Only Fools and Horses

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Graham McCann. Only Fools and Horses

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Also by Graham McCann

Cary Grant: A Class Apart

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It was not long after this first set of ad hoc commissions began that Dennis Main Wilson, impressed by Sullivan’s progress, encouraged him to start working on his idea for a sitcom. Greatly excited, Sullivan promptly took two weeks’ leave and went to his in-laws’ home in Crystal Palace, where he locked himself away and laboured until he had a proper pilot episode fully scripted. Meeting once again in the BBC bar, Main Wilson speed-read it in twenty minutes and loved it, and, as he later recalled, resolved there and then to make the project happen:

I said ‘I’ll buy it,’ even though the scene had changed, and I wasn’t in a position to buy officially. But under my old thing I would have been, so sod it, ‘I’ll buy it.’ If [the BBC don’t want it] I’ll bloody sell it to ATV or something. And I bought it and luckily our Head of Comedy in those days was Jimmy Gilbert [ . . . ] and I bashed into his office and said ‘Read that!’, and anybody who works in light entertainment and is a boss, poor devil, the number of scripts that come in, even if they’re filtered by script editors . . . But I said to Jim, ‘Read that, not at the top, not at the bottom of the thing – now! We’ll be in the bar.’12

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