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CHAPTER TWO

He Who Dares

’Cos where it all comes from is a mystery . . .

Early in 1981, John Sullivan and Ray Butt sat in a London pub and wondered what they should do next. Their new sitcom had been aborted. Time was running out. Something had to be done. Quickly.

The pub in question was The Famous Three Kings, on the corner of North End Road and Talgarth Road – a place where Butt often liked to go for a quiet drink and a think. After the pair had sat there for a while and moaned about the decision to axe Over the Moon, they tried to distract each other by moving on to other, less troubling, matters, exchanging anecdotes about the many things that they had in common in their backgrounds. Both of them, for example, came from working-class families in London (Sullivan’s in the south, Butt’s in the east), and had grown up in a similar kind of milieu, so they talked about some of the places and people that had made a mark on their memory.

As they flitted from one colourful story to the next, something came up that struck the two of them as, just possibly, the seed of another sitcom. It centred on that traditional laissez-faire location, the local market.

As a teenager, Sullivan had worked for a brief time informally on a Saturday stall in the small but busy Hildreth Street Market in Balham, and had been fascinated by all of the ‘characters’ there who competed for the customers’ cash. It had seemed like a modern-day version of a street scene from Dickens: a busy, colourful, richly diverse array of individuals, each one with his or her own personal style and strategy. Some were loudmouthed bullies, others were artful charmers and a few were engaging or hapless amateurs, but all of them contributed to the powerful theatricality of the social event.

Butt knew exactly what Sullivan was discussing, because he had similar memories: his father, for example, had returned from serving in the Second World War, pooled what money he had with that of a friend to buy an old NAAFI wagon and then started a small business selling ice-creams on Roman Road Market in Bow. Butt himself had spent some time there as a youth working alongside a very memorable street market trader: none other than the future comic icon Tommy Cooper.¹

As they compared and contrasted experiences, they found one figure in particular loomed large in both of their memories. ‘We discovered that our favourite character was the fly-pitcher,’ Sullivan later explained. ‘He’s always funny, always a lad, and he was only there for half an hour, because he had to get away quickly before the market inspector came. You can have a good laugh with them, then they’re gone. You barely knew their names but they seemed like friends.’ The air of casual mystery that surrounded them had always struck Sullivan as particularly intriguing: ‘You never seemed to see them anywhere: where do they come from, where do they go?’²

The fly-pitcher seemed like the most audacious natural performer: either working with one or two Jimmy James-style sidekicks, or, more bravely, on his own, this figure went out into the street each morning ready to take on the world, no matter how much ammunition, or brummagem merchandise, was currently at his disposal. Living on his wits, the al fresco entertainer treated the market place as his stage, the standing crowd as his audience, and the act of selling as an art. Words washed over those who watched and listened like great tidal waves, drowning out any critical thoughts before they could bob up and catch their first breath. Like the British equivalent of America’s old lapel-grabbing huckster, the fly-pitcher simply would not let you go until you had bought what he sold.

They grew into their game. Some came to rely on a ‘shill’ (a collaborator who poses as a customer in order to dupe innocent bystanders into participating) and others remained honourably solo, but all had to learn how people reacted to different phrases, gestures, gags and gimmicks. If he did well, he would return the following day, and maybe even stay on for a fairly regular run, but if he did badly he would slip away to find another unofficial venue. The overlap with show business was obvious; the fly-pitcher was the open-air echo of the doughty old Variety star. Max Miller sold gags; his modern day equivalents sold cheap pairs of tights, portable CD players, pop-up toasters and china plates.

