This time next year.... (Only Fools and Horses)

Member Name: ElChupacabra

Product:	Only Fools and Horses
Date:	01/08/09 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellant cast, wondeful scripts, great heart.

Disadvantages: None

Only Fools is my all time favourite sitcom...and it deserves to be.

This show is very much lightening in a bottle. Its success is very much down to the combination of great acting and wonderful scripts. Quite simply without the key ingredients the show would not work.

As I am sure everyone knows already, Only Fools and Horses follows the exploits of the Trotter brothers, Derek "Del-Boy" (Sir David Jason) & younger brother Rodney (Nicholas Lyndhurst). Del is desperate to be rich and successful yet has to be content with wheeling and dealing is the glamourous world of market trading. Over 20 years the show ran and we watched the characters grow and experience life, from single men to married with children. Along for the ride was usually either their grandfather (Leonard Pearce) of their Uncle Albert (Buster Merryfield). Add to that a terrific supporting cast & characters, such as Trigger (Roger Lloyd Pack), Boycie (John Challis) and Denzel (Paul Barber), and you have the recipe for a wonderful show.

The whole cast delivered wonderful performances with excellent comedy timing, helped greatly by the sharp and witty scripts from show creator John Sullivan.

For those of us from a working class background there was great familiarity in Only Fools. When the show started television was largely targetted at the middle and upper classes, with occasional exceptions such as Steptoe & Son (very much an early verison of this show) and In Sickness and In Health. But Only Fools had something those earlier shows and the middle class ones didn't. It had a heart. You truly wanted Del-Boy and Rodney to succeed and John Sullivan's excellent scripts did not just make you cry, they made you feel happy and sad and could make you shed a tear. The talents of Sullivan, Jason and Lyndhurst enabled the show to inject humour in sad situations, and vice versa, without it ever feeling crass or inappropriate.

The only dissapointing part of the show came with the final three specials, set after the Trotters had become millionaires. Many say they show wasn't the same after the Trotters tried to deal with bankrupcty, but I feel the actual reason the show did not work properly is that the brothers never have the senior Trotter, Grandad or Albert, to play off. I thing it is often seriously overlooked how much Pearce, and particularly Merryfield, brought to the show. It's a bit like the Star Trek dynamic of Kirk, Spock & McCoy, Whilst Kirk & Spock can survive by themselves, their stories where they play off of Dr. McCoy were always that much richer and I feel the final three Only Fools very much missed the elder Trotter character.

Still the last three episodes are vastly above most of the sitcoms on TV today and the show as a whole is quite simply leagues above anything else, as continued re-runs and record breaking initial transmission figures proved.

If you are British this show should be in your DVD collection in it's entirety. If you are not, but you live in the UK, it is the perfect introduction to the grass roots working class Englishman.

Summary: The greatest British sitcome of all time.