by David Jason
For series two, at the risk of offending against any number of existing broadcasting statutes, the decision was taken (and this was way above my pay grade, let me hastily add) to set Ronnie Hazlehurst’s work aside and, assuming lightning didn’t strike us all dead for our blasphemy there and then, use something different, with helpfully illustrative lyrics. It wasn’t automatically assumed that scriptwriters would come up with opening numbers for their shows, but John, helpfully, had some previous in this area: he had written the theme tune for Citizen Smith. So he duly composed a theme song for Only Fools, the lyrics of which included the whole of the original expression (‘why do only fools and horses work’) and went at least a little way towards explaining it. It also went on to become quite an item in its own right – a catchy number that came to embody the show and that people found themselves singing and humming even at times when they weren’t in front of the television. You can’t underestimate the importance of that. Behind every great sitcom, there’s an iconic theme tune. Or rather, in front of it, obviously.
John even sang the song himself, due to the unavailability of Chas & Dave, the ‘rockney’ double act, who had agreed in principle to record the new theme for us, but then inconveniently had to go and have a huge smash hit record (‘Ain’t No Pleasing You’) which set them on the path to national stardom and left them too busy to meet their engagement with us. I wonder how Chas & Dave feel now about that little dink in their career path. It’s one of those oh-so-poignant, ‘road not taken’ moments. They could have sung the theme tune for Only Fools but instead they had to settle for massive chart success. How different things might have been for them, one ruefully ponders, if they hadn’t had that smash hit.
Anyway, the second series got made and it contained all sorts of good stuff, including the aforementioned ‘Ashes to Ashes’ episode, with the urn containing the mortal remains of Trigger’s grandad, and the now famous ‘chandelier drop’ from ‘A Touch of Glass’, with Del and Rodney up the ladders, carefully holding the blanket under one of Lord Ridgemere’s priceless crystal chandeliers while Grandad, upstairs, loosens the other one. That’s another Only Fools sequence that people have warmly admitted to their annals, if I may put it that way. It’s worth making the point, in relation to the second series, that this was the first time John Sullivan had been able to write with all of our faces specifically in his head. The six episodes of series one were finished before the show was cast. The scripts were adapted slightly, to fit our voices and natural timings and so on, and to insert various set-ups and jokes as they arose, such as the running ‘Dave’ gag. But that was clearly very different from sitting down at the start of the writing and being able to summon Del’s and Rodney’s voices and expressions. If the scripts tightened in series two, then it was on account of that.
So how did it go over this time? Well, in response to these new and exceptional offerings, the audiences duly … stayed pretty much the same. Apart from the 10.2 million that tuned in for the chandelier caper, the figures held steadily around the eight million mark – and even though Channel 4 had now officially joined the national broadcasting party, this was still a few million short of what the BBC would have been hoping for from one of its primetime sitcoms.
Accordingly, when it was time to take a decision on making a third series, things really were trembling in the balance. John Howard Davies, who was the Director of Comedy at the BBC at the time, summoned me, Nick and Ray Butt to a meeting in his office somewhere along the daunting forty-mile-long corridors of Television Centre. Now, something I can tell you about John Howard Davies is that when Ray Butt originally sent him John Sullivan’s draft script for ‘Big Brother’, the first episode of Only Fools, Davies sent Ray a memo saying that, although he had enjoyed it, he didn’t think it was strong enough to work as an opening episode and kick off a whole series. And Ray was so piqued that he kept that memo stuck to the wall of his office at the BBC until the day he left, by which time Only Fools was well under way, its opening episode having been, of course, ‘Big Brother.’
Anyhow, John Howard Davies sat behind his desk with, on one side of him, a stack of scripts and, on the other, a sheaf of paperwork. He said to us gravely, ‘Over here I have some scripts for a third series of Only Fools and Horses. And over here I have some viewing figures for the last series of Only Fools and Horses. The scripts on the right are telling me we should definitely make another series. But the figures on the left are telling me we should definitely pull it.’
