Читать книгу Only Fools and Horses - Graham McCann - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

Setting Up

Little acorns . . .

Apart from overseeing the casting, Ray Butt, as the man in charge, still had a bewilderingly complex set of tasks to see through all the way to their completion. Any sitcom producer’s ‘To Do’ list runs to a very long roll indeed, and, as Butt pushed on with the planning for the debut series of Only Fools and Horses, the multiple stresses and strains kept on coming. He had assembled a large team of talents and could delegate particular tasks, but the fact remained that, when everything was ready and the time arrived for the production as a whole to be judged, the buck would stop with Butt.

One aspect that required careful attention was the physical look of the show: the costumes, the make-up and the sets. Butt dealt with this by appointing some trusted specialists to help sharpen the sight of the sitcom.

The person enlisted to design the costumes was Phoebe De Gaye. ‘I was a young designer,’ she would recall, ‘in fact I might have been an acting designer, and the job was given to me as a way of trying me out before deciding whether to appoint me as a full-blown designer. I can’t remember exactly, but I do know inexperienced designers were often tried out on sitcom pilots.’¹ Even though Only Fools was her first major project in control of this area, she felt that she had proven herself as an assistant on numerous other BBC productions, and was delighted to get her chance to stamp her own mark on a show.

Researching the types and trends that might help to find the right look for the characters, she went out into London, photographing those figures – such as the flashily dressed men who strutted about in used-car showrooms – who struck her as potential templates for decorating the likes of Del Boy. She also visited a warehouse off the North Circular that contained a startling array of gaudy Gabicci shirts, as well as a shop near Marble Arch that sold cut-price suits so shiny and badly made that they creased as soon as one touched them. Adding a selection of similarly cheap and tacky clothes and trinkets from Shepherd’s Bush market and Islington’s Chapel Market, and a few other items from the BBC’s own stockroom, she then proceeded to age a number of them artificially (especially those earmarked for Grandad), using cheese graters, soap and sandpaper to register the right degree of wear and tear.

She also spent time with the main actors, taking them to sample some of the styles she had spotted, and discussing with them her ideas for each character’s wardrobe. David Jason, as a famously strong-minded performer who always had his own ideas about the people he played, was probably the greatest challenge for the young designer, as he resisted a number of her suggestions – including her desire to see Del Boy sporting suitably fashionable permed hair – but she also relished his eagerness to examine and exchange ideas.

Jason’s primary inspiration for how Del should appear was a character he had encountered during his time as a jobbing electrician. Back when he and his partner were struggling with their company B & W Installations, they decided to try to drum up business via a mailshot, sending out hundreds of letters to local builders, plumbers and contractors, and one of the first recipients to respond was an Eastender called Derek Hockley.

Hockley was a contractor who had recently added Ind Coope Brewery to his list of clients. Although he was one of countless wheeler-dealers in the area, what struck Jason most about the man was the stark contrast between his down-to earth attitude and his self-consciously dapper appearance. He had short, neatly parted hair and a small and precisely pruned goatee beard, and was always very well turned out with a clean and immaculately pressed shirt, a sharp suit, highly polished shoes, a camel-hair coat and plenty of eye-catching gold jewellery. Unable to shed his old gorblimey Cockney accent, he took obvious pride and pleasure in what he regarded as his new sartorial elegance.

Hockley’s firm belief in the axiom that ‘clothes maketh the man’ thus became a major element in Jason’s interpretation of what made Del Boy tick, but the actor also drew on his memories of numerous other young men on the make to give the character a suitably confident swagger. ‘I’d seen it so many times with guys who fancy themselves,’ Jason later explained. ‘They develop a body language that is supposed to impress the birds I suppose. It’s like a signal that says, “I’m the business, look at me, I’m the cat’s whiskers, I’ve got style, I’ve got class.”’² One other thing that he took from Hockley and some of his colleagues was a strangely bumptious little mannerism that involved twitching his neck as though his collar was slightly uncomfortable: ‘I’ve no idea what it means,’ Jason said, ‘but lots of them do it and it’s a bit intimidating.’³

