in A Sharp Intake of Breath, and that was all very slapstick, falling over on the floor, opening the washing machine and all the water coming out. I though that was his style and I was saying that Del had to be sharp, very sharp, tough, an aggressive little guy who has lived in the streets and survived.’10 There was no great aversion to Jason as an actor, as far as the scriptwriter was concerned; he was just sceptical as to how closely such a figure could come to matching his mental image of the indomitably doughty Del.
Some sources would later allege that, while Sullivan pondered this proposal, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment, Jimmy Gilbert, expressed his concern that the decision to give David Jason a sitcom of his own might ruffle the feathers and upset the future plans of his Open All Hours colleague Ronnie Barker, who was such a big BBC star at the time that no executive wanted to risk upsetting him in any way.11 This is incorrect. Barker himself, in fact, not only liked and admired Jason both as an actor and a friend but also saw his colleague as his protégé, and was certainly not the kind of performer who resented seeing younger talents rise up the ladder. Gilbert would also later confirm that he had never expressed any such concerns:
I was pleased when David’s name was mentioned. There had been various actors, ever since I became Head of Comedy in 1973, whom I’d wanted to find things for at the BBC. The top five were: Ronnie Barker, Richard Briers, Ronnie Corbett, Leonard Rossiter and David Jason. So I’d been delighted when David Jason joined Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours. Then, some time later, his agent at the time, Richard Stone, who was an old friend of mine, told me: ‘David would love to do some more Open All Hours with Ronnie – he loves it, and loves working with Ronnie – but he would also want us to look for something else, for him, as well.’ And I was happy to take that on board. So when David was suggested for Only Fools and Horses there was absolutely no resistance from me – quite the opposite in fact – and certainly no anxiety about upsetting Ronnie Barker, because, after all, Ronnie had been doing the same thing himself, with Porridge and other shows, and I knew that he and David were such great friends.12
One query that Gilbert did express initially was much easier for the team to dismiss. He had argued that David Jason did not look anything like Nicholas Lyndhurst, so audiences might struggle to suspend their disbelief when watching them playing brothers. Apart from the fact that Gilbert appeared to have forgotten that the BBC had already enjoyed great success in the 1960s with a sitcom – Sykes and A . . . – that had relied on the comic conceit that Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques had been cast to play ‘identical twins’, he also seemed to have ignored the fact that, as far as this current project was concerned, such a physical mismatch had already been envisaged clearly by John Sullivan in his scripts. ‘The whole point,’ explained the exasperated writer, ‘is that Del and Rodney are actually the only ones who think they are brothers. Everyone else thinks they might well have different fathers. They had to be counterpoints to each other – one tall, one short, one blond and the other dark-haired. They had to look different to each other and at one point when we casting there was even a suggestion that we had one of them mixed race.’13 The disparity in height was also something that Sullivan had planned in order to prevent Del from appearing unsympathetic: ‘In my view, they had to be different. If you had a big, tall Del Boy treating a slightly smaller Rodney the way Del treated his younger brother, people would regard him as a bully. I felt you had to have Del smaller than his brother to get away from the bullying aspect.’14
Butt was convinced that Jason was, by this time, the best option, so he sent the actor a script via their mutual friend and colleague Sydney Lotterby (the producer of Open All Hours) and, without specifying what role was still to be cast, invited him to respond with his opinions. Jason loved looking through the sample episode – ‘I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever read’ – but was unsure of where, if anywhere, he was meant to fit within this fiction. His first guess was that it might be the part of Grandad, because, he reflected, he had acquired something of a reputation for playing elderly characters. It was true: as early as 1968, when Jason was still only in his twenties, he came close to being cast as the septuagenarian Jack Jones in Dad’s Army, then portrayed an elderly patient in both a 1969 episode of Doctor in the House and a 1971 episode of Doctor at Large, as well as a hundred-year-old gardener named Dithers in the 1972 Ronnie Barker sitcom His Lordship Entertains, and then in the mid-1970s he appeared once again alongside Barker in Porridge as the very elderly inmate called ‘Blanco’, so he would have been forgiven in 1981 for wondering if he was now wanted for the part of the Trotter boys’ grandfather.15
Ray Butt clarified the matter when he called to ask Jason to come in and read for the part of Del Boy. Somewhat ruffled by the revelation that he had only come into contention as a ‘tail-end Charlie’, Jason was tempted to point out politely that, at this stage in his career, he felt he was far past auditioning for jobs. The quality of the script, however, struck him as simply too good to turn down, and, besides, the character of Del Boy seemed to be the role for which he had been waiting throughout his career. After being asked to play a long succession of losers and lonely misfits, here, at last, was something different: a quick-witted, fast-talking, indefatigably ebullient sort of character who was always the centre of attention. The actor therefore agreed to go in for a meeting, desperate to do whatever was needed to secure himself the job.
Jason was asked to return the following day to read with Nicholas Lyndhurst and Lennard Pearce, because Butt was particularly keen to see how well the three actors would interact. John Sullivan was also present, and, as the session progressed, he was very impressed. The instant rapport, particularly between Jason and Lyndhurst, struck the writer as extraordinary: ‘They had this little read and although they’d never met before, it was immediate – just like you see it now. They both went into their characters. It was incredible. They had this wonderful chemistry. David was perfect all along and I didn’t realise just how perfect he was for the part.’16 The impact of the read-through was overwhelming; Butt and Sullivan simply turned to each other and nodded.
The decision was made there and then, and all three actors – Jason, Lyndhurst and Pearce – were duly confirmed as part of the cast. The Trotter family had been formed.
This, however, was only one aspect of the casting process. While the search for these three key actors had been going on, Ray Butt had also been busy selecting the first few supporting players. The two ostensibly minor characters requiring the most careful casting, because – if played well – they had the most potential to evolve into regular figures, were Del’s permanently dazed-looking roadsweeper friend Trigger, and a competitive local second-hand car dealer with misguided pretensions to social superiority called Boycie.
Ray Butt spotted a potential ‘Trigger’ (RODNEY: ‘Why do they call him Trigger? Does he carry a gun?’ DEL: ‘No, he looks like an ’orse!’) when, a few months before, he had gone to see a West End play (a comedy by Stanley Price starring Penelope Keith and Peter Jeffrey) called Moving. Butt had actually chosen to go there in order to assess the suitability of Billy Murray to play the part of Del, but, once he started watching the action unfold, he found himself drawn instead to another actor in the cast: Roger Lloyd Pack.
Born in Islington, London, in 1944, and educated at Bedales public school in Hampshire, Lloyd Pack – the son of the film and theatre character actor Charles Lloyd Pack – was an experienced RADA graduate who had already appeared in numerous television programmes (ranging from the critically acclaimed Quentin Crisp biopic The Naked Civil Servant in 1975 to an episode of the popular crime series The Professionals in 1978) as well as a steady procession of theatrical productions. Butt, who had worked with the actor’s father, looked at this tall and thin figure on stage with his long and lugubrious face and thought he was ‘just right’ to play Trigger: ‘So I met with him, we had a chat, and he accepted the part.’17
Casting the character of the shady and snide second-hand car dealer, Boycie, did not take the team too long, either. This was partly because the character was not envisaged originally as a definite regular in the show, and partly because both John Sullivan and Ray Butt soon agreed that the actor best suited to playing him – and perhaps pointing to his full comic future – was John Challis.
Born