The thought dawned on both Sullivan and Butt more or less immediately: this character could work brilliantly as the catalyst for another sitcom. The context of the black market seemed to fit the early Thatcher era in Britain rather smartly, with countless stories already being circulated in the media about dodgy would-be entrepreneurs attempting to exploit the confusion that came with deregulation to make fast and fluid fortunes, and the fly-pitcher in particular suddenly appeared emblematic of the new breed of working-class free riders. Butt, Sullivan later recalled, was quick to advise his friend to test this project’s potential: ‘Ray said: “Why don’t you have a crack at that?”’³

Sullivan went home from the pub that afternoon with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. The ideas were suddenly coming together, quickly, and he knew what he wanted to do with them. He wanted to write the kind of vivid and rich sitcom that really engaged with contemporary life instead of evading it. He was eager to write something that cut through the clichés about ordinary working-class life – especially the life in his native London – and write about the community from the inside. He wanted to explore, for example, the ambiguity of the black market (‘When I was a kid the black market fed and clothed us a lot better than the Common Market does now’) and depict a more balanced view of the contemporary cultural mix (‘In the pubs where I drink, there are people of all races and they’re not at each other’s throats. If there’s a fight, it’s between two drunks, not between racial antagonists’).⁴ Sullivan’s London was the pubs, clubs and tower blocks – working-class, multi-racial and vibrant. He realised that he could write about such an environment with real authority, capturing the key details with a high degree of realism and sensitivity as well as plenty of playfulness and humour.

As far as the situation of the sitcom was concerned, he elected to set it in Peckham, because it was an area of London that he knew well, and it was also, in those days, one of those multi-racial, high-crime areas of the city that seemed redolent of the current confused social mood. Among some of the recent reports in the newspapers, there had been one about a high-profile clash between the National Front and the Anti- Nazi League, monitored by 3,000 police, outside one of the area’s many derelict houses,⁵ as well as countless other stories and opinion pieces relating to instances of urban decay, vandalism, arson attacks, robberies and muggings. More positively, the district had also become known for its role as a centre of underground dance, rock and reggae music (championed by a group of squatters, based ironically enough at a former DHSS building in Collyer Place, who dubbed themselves ‘The Dole House Crew’), thus acting as a catalyst for the many diverse elements of urban and travelling culture then under threat from restrictive laws.

More specifically, John Sullivan wanted to focus on one of Peckham’s cold and drab-looking brutalist tower blocks that seemed to loom high in the skies as sad and lonely relics of an outdated architectural vision of the future. Most of them erected in the early 1950s, they had elevated countless working-class people physically while the social world below kept them stuck in the basement. By the start of the 1980s, many of these so-called ‘streets in the sky’ were under attack not only for their ugliness but also their insalubrity (Sir John Betjeman, for example, branded them ‘inhuman things’⁶), and their image as incubators of alienation and social unrest had become notorious.

‘In those days,’ Sullivan later explained, ‘I had a lot of mates who lived in tower blocks. The lifts never worked and you always had to walk up to the seventeenth floor to get them to go to football. One of the things I wanted to say in it was: The lifts don’t work in council blocks. Will somebody do something?’⁷ The man who had been so engrossed by the comedy and drama of Dickens now saw the chance to emulate that social and literary spirit within a sitcom that tapped straight into the zeitgeist. While the likes of Terry and June fussed about inside their strangely timeless and placeless suburban abode, this show would find humour in the grit and the graft of the here and now.

As far as the comedy of the sitcom was concerned, it had to seem organic. Sullivan wanted the laughs to come more from the quality of the characters than from the quantity of the one-liners. All of the great sitcoms that he admired had proceeded in this subtle, truthful manner: Galton and Simpson’s Hancock’s Half-Hour and Steptoe and Son, for example, had worked hard to draw humour from within the individuals and their relationships rather than merely from a few funny things they were given to say, and even Johnny Speight’s more overtly topical and dialogue-driven Till Death Us Do Part still tried to lock the laughter into the logic of a particular life. Unlike lazily traced stereotypes or clumsily constructed caricatures, these keenly observed comic creations seemed real enough to belong to the complex community within which all of the audience existed. It was this thoughtful precision and attention to detail that had helped make the likes of Anthony Hancock, Albert and Harold Steptoe, and Alf Garnett seem so strongly iconic for the culture and society of their time. It was this achievement that John Sullivan was now so eager to emulate.