Collaborating with Jason, Phoebe De Gaye gradually pieced together the key ingredients to dress Del ready for action. John Sullivan’s original vision of the character as a medallion man with a sovereign ring on every finger was revised to make him a slightly more reserved, but almost as tacky, figure with a fake gold chain around his neck, a couple of rings on his fingers and a chunky bracelet dangling from his wrist. She also chose a wide range of injudicious colour combinations, tailored some trousers that were ‘tight over the bum’ and pliable at the front for the onset of a paunch, and, following another unconventional shopping expedition, found him the perfectly imperfect patchy sheepskin coat along with a patterned flat cap.

Lyndhurst and Pearce also had De Gaye to thank for assembling a basic wardrobe for their characters. She decided to dress Rodney (whom she described initially as ‘tall, dingy and droopy’) in an old pair of blue jeans, some cheap and grubby T-shirts or limp woollen V-necks and a green camouflage combat jacket she had found in the BBC Costume Department, and then added a Palestinian-style scarf selected from Shepherd’s Bush market. The key idea for Grandad was that he should look as though he could not be less bothered about his appearance, with the top of his head almost always covered (even indoors) by a dirty-looking old hat, and part of his pyjamas mixed up with his other layers of clothes. In order to give his specially aged outfits an additional ‘crusty’ look, she daubed them with Vaseline, make-up and even a few bits and pieces of real food.

While De Gaye was designing the costumes, Pauline Cox was planning the make-up. A very experienced BBC make-up artist, with a track record that included programmes ranging from The Morecambe & Wise Show to the 1978 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, she did not take long to sketch out her visions of the key characters.

She wanted Del to sport the kind of long sideburns that seemed to suggest a man who smelt of Brut aftershave and cheap hair oil, but David Jason, once again, proved resistant to the idea, so she decided instead to settle for giving the character a slight but shiny-looking quiff. Having worked with Nicholas Lyndhurst before on Butterflies, she knew him well and was quick to find the right pasty powdering for Rodney’s callow face. Lennard Pearce, though sixty-six, needed to look a little older and much coarser, so Cox drew some thin red spider veins on his cheeks to lend him a weather-beaten appearance, and put greasepaint under his eyes to resemble pouchy bags.

As the characters thus came into sight, so, too, did the actual sets. Tony Snoaden was the production designer who was piecing together the various places in Peckham. His research had begun when he went with Ray Butt to view a row of three more-or-less identical twenty-storey tower blocks near Kew Bridge in south-west London, and another, even scruffier, set just off Bollo Bridge Road, north Acton, in the north-west of the city. Butt said that these were the kind of ugly constructions he thought would serve as models for Nelson Mandela House, and so, after studying the exteriors, they went inside one of the empty apartments and Snoaden made some notes. The tower block that would be shown at the start of each episode was one from north Acton.

When it came to creating the set for the Trotters’ flat, he paid close attention to John Sullivan’s existing scripts, which included such unusually specific descriptions as the following:

The room should reflect their style of business. Nothing is permanent. The settee and two armchairs are from three separate suites as the other pieces were used as make-weights in various other swaps. There are three TV sets; one colour, one black and white, and one with its back off awaiting repair. There are a couple of stereo music centres standing one on top of the other. Various video games, talking chess games, etc., litter the room. Their phone is one of the ornate 1920s type with separate ear-piece on an alabaster base. The décor is clean but gaudy. Dozens of clashing patterns. It should look like the start of a bad trip.⁴

Acting on such suggestions, Snoaden kept firmly in mind the knowledge that the family had no real taste at all, so he went for the most vulgar and idiosyncratic décor that he and his colleague Chris Ferriday (the BBC’s Props Manager) could find. He covered the walls in a melancholic shade of beige paper and carpeted the floor in what resembled a mixture of mud, sugar and honey, and, as he recognised that this was supposed to be an all-male environment, filled the scruffy living room with an incoherent selection of unlikely objects, including old car wheels, ice buckets, reproduction paintings, a Pirelli calendar, forgotten holiday souvenirs, an ugly wrought-iron guitar, piles of yellowing newspapers and creased magazines, a few empty beer bottles and a wide variety of unsold items of stock. There also had to be a large and diverse range of tables, because the Trotters were the type who were prepared to sell everything – even the table on which they ate their meals.