There was a silence here, while Nick and Ray and myself shifted uneasily. And then Davies said, ‘Well, balls to the figures on my left – we’ll go with the scripts on my right!’
Cue much relief and rejoicing. God bless John Howard Davies and his balls. Of course, the third series got made, and from there the show really started to bound forward and the audiences snowballed. By the time of the fourth series, the first series’ figure of seven million per episode had doubled. Series five and series six would see audiences of between 16 million and 18 million as a matter of course, and the Christmas specials would end up peaking even higher than that, all the way up to those record-breaking, 20 million-plus levels by the end. Yet if Davies had been a different kind of broadcasting executive, the sort who only scrutinised the bottom line, the show would have been chopped in its infancy. Only Fools survived and grew because somebody had the courage to ignore the maths and nurse it and give it the time to develop. It wouldn’t happen like that nowadays. Now everybody seems to want success straight off the bat, and the BBC feels obliged to join battle with the commercial operations and the whole world seems to be chasing numbers rather than excellence. It’s a salutary reminder, really, of the part that luck played in the success of Only Fools. Yes, it was a fantastic creation, but we happened to come along at the right time, to the right place, with the right people in control.
Of course, luck isn’t inexhaustible. The show had arguably just hit its stride when it was knocked flat on its back by a major upset, the worst it would know in its lifetime.
The last I ever saw of Lennard Pearce was outside the magistrates’ court in Kingston in December 1984. We were filming, I hasten to add, rather than responding to a summons. We were doing some scenes for a daft series-four story in which Grandad takes a tumble into a pub’s beer cellar and Del and Rodney then join him in pursuing a hefty compensation claim against the brewery, only to discover, when their case is heard, that this is not the first time that Grandad has tried this ruse. That was a Sunday morning and, as he wasn’t needed on set, Lennard was due to join up with us again seven days later. But on the Wednesday, Lennard’s landlady found him lying at the foot of the stairs to his flat after a heart attack.
He was taken into intensive care at the Whittington Hospital in Highgate. John Sullivan visited him there and took in a replica of Trotter, the china pig that used to be placed in the control room at the Only Fools studio sessions and which it was Lennard’s habit to touch for luck before every show. Sadly, the pottery pig couldn’t work any magic in these circumstances. Lennard suffered a second heart attack in the hospital. On the Sunday morning, Nick and I were getting made up, when Ray Butt came and stood in the doorway. He didn’t say anything. He just shook his head and walked away. We had spent the week fearing the worst, and here it was. We knew, before this, that Lennard’s health hadn’t been the best. He was sixty-nine and had had some troubles the previous year with his balance and he had been taking pills for hypertension. But the actuality of it – the finality of it – was overwhelming. Neither Nick nor I knew what to say or do with ourselves. I remember just sitting silently in a chair for a long time, trying to absorb it and failing. The day’s work, obviously, was abandoned. As we left in silence to go home, as if in some kind of maudlin film, there was a sudden flurry of snow.
At that point, I thought the show was probably over. I couldn’t see any way around it. Obviously, a meeting was rapidly called, led by Gareth Gwenlan, who had by now graduated to that Head of Come
dy role. John and I were part of that meeting, and Ray Butt and a couple of other BBC people, and when I walked into that room it was on the pretty firm assumption that we were going to talk about calling it a day and about what the exit strategy would be. But that wasn’t the case. Broadcasting can be a fairly ruthless and logistical business, and I never completely worked out, in the discussions that followed, how much the BBC’s position was driven by the fact that transmission dates were now locked into the schedules, and how much it was about their will to keep the show alive for its own sake. No matter. What I do know for sure is that John and I very quickly crushed the idea that some bright spark had of getting in a lookalike to play Grandad. Just blithely sailing on like that, as if nothing had happened, would have been an insult to Lennard that neither John nor I, or anyone else in the cast, would have been able to live with, and we made our feelings on that issue very clear.