He was getting particularly excited about the potential of the central character of the fly-pitcher. Dubbing him Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter (‘I’d worked with a guy called Trotter, while Del was one of those names I loved, like Del Shannon’⁸), he proceeded to draw on his memories to add some flesh to the basic fiction.

One of the specific inspirations for Del was a man Sullivan had known called Chicky Stocker. He was a hard and often aggressive working-class Londoner, but always took great care over his appearance and was fiercely loyal to other members of his family. It was this ‘tough and tender’ combination that served as the template for Derek Trotter. Sullivan also drew on a couple of other characters he had observed in the car trade, who used to flash their gold signet rings, wave wads of borrowed money around and buy other people drinks that they often could not really afford.

A more general idea that the writer dreamed up for Del was to make him a kind of verbal jackdaw, complementing his readiness to collect a wildly disparate range of commodities with a penchant for accumulating a similarly bizarre bricolage of exotic-sounding phrases. As Sullivan later explained:

By then we were part of the European Community and I noticed all the products you bought, whether they were British or foreign goods, had ingredients and other bits of information written in different languages. I regarded Del as an entrepreneur, also someone who thought of himself as worldly wise, yet he was living within his own personal society with people who weren’t. I thought he’d most probably read, for example, a foreign statement on the back of a pair of tights and used it to try and impress people, not realising what it actually meant, and the fact that he was impressing no one.⁹

Del already seemed real to Sullivan, but the writer wanted to find a way to constrain the figure in order to keep him from straying beyond the boundaries of this particular sitcom. At a time when the Government’s Employment Secretary was urging people like Del to ‘get on their bike’ in search of better prospects, Sullivan had to ensure that this particular character would stay put in Peckham.¹⁰ He wanted to root the free rider within some kind of family unit.

The decision was taken, therefore, to ‘trap’ him, emotionally, inside his situation. Just as the young and socially aspirational Harold Steptoe, for example, had been stuck with his old-fashioned working-class father, Albert, so Del needed to be fastened tightly to his own flesh and blood. After toying with the idea of linking him to a cousin (which, on reflection, did not seem intimate enough), he was given a dependent younger brother, Rodney, and an otherwise isolated and semi-helpless grandfather.

Rodney was inspired mainly, once again, by Sullivan’s own memories of real-life figures:

I knew a couple of guys. One is a fellow who works for me now, a mate of mine from my old street; he’s got a brother who’s about twelve years older than he is, and the brother has naturally guided him and led him and looked after him. And I knew another set of brothers, the same situation. And my sister is fourteen years older than I am, so as a kid she was never like a normal sister, she was kind of an auntie. It took me until I was twenty to really take her as a sister. I thought, I can do it in a way that he’s got this kid brother: the mother dies, and he brought him up. People will look on him as a hero because he didn’t let the kid go into care or an orphanage, he brought him up. Even though he’s a bit of a toe-rag, Del, and he’ll sell you an iffy thing, he brought that kid up, so that’s a great sound basis for a sympathetic man.¹¹

Sullivan also remembered a boy in his class at school who later ‘went round acting like he was Einstein’ because he had just passed two GCEs. This undying pride in a couple of humble O levels thus became the foundation of Rodney’s own chronically friable amour-propre.

In order to tie this odd couple more closely together emotionally, Sullivan came up with the more detailed ‘back story’ that their father had deserted them a long time ago and their mother had died when Rodney was aged just three, leaving Del to act partly as older brother and partly as a surrogate parent. Sullivan then added an older, semi-detached observer to the mix: Grandad. The older character provided a view of life that stretched from the end of the First World War, rooting the younger Trotters and taking the edge off the vicissitudes of their lives with his stoical ‘seen-it-all’ armchair view.

The next step, as he developed the potential sitcom, was to invest this trio with their own distinctively, and believably, dynamic relationship. He not only had to draw them together; he also, crucially, had to find a reason to keep them together.

