the possibility of a nuclear attack. It was, surely, a veritable cornucopia of comic delights. Certainly it all seemed to have played really well with the studio audiences at the Sunday-night recording sessions, and that’s always a good litmus test. The only thing left to do was to sit back and wait for the nation to swoon in ecstasy and wonder.
Plumpf! Another deflation. The first series of Only Fools generated a reaction which these days we would probably describe using the word ‘meh’. The critics felt largely able to ignore us. Certainly nobody was inspired to write a review that said, ‘I have seen the future of television comedy, and it is Only Fools and Horses.’ Nor, indeed, did anybody have the prescience to come out and say, ‘Heed my words: one day, 24 million-plus people will be swarming all over this.’ We had barely any presence in the media at all, in fact. I would have been happy to go out and publicise the show, and John battered away at the BBC press and publicity department to organise features on me and Nick for the magazines, to act as trailers for the programme and get it under people’s noses. But nothing happened. Whether the publicity department tried to drum up some interest and were knocked back by an entirely indifferent British press, or whether they saved themselves the inconvenience and embarrassment by not getting their drums out in the first place, I could not tell you. All I know is, my boundary-breaking Vogue cover story was not forthcoming. I wasn’t even in Good Housekeeping.
Alas, the press were not alone in largely ignoring us. That first series generated audiences of between seven and nine million, the kinds of numbers for which channels would bite off your hands as far as the elbows these days. But this was back in the terrestrial-only period, when people had far fewer claims on their attention. Indeed, British television wouldn’t even know the bewildering plenty of a fourth channel until the following year, 1982. So seven to nine million didn’t really qualify as setting the world on fire – nor even, really, setting Radio Times on fire. During and immediately after the series, there was, accordingly, a general feeling of flatness – a sense that the spark hadn’t caught. Given the hopes I’d been harbouring, it was fantastically dispiriting. Moreover, still more troublingly, with the future of the show by no means guaranteed, indifference seemed to be coming off the relevant BBC executives in misty waves.
But then, I suppose, to a certain extent, all of us involved in Only Fools were already used to a touch of corporate coldness. At some point during the screening of that first series, the BBC had decided to decorate the foyer and main corridors of Television Centre, the mothership of their broadcasting operation in Shepherd’s Bush, with giant colour pictures celebrating the corporation’s current comedy output. I remember passing through there one day and thinking, ‘Ah, well, that’s nice of them.’ Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles were on the wall, beaming out from the set of To the Manor Born. Kenny Everett was up there – Dave Allen, also. Ronnie Corbett was depicted in Sorry! and there was a tribute in image-form to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, too. ‘How great,’ I thought, experiencing an anticipatory tingle of flattery. ‘Any moment now I’m going to see Only Fools and Horses saluted among this illustrious company.’
Wrong. We were nowhere in sight. The galaxy of BBC comedy talent deemed worthy of hanging in the foyer (in a manner of speaking) did not include our humble unit. Rumour had it that there was a snap of us somewhere in the vicinity of the lift shaft, up on the sixth floor, though I never set eyes on it. It was all rather disheartening and hard not to take personally. John, in particular, felt slighted by this omission and complained bitterly about it. I don’t know whether it was the BBC’s reaction to our working-classness, or our working-class reaction to the BBC – and the chances are it was a bit of both. But in those early days, before the show found its rhythm and its audience, we never quite shook the impression that the BBC was slightly embarrassed by us. It only added to the feeling that we, and our show, were a bit of an outsider as far as the powers that be were concerned – urchins with grubby mugs at the gates of the big house – and that we had it all to prove before we would find love and acceptance there.
Indeed, maybe it was just the way the BBC operated, something to do with the culture of the place, but a certain amount of reserve characterised its relationship with the show even once it was successful. None of the actors in the series, me and Nick included, was ever put on a retainer, which would have locked you in place and given you a bit of job security – and which, just as importantly, would have given you the sense that they were thinking about the series in the long term. Instead, whenever a series finished, you were left in limbo, wondering whether another one would ever be commissioned. Getting a straight answer to the question ‘are you going to let us come back?’ was extremely difficult. ‘Possibly’ was about as precise a response as you would be given. I would be ringing up John Sullivan and saying, ‘Have you heard anything?’ and John would say, ‘No. I’ll ring Ray Butt and see if anyone’s said anything to him.’ Weirdly, people didn’t seem to be involved in the process. Each time, it was as if the machine had to finish churning though the figures before finally clanking out an answer. At some point in the mid-1980s, after four or so series, when the show had established itself but was again in its annual limbo period, I found myself seated at a dinner next to Bill Cotton, who was then the BBC’s Managing Director of Television. A big cheese, in other words. Nick Lyndhurst was also at the table and he was nudging me all evening to
ask Bill outright if we were going to get another series. I felt a bit awkward about doing so, not wanting to seem gauche or desperate. But I bided my time as the meal went on and at what I considered the optimum moment, adopting a tone of casual diffidence, I finally went for it.
‘So, er, Bill. Do you reckon Only Fools will get another shot sometime?’
He laughed loudly. ‘Oh, don’t ask me, old chap,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do with me.’
I had aimed too high, clearly. Those kinds of decisions were for people elsewhere in the machine. But the machine was so big that you could work inside it for years and still not feel you had a proper grasp on the mechanics of it. And I say this as someone who is quite good with machinery, too, and who has been known to restore motorbikes and classic fairground slot machines in his workshop at home.
Whatever, the heat certainly wasn’t under us at the end of series one. In fact, John was getting some pretty strong hints from above that maybe he’d like to try something different now – kind of ‘so, that was fun – what else have you got?’ But he was still backing the show, and so was I. I knew it was funny and I still thought it had the potential to strike a really huge chord with people. If it had a problem grabbing attention, it was partly the fact that nobody in the cast was a star. Me and Nick had some prior television experience, but not in leading roles, and neither of us was the kind of actor whose name alone would guarantee an audience from the off. The only way to get around that was to give it time.
There was also the matter of the title, an ongoing bugbear for the BBC, as I mentioned earlier, which didn’t directly explain what the show was about and which was always going to take a bit of getting used to. Changing it after one series was completely out of the question – and in any case, John Sullivan had already dug in hard on the title’s behalf and would brook no challenge to his authority in that area. So one thought was to make the theme music work a bit harder on the title’s behalf. For the first series, the theme was an instrumental, written by Ronnie Hazlehurst, who was no slouch when it came to the composition of signature music for television. Indeed, at one stage in the seventies and eighties, it seemed to be the law that before a BBC programme could be passed as fit for public broadcast, Ronnie Hazlehurst had to do the theme tune. No Ronnie, no show. In addition to his piece for the first series of Only Fools, younger readers may care to check out his work at the front and back end of such programmes as The Generation Game, Yes, Minister, To the Manor Born and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, and especially his famously cash-till-driven opener for Are You Being Served?. It’s well happening, as we say in the music industry.