The initial inspiration for that other locus of activity, The Nag’s Head, came from a pub near Chapel Market in Islington called The Alma, which Snoaden spotted during the early days of visiting filming locations.⁵ The traditional-looking Victorian frontage seemed ideal, and, once inside, looking at the rather dull and downbeat drinking areas, he realised that ‘the layout was almost like a studio set, which meant I could virtually copy the actual layout’.⁶

Arguably the most important physical item of all – the battered Reliant Regal Supervan III – was something insisted upon by John Sullivan. It was to be Del Boy’s equivalent of Pinocchio’s nose: the taller the tales that he told, the smaller this silly vehicle would seem. No matter how many times he would boast about how, this time next year, he and his family would be millionaires, they would all still have to squeeze back into the truth of the situation: that tiny yellow van. The make was arrived at through a quick process of elimination: the more sporty options were rejected in favour of a far more functional vehicle with enough space to carry the Trotters’ miscellaneous merchandise, and the fact that it was a three-wheeler struck Sullivan as symbolic of the Trotters’ incomplete lives – even their van had something missing. The ‘New York–Paris–Peckham’ slogan on the side of the van was inspired by the ‘New York–London–Paris’ line on a packet of Dunhill cigarettes, and would serve as another unwitting reminder of just how little the business has really achieved.

Chris Ferriday found the right model, in the right stage of deterioration, at a specialist prop vehicle supplier called Action Cars in Harrow in Middlesex. The BBC rented it for the first series, but would go on to hire several more because their chassis kept giving out and none of them were worth repairing.

Surveying all of these actions and initiatives as each week went by, Ray Butt was very pleased with how the visual aspect was developing, but there were still other matters to which he needed to attend. The sitcom’s characters and structures needed to be shot for the screen, so more support was needed both on the studio floor and up in the production gallery.

He was assisted here, as with many other aspects of the process, by his production manager, Janet Bone. An old colleague from Citizen Smith, Bone was busy scouting for suitable location sites as well as supervising the schedule, but she also helped Butt assemble the rest of his technical staff.

The very reliable and experienced Bill Matthews was brought in as cameraman (he had previously worked on such sitcoms as The Liver Birds), two more former members of Bone and Butt’s Citizen Smith crew, Dennis Panchen and Don Babbage, were installed as sound recordist and lighting director respectively, and John Jarvis (whose credits included a period working on The Goodies) was enlisted as film editor. Their immediate task was to spend the next few weeks filming all of the exterior scenes required for the entire series, before returning to Television Centre to record the studio sessions.

Ray Butt was meant to have taken control of the actual direction himself, but he hurt his back (slipping a disc) just after location shooting began early on in May and was rushed off for what would prove to be a profoundly frustrating three-week stay in Charing Cross Hospital. At the very last moment, therefore, a replacement needed to be found. Gareth Gwenlan stepped in to oversee the first day’s schedule, but, as a busy figure elsewhere within the BBC, he was unavailable to continue (although he would carry on helping out with the production as a whole), so John Howard Davies contacted Martin Shardlow to take over the directorial duties for the remainder of the location shooting and then the studio recordings.

Shardlow was in the process of setting up for another project, so he was somewhat startled to find himself uprooted and moved on so suddenly. When all of the scripts and the location schedule were sent to him in his office at Television Centre, he had a brief amount of time to read and assess them, used a few of Janet Bone’s photographs to complete a very basic shooting script, and then found himself straight out on the streets filming the relevant scenes. Once the combination of shock and disorientation had faded, Shardlow started to enjoy the experience, relishing the opportunity to play such a major part in what soon came to seem like a thoroughly promising project. ‘After a bit,’ he would recall, ‘Ray was able to turn up for the technical runs, and things like that, but on the whole he left it to me.’⁷