Sullivan proceeded, therefore, by making sure that each figure kept bouncing off the others: Del had been forced to grow up quickly – probably too fast – and his responsible side was tempered with boyish enthusiasms and ambitions; Rodney was young but socially aware, matching himself against his older brother and finding his own way within Del’s waning parental authority. One had to feel obliged to take notice of the other. Grandad, meanwhile, was there as the one who would keep the other two feeling young while providing them with a sense – albeit unreliable – of historical perspective. Combined, the three ages gave the situation a sense of balance.

Preparing to record his initial impressions on paper, however, the writer struggled for a while to conjure up his pilot script. ‘I don’t look forward to that first day when you sit down,’ he would explain. ‘“We’re off!” That’s the worst day of the lot.’ He thus had to find unconventional ways to make the project progress: ‘That idea of just “Page 1” is a killer, and I advise everyone I ever talk to who wants to write, if you start on Page 1 and it’s not working, well, go to Page 30. Start anywhere. Just start, start getting a flavour, start getting a taste of the thing for yourself.’¹²

Easing himself slowly into this fresh comic world, therefore, he accumulated the corroborative details: various biographical notes were composed about the late mother and the absent father; Del Boy’s formal full name was recorded as ‘Derek Edward Trotter’, and Rodney’s was ‘Rodney Charlton Trotter’ (the middle name coming from his mother’s love of Charlton Athletic FC); Grandad was provided with an eventful past with plenty of potential for rambling anecdotes; the humble Peckham tower block was awarded the topically worthy name of ‘Nelson Mandela House’, given twenty-six levels, and the Trotters were installed in a tiny flat on the twelfth floor; their living room was decorated with cheap and cheerful wallpaper, an assortment of tacky bric-à-brac and boxes of dodgy merchandise; the title coined for their unofficial and unregistered company was ‘Trotters Independent Traders’; and everyone was given a vocabulary rich in contemporary Cockney slang. There were also three basic places planned for where these characters would most often move about and interact: the flat, the pub and the market.

Sullivan also felt certain that he wanted Del Boy, in particular, to embody the strangely ebullient mood that some members of Britain’s lumpenproletariat, in spite of the many widespread social and economic problems, were now exhibiting. ‘In London, at least,’ he would later explain, ‘there was this incredible tidal wave of confidence for the future, and I wanted to write about it, because no one at the BBC or on TV was writing about it then.’¹³ This defiantly upbeat spirit, in short, would supply the sitcom with its heartbeat: no matter how bleak or shambolic the circumstances might be, Del would always remain convinced that, ‘This time next year, we’ll be millionaires.’

With some of the background now settled, Sullivan’s attention moved on to the foreground. Action had to happen. The important thing was that it had to happen primarily due to the nature of the characters rather than purely through the power of the plot; viewers had to keep coming back mainly because of the comic potential they could see in the key personalities. Del had to be pushing and pulling, Rodney had to be pausing and pondering, and Grandad, sitting lazily in the middle, had to be equally unconcerned and unconvinced by either side’s position. Any particular storyline that followed would thus proceed from strong personalities and plausible problems rather than anything laboured and contrived.

The more that Sullivan contemplated the kind of schemes and scams that this trio might pursue, the more promising the project seemed. As he began to write the first few scenes and exchanges of dialogue, he already felt convinced that he could conjure up something that would strike an audience as not only funny but also engagingly real.

A couple of weeks after that initial conversation in the pub, therefore, it was an optimistic John Sullivan who turned up at Ray Butt’s office at Television Centre with a completed draft script for the new sitcom whose working title had been Readies (‘People like Del never dealt in cheques or credit cards; everything had to be ready cash, so the title seemed to be appropriate’¹⁴) but had now been given the more unusual and hence eye-catching name of Only Fools and Horses (a phrase that Sullivan felt captured Del Boy’s outlook on life very neatly). Butt read it, liked it and sent it on to the BBC’s then-Head of Comedy, John Howard Davies.