It was John who suggested that if Only Fools was going to survive, then he should write Grandad’s death into the show, give him a proper funeral scene and fittingly mark the exit of his character. Then, somehow, the life of the show could gather itself and resume, just like our lives outside the show. I don’t know about the rest of the people around the table, but, as firm as John sounded about this, I had my doubts that he could make it work. This was not an area you had seen television comedies venture into, for fairly obvious reasons. How could you actually record and explore the death of one of your central characters, without doing something utterly disruptive to the comic tone? That stuff was too big for comedy, surely.
Of course, I should have had more faith in John’s talents. What he came up with was, in terms of its drama and reach and the unflinching way in which it went about its grim but necessary work – and also, we should add, in its continued comedy – probably his greatest piece of writing for the show. This wasn’t just a matter of the funeral scene, although that’s the centrepiece of it, with Del’s stern and bottomlessly touching admonition to the gravediggers as they spade the soil onto the coffin (‘Gently!’), and with the beautiful clinching gag wherein he and Rodney drop what they take to be Grandad’s trilby into the grave as a final mark of honour and walk away, only to hear the vicar wondering if anyone has seen his hat. All that stuff is truly brilliant but, for me, there is another significant moment, after the funeral, in the aftermath of the gathering back at the flat. Del has, as ever, brightly played the part of mine host at that occasion, welcoming the guests and serving drinks, inspiring a bewildered and angry Rodney to accuse him of getting over Grandad’s death too quickly. The speech that Del then has is, I think, among the most poignant that John wrote for him.
Get over it? What a plonker you really are, Rodney. Get over it? Ain’t even started yet. I ain’t even started, bruv. And do you know why? Because I don’t know how to, that’s why. I’ve survived all my life with a smile and a prayer. I’m Del Boy, ain’t I. Good old Del Boy. He’s got more bounce than Zebedee. ‘’Ere, pal, what you drinking?’ ‘Go on, darlin’, you ’ave one for luck.’ That’s me, that’s Del Boy, isn’t it? Nothing ever upsets Del Boy. I’ve always played the tough guy. I didn’t want to, but I had to, and I’ve played it for so long now that I don’t know how to be anything else. I don’t even know how to … oh, it don’t matter. Bloody families – I’m finished with them. What do they do to you, eh? They hold you back, drag you down and then they break your bloody heart.
After which Rodney, who has been utterly silenced by this torrent, whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’
It’s a great outburst, that. Del’s heart comes off his sleeve and it all comes pouring out. It was such a clever way to get at Del’s true feelings without in any way dissolving the character of Del. You’re reminded of how much Del gave up in order to raise Rodney and look after Grandad. But the key to it, I think, is the self-knowledge that Del is allowed. ‘That’s me, that’s Del Boy, isn’t it?’ What was crucial about the people John Sullivan created in Only Fools – and this is perhaps the reason they continue to inhabit viewers’ minds and lives all this time later – is the way he gave them the scope to know themselves, and to see themselves as other people do. At that point Del isn’t just some sitcom cypher that everybody laughs at. He’s a rounded character – a person. The funny stuff in Only Fools speaks for itself. But the reason the show has become part of the national psyche is because, ultimately, as at that moment after the funeral, it was about real people behaving in real ways.
I’m very proud of what we did in that episode, ‘Strained Relations’. It suggested that there were broader, more complex aspects of life that the show could now go on and meet – which it duly did, in the form of Del’s relationship with Raquel, played by Tessa Peake-Jones, and Rodney’s relationship with Cassandra, played by Gwyneth Strong, and in the form of love and marriage and birth and all of the big stuff. Above all, it enabled us to feel that the programme had done right by Lennard. We missed him terribly, and I still do. But it’s some slight consolation to think that part of his legacy to Only Fools was that greater depth and breadth and confidence that it had thereafter.
