James Buckley

In its one-off revival last night as Rock & Chips, Only Fools and Horses, the BBC's over-loved hit from the Eighties and Nineties, performed a genre-bend. A broad, sentimental, Cockney sitcom became a comedy-drama of charm and subtlety that did its writer John Sullivan nothing but credit. It is possible, I concede, that as an irregular viewer I missed nuances in the original, but for most part Only Fools stays in the mind - does it not? - for the chandelier smash, Rodney and Del Boy's foggy transformation into Batman and Robin, and David Jason's perfect fall through a non-existent bar, a moment pilloried with splendid unfairness by the comedian Stewart Lee for being repeatedly voted television's funniest moment.

There was almost no physical comedy in Rock & Chips, a prequel set in 1960 (it felt earlier). Del Boy was a teenager, Rodney not yet born and their mother, Joan, not merely still alive but, in Kellie Bright's winsome portrayal, still sexy. (I'll never think of Kate Aldridge, whom she plays in The Archers, in the same way again.) The 90 minutes' broadest point was Phil Daniels's moustache, donned to complete his misjudged turn as Grandad. Joan's boss's lascivious attentions to her bosom would also count as seaside postcard humour were they not undercut by the seediness of his masturbating after each of their encounters.

Instead of big laughs we were delivered a genetic explanation for why Rodney was as he was in Only Fools: melancholy, disappointed, brighter intellectually than his half-brother Del but without his neon-glare personality. His father, an unknown quantity in the series, turned out to be a ruthless jailbird with an artistic streak called Freddie Robdal (pun), who seduced his mother right under the careless supervision of Del's idle father, Reg. Nicholas Lyndhurst who, of course, played Rodney, here played his father, Freddie, and produced a detailed performance that suggested the con's psychotic tendencies could be tamed by the right woman. It was from Freddie that Rodney must have got his brains, for Joan was so thick she did not get a single joke that Freddie pushed her way. From Joan, he clearly inherited his stoical sadness.

As the really boyish Del Boy, James Buckley conveyed during his relatively brief screen time his Oedipal feelings for his mother and an early surefootedness in business, if not in society. Joan, looking down at her new baby, predicts, not unreasonably, that Del will be rich one day. From another high rise Freddie looks down on them. She nods her head. He raises his glass in pride. His paternity has finally been acknowledged. The question posed by Rodney in the last Only Fools and Horses, did his father love his mother, has been answered. Full of astute period details, such as the family planning clinic where a room of Mrs Smiths await their pregnancy tests, and with enough good lines to get by on (a snail looks like "a bogey in a crash helmet"), Rock & Chips was better than the sequel that preceded it.

There are many for whom the words Only Fools And Horses spell comedy gold. The Peckham-based misadventures of Del Boy and co habitually figure in all-time greatest sitcom lists and there can't be anyone left alive who hasn't seen David Jason fall through the bar at the Nag's Head. Like it or not, Only Fools And Horses has become part of British folklore. So as someone who never really got the whole lovely-jubbly lark, it was hard not to approach Rock & Chips without a touch of trepidation. This prequel from writer John Sullivan threatened to be 90 minutes of in-jokes about characters I never cared about in the first place, stuffed with references that would fly straight over my head. But knock me down with a filched feather duster, if it didn't turn out toan understated slice of bittersweet nostalgia.

The first mildly weird thing Rock & Chips had going for it was that Nicholas Lyndhurst was playing the dodgy criminal who turned out to be Rodney's dad. Given that Lyndhurst will forever be linked at the hip to the gormless Rodders, it felt oddly incestuous watching him seduce Mrs Trotter in a liaison that would climax with him fathering himself. Or maybe that was just me. There were more major plus points in the performances of James Buckley (of The Inbetweeners fame) as the young Del Boy and Kellie Bright as his sainted mother. Transcending the clunking staginess and looming sentimentality that threatened to scupper Rock & Chips at any minute, Buckley and Bright seemed beamed in from a classic black-and-white kitchen sink movie of the 1960s. They deserved a show all to themselves.

Though it was strangely unconvincing in its period detail - everything looked squeaky clean and lifted from the BBC props cupboard - and had more than the odd lapse into knucklehead farce, Rock & Chips was more than a mere vanity project for John Sullivan. Somehow it made me care about the Trotters in a way decades of Only Fools And Horses never came close to.

John Sullivan's one-off drama sees the return to TV of his most famous creations, the Trotters of Only Fools and Horses (which still holds the British record for biggest sitcom audience, over 24 million for the 1996 Christmas episode Time on Our Hands). Set in 1960, this focuses on the family's early years in Peckham, with Shaun Dingwall as bone-idle Trotter paterfamilias Reg, Kelly Bright as his wife Joan and James Buckley as a youthful Del Boy. Nicholas Lyndhurst (who played Rodney in the original Only Fools), though, is the undoubted centre of attention in the role of Freddie "The Frog" Robdal, a charming geezer-about-town whose roving eye has settled on the lovely Mrs T...

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Sir David Jason on the set of Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Chips

Sir David Jason stopped by to give some tips to the young Del, James Buckley.

I love comedy. You muck around for a few hours...

HE'S the man who will do for winkle-pickers and leather jackets what David Jason did for camel-haired coats and cocktail umbrellas.

Up-and-coming actor James Buckley has scooped a dream role playing a young Derek "Del Boy" Trotter.

Many will be just as keen to see how the 22-year-old fares as the London wheeler dealer originally played by David Jason.

But James is no stranger to playing a cheeky chappy. He said: "I've always watched comedy, and being a comedic actor is what I'm quite good at. It's simply a lot of fun.

"I've previously done heavier parts where you really have to get into character.

"But I prefer a job where you can turn up and work with a group of people you really get along with, muck around for a couple of hours, film it and go home."

James Buckley looks cushty as the teenage Derek Trotter in new BBC show Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Chips, a prequel to comedy classic Only Fools And Horses.

The Inbetweeners star pulled on a leather jacket and winkle-pickers yesterday and braved the rain in London for the first day of filming.

Del Boy's tarty mum Joan, played by Kellie Bright, and work-shy dad Reg (Shaun Dingwall) were also on yesterday's shoot.

Inbetweeners' James Buckley to play teenage Del Boy

The cast for the workingly-titled Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Chips has been announced - and it's a very exciting mix.

Oh dear. It was already a very male show, but this week Dean Craig's campus comedy - a non-swearing, teenage Curb Your Enthusiasm mixed with The Inbetweeners - fumbles about in Porkies territory when Danny needs a subject for his Female Beauty photography project and lets Shane give him a few unethical tips. Still, it enables their misanthropic housemate Fred (James Buckley) to cruise past the clueless pair once more, and throws in an appealing romance to leaven the testosterone-fuelled horseplay. Next week's episode gets things back on track.

Off the Hook (BBC3) was always going to suffer in comparison with The Inbetweeners. It's hard not to see it as a sedate university-days version of the boisterous schooldays sitcom, not least because the two shows share an actor in basin-faced James Buckley. Indeed, the former distinguishes itself from the latter by being nowhere near as good. In place of the exuberant puerility of The Inbetweeners, Off the Hook offers stock characters, lame gags and a very tame take on freshman year. It's odd that the show about the older kids is the more bowdlerised and less well observed, but when you hear it's been scaled up from a series of five-minute internet shorts, it sort of makes sense.