and educated at Ottershaw independent school near Woking in Surrey, Challis had started his adult life as a trainee estate agent before committing himself to an acting career. Moving on to enjoy a spell with the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as making countless television appearances in shows ranging from Coronation Street to Doctor Who, he was, by 1981, a very experienced and versatile performer well respected within the profession, even though his name remained relatively unfamiliar to the average viewer at home.
Sullivan and Butt had worked with him a couple of years before, when he appeared as a police inspector in an episode of Citizen Smith, and Sullivan, in particular, had been so impressed with his performance that the writer had promised the actor he would find something else for him to do in a future project. Challis had heard such things many times before, taking each one with a pinch of salt, so he was surprised when, in April 1981, he received a script from Ray Butt inviting him to take on the part of Boycie.
Challis had only recently returned from America, where he had worked on a number of plays and enjoyed the experience so much that he had been tempted to stay there indefinitely, until a failed romance prompted a sudden change of mind. Resuming his career in Britain, he regarded the Only Fools offer as nothing more than a short-term distraction, as, initially, it only involved a single day’s shooting on the set. Both Sullivan and Butt, however, were hopeful that Challis would make Boycie seem too good a character to leave behind if the first series proved a success.
Other minor characters were also recruited, but, by this stage, the core of the ensemble was safely in place. With Jason as Del, Lyndhurst as Rodney and Pearce as Grandad, the heart of the new sitcom was about to start beating.
It had been, by the normally very eventful standards of the traditional British sitcom, a relatively painless and problem-free process. True, the casting of Del Boy had lured Ray Butt into embarking on a number of brief detours and diversions, but, after that singular shaky start, the proper aim had been achieved: not only finding the right individual actors, but also, perhaps even more crucially, the right combination of individual actors. The talent, the team and the chemistry were now there, and that made everyone involved so much more confident about all of the other daunting tasks that now had to be attempted.
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’