At Lennard’s actual funeral, which took place a couple of weeks before filming resumed, we were asked to stand and sing a hymn at one point, and I opened my hymn book, took a breath … only to discover that the relevant page in it was missing. Some of us had a quiet giggle about that there and then, and I know Lennard would have utterly approved. It seemed a suitably Trotter-like occurrence to see him out on.
John’s other stroke of brilliantly redemptive invention was to create the character of Uncle Albert, Grandad’s long-lost brother, who turns up, naturally enough, for his brother’s funeral and then never leaves. Buster Merryfield’s path to sitcom fame must be among the most unlikely in history. His photo seemed to emerge almost at random from a pile of long-ago submitted actors’ CVs in Ray Butt’s office, just at the point where Ray was looking for somebody to play a white-whiskered former navy man old enough to have seen action (or thereabouts) in the Second World War. Happening on Buster’s face, Ray had no choice but to put in a call. Until that point, Buster was a bit-part theatre player who had only turned to acting in retirement after a career as the manager of a NatWest bank in Thames Ditton. He was living with his wife in a bungalow on the south coast and he claimed never to have seen the show. He would spend the first month of his time in the cast of Only Fools flashing up and down to London in a BBC car, honouring the remainder of his contractual commitment to a pantomime in Bournemouth.
Buster had some early problems with the recording sessions in front of the audience, which was work he had never done before and which takes a bit of getting used to. You’re poised somewhere between theatre acting and location filming and there’s cameras and crew and microphones between you and the audience and it can be distracting and odd. Buster was fluffing his lines and drying and I found him backstage in a right old state because he felt like he was in over his head. So I did what I thought might help: at the next take, I deliberately screwed up a line myself and turned it into a joke with the audience. It happens to us all, was the only point I was trying to make – and, above all, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, the audience love it if you screw up, because you’re in on the moment together. When he knew he could relax, Buster was fine, and he was a fully blended-in team player from that point on.
Buster’s trademark and calling card was, it goes without saying, his beard. He was extremely attached to it, in more senses than one. Nick and I spent a long time nagging him to bring in a photo of himself without the beard, but he absolutely refused. We began to think that maybe there was no such thing, and that Buster had emerged, fully white-bearded, from the womb. Eventually we convinced him that John was writing an episode of the show in which Uncle Albert would appear in flashback as a young man, for which scenes, it stood to reason, Buster/Albert would not have had his beloved beard. The prospect upset him enormously, almost as if he believed his very strength, in some vaguely Samson-like way, would drain
away with the scissoring of that vital hair.
‘It’ll be OK,’ I reassured him. ‘You’ll be able to wear a false one after.’
‘But it will take ages to grow back,’ replied Buster.
‘Well, you could wear the false one for ages, then,’ I suggested helpfully.
He wasn’t happy.
Eventually we got John in on the wind-up and brought him in to confirm to Buster that the beardless flashback episode was go. John could never keep a straight face for long, though, so the jig was soon up – although not before Buster had plaintively asked John if he couldn’t just cut the beard back a bit and then cover it with make-up, which would have looked marvellous on camera, no doubt.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A fight with Nick Lyndhurst, and the party that wasn’t
ONLY FOOLS THREW me and Nick Lyndhurst together in a working partnership. That was all that was expected of us. We didn’t have to become a pair of physically unlikely brothers in real life, just because the script for a television comedy show told us that’s what we were. Yet, during that intense decade of filming in the 1980s, over the course of those seven series, a pair of unlikely brothers is what we did become. Nick was twenty when it all started. I was twenty-one years older than him, but the gap somehow didn’t seem to matter. Indeed, it seemed to close when we were around one another. There was an easy rapport there – and, quite coincidentally, a bunch of interests in common outside of acting, too. Both of us, for example, thought there was nothing better in the world than going diving – except, possibly, flying gliders, planes and helicopters, which were hobbies we both eagerly explored during this period. And both of us got an enormous and perhaps disproportionate amount of pleasure out of winding people up by means of elaborate practical jokes.
