Only Fools Work
Horses Have a Better Union Than Us
Plonker
It’s weird, the places this job takes you. I’m not even sure what “this job” is, to be honest. What am I? A video producer? A writer? General games media dogsbody for hire?
At the moment most of my time is being spent writing reviews for a couple of websites. Wee bits here and there. Three weeks ago I was pulling 18 hour days cutting together a Top Gear spin-off, which was so full of VideoGamer alumni on both sides of the camera that you could arguably call it a Miller Report spin-off as well.
Every video job posting I look at wants the Winning Applicant to be a combination of Steven Spielberg, Maurice Saatchi, and Tom from MySpace. And also be cool with earning a poverty wage in the most expensive city on earth, which is a piece for another time.
Life is odd. Crap. Brilliant. Mad. And it rhymes with itself.
Voicie
A few years ago we were approached to do a few trailers for a city-building game, which I won’t name, but will describe as trying desperately to be described as “pythonesque” despite having more of the spirit of Roy Chubby Brown. I don’t often mention this gig because it’s the one and only time in my company’s existence where, to put it extremely politely, we didn’t get on with the client.
The work, though, was fun. We shot a live-action intro. I wrote the script, did some guide VO, and cut it together with gameplay footage. We then learnt that the final VO would be provided by John Challis. “That’s pretty cool”, I thought. I’d written words for Boycie. You know. From Only Fools. Trigger’s Broom. During the war. Falling through the bar. Yellow Robin Reliant, which is actually a *Reliant Supervan* but you can’t expect people to know things.
This Isn’t Peckham
Years later, we’re filming the last episode of Top Gear Gaming with Tom Bennett, who plays Del Boy in the west end musical, but whom you know as the guy from PhoneShop. We’re renting a Yellow *Reliant Supervan*. We’re getting things cleared by people who get things cleared by people who get things cleared by The Sullivan Estate.
Immersed in all this, I start to remember how much of an institution the show was. My childhood alarm clock – a diorama of the Yellow *Reliant Supervan* parked outside a South London tower block, which would play the “Why do Only Fools and Horses work?” refrain from the theme tune on an interminable loop until you turned it off. It eventually mysteriously broke, and was replaced with a functionally similar Star Trek: The Next Generation clock.
Durin’ the Postwar
Before it was a novelty alarm clock, or a west end musical, or a cloud of half-remembered bits that brexit da’s get wrong, Only Fools and Horses was - get this - a sitcom. An extremely good one at that.
At some point in the grim darkness of post-postwar Britain, still clinging to the fading light of its self-described golden age as it waded through the aftermath of the 1970s economic crisis, a TV show captured the mood of the time with a delicate mix of sight gags, pathos, and long, ponderous scenes of single-room word sparring. A Waiting for Godot with bus routes to Croydon.
The first series of Only Fools gives us a glimpse of one very specific moment in time; not long after Thatcher came to power, but just before the Falklands war. The transition point between two distinct nations: a stateless limbo preserved in the amber of nicotine stains on Bakelite. The tired, depleted husk of a socialist country waiting to be born again as a citadel of greed.
It’s as brilliant as it is difficult to watch with 21st century sensibilities. The speed at which it bounces from its characteristic wit to various forms of unchecked prejudice is enough to give you whiplash. There’s no way to soften it: Del Boy and Rodney are, to only slightly differing degrees, fundamentally misogynist, casually racist, suspicious of foreigners, and frightfully homophobic.
This is made all the more jarring by the fact that these characters, staring back from the fat end of time, have been absorbed into our culture as bundles of cute catchphrases. Their unsavoury bits jettisoned, their more endearing qualities held up as virtues. “He’s a bit of a Del Boy” they say, usually affectionately, about anyone with a bit of patter and a work ethic.
They’re not supposed to be role models, of course. (I mean, Ronnie Biggs and Alf Garnett aren’t supposed to be role models either, but Britain has an alarming habit of putting worstcunts on a pedestal1). They’re supposed to be personable, sure, but also pitiful and idiotic. Writers have a great tendency to make stupid characters come out with stupid things.
Grandad has one of the best lines in the whole show, which isn’t stupid, and rounds off a monologue about watching the wounded return from The Great War in his youth. “They promised us homes fit for heroes. They gave us heroes fit for homes.” It’s an arresting moment, and it isn’t quickly hurried out of frame by a cheap follow-on gag – they hold it there, on the last word, for an achingly long time. A century’s worth of disillusionment suspended in a dramatic close-up. Batman costumes, pratfalls, and broom handles melt away in that moment to reveal the gnarly truth at the core of the show. Grandad’s generation paid in tears for a future which had all but evaporated. Rodney and Del Boy, through economic desolation and the suffocating weight of cold war paranoia, didn’t have a future at all. This is a show about people who missed the party.
As Global Britain meanders from one crisis to the next, and the prospect of having to maintain three or four jobs just to survive becomes hyper-normalised and branded as entrepreneurial by dimwitted androids who invent phrases like “the gig economy”, the paint-flaked, grime-smeared world of Del Boy’s Britain feels ever more tangible.
[Boycie Laugh]
Of course, later seasons of the show would come to reflect the Britain of Thatcherism, an environment more embodied by the character of Boycie than arguably anyone else in the ensemble.
By all accounts, John Challis was a lovely man. He liked hedgehogs and Ice T, and will be missed.
A Photo Of My Cat
Though Bristol has a reputation for knocking them off again.