John Sullivan, meanwhile, was watching much of this activity from a greater distance than he would, ideally, have desired. ‘Dennis Main Wilson was all for [me playing an active role in the production process],’ he would later remark. ‘He was all for me coming to editing and everything, being heavily involved, and being on filming, and he talked to me an awful lot. Ray Butt was less so. He was protecting his area more.’⁸

Sullivan did at least know that, even in absentia, Martin Shardlow would still be properly apprised of his opinions as to how each episode should be shot, because, very unusually, those opinions were already included in all of the scripts. ‘When I joined the BBC,’ the writer explained, ‘I never knew how to lay a script out; I didn’t know what was expected. So the first thing I wanted was a script, but what I realised years later was that I had a director’s script, a shooting script, which had all the reaction, so that was the habit I got into: “Cut to reaction, cut to reaction.” When I saw other writers’ work I realised they didn’t do it. But that’s how I write.’⁹ Such unconventional input was a source of some reassurance for Sullivan, but it did little to dispel the feeling that his influence on the project as a whole was still not as strong as it could, and should, have been.

One particular cause of his frustration was the show’s opening theme tune. Sullivan had always been a keen music fan – ‘As a kid, I was always writing songs’¹⁰ – and, when Dennis Main Wilson had encouraged him to write ‘The Glorious Day’ for Robert Lindsay to sing at the start of Citizen Smith, he had snapped at the chance. When it came to making Only Fools and Horses, therefore, Sullivan came up with a new song that he thought would be ideal:

Stick a pony in me pocket

I’ll fetch the suitcase from the van

Cos if you want the best ’uns

And you don’t ask questions

Then, brother, I’m your man.

Where it all comes from is a mystery

It’s like the changing of the seasons

And the tides of the sea

But here’s the one what’s driving me berserk

Why do only fools and horses work?11

The problem was that no one else – and certainly not the producer – seemed to agree about the song’s appeal. ‘Ray Butt didn’t particularly like it,’¹² Sullivan later complained.

It was a great disappointment for the writer, therefore, when Butt decided instead to ask the doyen of television theme tune composers, Ronnie Hazlehurst, to come up with something more suitable for Only Fools. Having either written or arranged the music for such sitcoms as The Likely Lads, Not in Front of the Children, Are You Being Served?, I Didn’t Know You Cared, Last of the Summer Wine, The Other One, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Butterflies, Yes Minister and To the Manor Born, as well as collaborated with John Sullivan on Citizen Smith, he seemed the obvious choice to create a theme for this new show, but his finished effort – a ‘jolly’ tune featuring a swooping pub piano, a hyperactive bass guitar and jaunty saxophones – struck many who first heard it as something more appropriate for a cheap ITV game show than a carefully crafted BBC sitcom. ‘John hated it,’ Ray Butt later admitted. ‘I hated it. It just wasn’t right.’¹³ Unfortunately, however, Butt was still incapacitated at the time with his slipped disc, and, with time fast running out, there seemed no option but to go with what they had.

More positively, the music was set to be accompanied by an opening title sequence created by the talented Peter Clayton, whom Butt had hired as his graphic designer. After discussing the nature of the sitcom with his producer, Clayton had proceeded to go out on to the London streets and take pictures of those places that he felt were most evocative of the environment envisaged for the Trotters: a busy market, the inside of a pub, a large second-hand car lot, a scruffy-looking wine bar and a couple of run-down tower blocks. He then devised an animated sequence that saw each actor’s name arrive on a piece of paper shaped like a bank note, which flapped on, peeled back and flew off the screen, symbolising the vicissitudes of the fly-pitcher’s existence, getting hold of cash only to see it slip swiftly away again. In order to introduce each character’s distinctive personality as quickly as possible, Clayton took some stills of Del Boy (smiling cockily while waving around a wad of cash), Rodney (pulling out his empty pockets and looking puzzled) and Grandad (sitting down munching idly on a pie), added an establishing shot of the rust-ridden Reliant Regal parked outside the building, and then, in the painstaking way that was necessary in those pre-computer graphics days, linked them all together frame by frame via a rostrum camera.