Davies (a tough, imaginative and very experienced programme-maker who had produced and/or directed such hugely successful comedy shows as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Goodies, Steptoe and Son, The Good Life and, most notably, Fawlty Towers before rising up the ranks as an executive) read it, quite liked it, but sent back a memo saying that he doubted that the script would work as an opening episode. In spite of his misgivings, however, Davies saw enough potential in the basic idea to go ahead and commission enough scripts for a full series, although there was still no firm guarantee at this stage that the project would end up on the screen.

Davies’s decision might have had something to do with the fact that, as Sullivan was still under contract, it made sense to at least keep him working for his wages. More positively, however, Davies was also shrewd enough to note that there were some encouraging signs that, all of a sudden, Sullivan had arrived with the right idea at the right time.

In terms of popular music, at least, London’s working-class themes and scenes had not received so much telling attention since the era of The Kinks in the late 1960s. Upminster’s Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the Deptford-based band Squeeze and Camden Town’s Madness had all come to prominence at the end of the 1970s with a succession of clever, playful and colourful songs about local characters and their culture (including Dury’s Essex-born ‘Billericay Dickie’, who ‘ain’t an effing thicky’; self-styled Jack the Lad ‘Clever Trevor’, who protests that ‘things have got read into what I never said till me mouth becomes me head which ain’t not all that clever’; and – in ‘This is What We Find’ – DIY expert Harold Hill, who ‘Came home to find another gentleman’s kippers in the grill/So he sanded off his winkle with his Black & Decker drill’¹⁵). The self-styled ‘rockney’ music of Chas & Dave was another recent phenomenon, with such hits as ‘Gertcha’ and ‘Rabbit’ bringing other old Cockney phrases back into fashion. After years of American-accented preoccupations and pronunciations, therefore, a growing number of British songwriters and performers were looking to London for inspiration.

More pointedly, as far as any proposed television project was concerned, there was also a new show on ITV that featured a working-class London milieu and was beginning to build a large and loyal audience: a comedy–drama written by Leon Griffiths called Minder. First broadcast in the autumn of 1979, Minder followed the fortunes of Arthur Daley, a dapper but devious ‘importer–exporter’, and Terry McCann, his young and dimmer-witted bodyguard and sidekick, as they pursued a variety of get-rich-quick schemes in a colourful black-market environment. Its growing popularity augured well for a sitcom that promised to tap into the same kind of contemporary context.

Within a matter of a few more weeks, Sullivan had written the rest of the episodes and completed the series, and Butt took them to the BBC. John Howard Davies and other senior executives at the Corporation – most importantly the Head of Light Entertainment Jimmy Gilbert – were broadly satisfied with what they read, and they gave the green light for the show to go into production.

Gilbert, however, although he found the scripts ‘really very funny indeed’,¹⁶ still had one specific reservation he wanted resolved: he did not like the title of the show. It sounded, he said, far too odd and too obscure. ‘John actually gave me the impression that, originally, it had mainly been Ray Butt’s idea,’ Gilbert would later recall. ‘I suspected that John would still have preferred Readies, but he was now standing up strongly for the new name. I just told him that I wondered if Only Fools and Horses, as a title, would really mean that much to the viewers.’¹⁷

Sullivan had actually used the phrase ‘Only Fools and Horses’ once before, as the title of an episode of Citizen Smith (the third episode of the third series, broadcast on 27 September 1979), and was now adamant that it was ideal for his new sitcom. He liked the traditional expression ‘only fools and horses work’, and the delicate irony of Del spending all hours of the day engaged in the tough and tricky business of not working.

Once again, the genial but extremely diligent Jimmy Gilbert reacted with scepticism. ‘What does it mean?’ he asked Sullivan. ‘Oh, you know,’ the writer replied, ‘it’s a London saying.’¹⁸ In fact, after the doubtful Gilbert (who had heard of a similar saying – ‘Only birds and idiots fly’ – during his days in the RAF) had asked around, it was discovered that the origins of the phrase were contentious: some claimed that it dated back to the late nineteenth century in Australia, where a notoriously unscrupulous Sydney-based racehorse owner called Jim ‘The Grafter’ Kingsley was said to have coined the term, while others argued that it had originated during the same era in American vaudeville and then crossed over the Atlantic via visiting music-hall performers. The phrase had actually first started popping up in British newspapers a little earlier in the Victorian era (The Morning Post, for example, reported in 1857 on a court case in York in which several men, on trial for a local burglary, had been seen buying a great deal of beer in a pub with gold sovereigns, boasting: ‘only fools and horses work’¹⁹), and by the middle of the twentieth century it was being cited as a relatively familiar saying.²⁰

None of this did much to reassure the Head of Light Entertainment. The key point, as far as Gilbert was concerned, was that it would probably puzzle quite a few people in Wick.

This, according to John Sullivan, was the Edinburgh-born Gilbert’s litmus test for anything that struck him as in danger of appearing obscure: as some of his family hailed from in and around the northern Scottish town of Wick, and he associated the place with good, wholesome, commonplace British tastes, he supposedly reacted instinctively to anything out of the ordinary by exclaiming, ‘But will they understand it in Wick?’²¹ Gilbert objected to Only Fools and Horses, therefore, because he doubted that the title would stand up to scrutiny from the good citizens of Wick. Gilbert himself would later clarify his position apropos ‘the myth of Wick’:

I used to have in my office a photograph which I’d taken as a joke. Because we used to go up to Caithness to a farm near Wick, where my wife comes from, and there was a broken-down crofthouse there, which had tinkers in it. And it really did look an absolute wreck. But out through the roof was the biggest television aerial you’ve ever seen! So I took a photograph of it, put it on display in my office, and, if there was ever something proposed which I knew was not going to be universally approved of or understood, I used to show them this photograph and say: ‘He’s paying his licence fee too!’ So that’s how the ‘Will they understand it in Wick’ stories came about. It was just a light-hearted way of getting people to think a little bit harder about their audience.²²

Sullivan was sufficiently rattled by this reaction to propose as an alternative title Dip Your Wick, which he knew, as Jimmy Gilbert was a Baptist with a pronounced aversion to smut, would go down as badly as possible. ‘I almost got the sack on that one,’ Sullivan later recalled.²³ Among the other, serious suggestions that the team went on to consider, the most popular title was probably Big Brother, but that ended up being rejected because of the possible association with George Orwell’s 1984. Time was now pressing heavily, and Sullivan was due to meet Jimmy Gilbert and John Howard Davies at the start of the following week to agree on a definitive title, so he spent the weekend trying hard to come up with something that sounded right to him as well as right for them.

He typed and Tipp-Exed but still ended up drawing a blank. Some invaluable advice arrived shortly before the meeting from Gareth Gwenlan, another experienced executive producer in the BBC’s Comedy department, who had heard of the Only Fools idea and was eager to offer, discreetly, his support. ‘I told him to say he wanted to use [Only Fools and Horses as the title],’ Gwenlan would recall, ‘and they would need to think of something else if they didn’t like it.’²⁴

It worked. Sullivan sat down, shrugged his shoulders, said his mind was a blank and passed the buck across to Gilbert and Davies. The two executives exchanged glances, somewhat anxiously, and realised that neither had anything constructive to say, so they then said to Sullivan: ‘OK, you can have it.’ After several weeks of haggling, therefore, the team went back to the future: the show was going to be called Only Fools and Horses after all.

The last obstacle had been overcome. Everyone was now committed to pushing the project on.

The sense of relief, mixed with excitement, was immense. After suffering the crushing disappointment of seeing Over the Moon cancelled at such a late stage in the planning process, John Sullivan and Ray Butt could now celebrate the fact that a new sitcom was about to be created. The next stage, however, would be crucial: they would have to ensure that it was properly cast.