John Sullivan (I)

It's Christmas 1960 and the Trotters are settling into their new flat in Sir Walter Raleigh House, Peckham. In this second prequel to Only Fools and Horses, 16-year-old Del (The Inbetweeners' James Buckley) has left school. Very much the fledgeling wheeler-dealer, he's busily flogging 45s straight off the back of a boat from America and getting engaged to half of sarf London in the hope of creating some lustful opportunities. Rodney's still a baby, of course, and his father, the roguish but debonair Freddie "the Frog" Robdal (Nicholas Lyndhurst), has been temporarily detained. In Wormwood Scrubs. The first serving of John Sullivan's Rock & Chips last January gave many critics indigestion but it went down well with viewers, who didn't mind the lack of belly laughs. There are some cracking performances here, too: Robert Daws is splendid as a sleazy cinema manager and Paula Wilcox as Reg Trotter's mum surely must be closely related to Catherine Tate's Nan.

There's a whiff of John Sullivan's The Green Green Grass about this new show starring Ashley Jensen as Erin, a high-powered ad executive who - on a drunken internet shopping spree - buys a run-down farm in Yorkshire. As well as out-of-place Erin, there are stereotypes everywhere: a horsey next door neighbour (Sylvestra Le Touzel), a blustering family doctor (Robert Pugh), a shallow, metropolitan ex-boyfriend (Raza Jaffrey) and a nice, unsophisticated vet (Married Single Other's Shaun Dooley). It's as plodding as Erin's herd of cows, but the suggestion of subterfuge and intrigue could bode well if it becomes a series.

John Sullivan on Rock & Chips: Five Gold Rings

The 90-minute Rock & Chips film which was aired last January ended on the 2nd November, 1960, with the Trotter Family ensconced in their new high-rise council flat with the addition of the just born baby Rodney.

John Sullivan's 90-minute prequel to Only Fools and Horses turned out to be a wonderful surprise. With no laughter track and a minimum of slapstick, it is very different in tone to its successor. Rather than going for broad laughter it concentrates instead on an affair between the unhappily married Joan Trotter (Kellie Bright) and a local crook (Nicholas Lyndhurst). It is a simple love story played out against the backdrop of a pre-Beatles Britain, when money was short and the chance to move into a tower block was seen as the epitome of luxury. Rock & Chips works on its terms, and explains much about why Del and Rodney turned out the way they did.

Not that Del Boy would have even been troubled by the absence of quality control, but Only Fools and Horses continued several series past its sell-by date and ended up a pale, and stale, imitation of its once great self. Writer John Sullivan then flogged the dead horse even further by giving the least interesting supporting character, Boycie, an ill-judged and mirth free spin-off, The Green Green Grass.

So my expectations were suitably low as I approached Rock & Chips, a feature length Only Fools and Horses prequel set in 1960.

Guess what? It was terrific. Freed from the tyrannical demands of a studio audience, Sullivan was able to explore his characters in greater depth, fashioning a genuinely moving love story infused with poignancy and charm. The laughs may not have come as thick and fast as in Only Fools' sitcom heyday, but the comic moments were of the highest quality and beautifully crafted into the narrative. For once the description comedy-drama was fully appropriate.

Sixteen year old Del Boy (James Buckley) and his Nags Head cronies were all present and correct, seen mounting the first rung on the entrepreneurial ladder by selling nylon fibre carpets that electrocuted anyone who set foot on them. However, the focus of the film fell upon Del's mother Joan (Kellie Bright), and how she met Rodney's father, career criminal Freddie "The Frog" Robdal. In a crowd-pleasing piece of casting, Nicholas Lyndhurst played Robdal and did a fine job of it, nicely capturing the conflicted emotions of a ruthless, self-serving, amoral ex-con bewildered by love.

The period setting was lovingly recreated, the performances top notch and the script - apart from a couple of instances where Sullivan needlessly spelt out the jokes - was first class. Lovely jubbly work, John. Now leave it alone.

Rock & Chips Review

Overall, Rock & Chips wasn't a total disaster, but it felt like a pointless excuse for John Sullivan to revisit his biggest success, now that David Jason has called it quits and present-day adventures are impossible.

Rock & Chips was a strange affair, a 90-minute amplification of one of the running gags in Only Fools and Horses, that concerning Rodney's dubious parentage. All the old gang - Del and Trigger and Boycie - were on hand as schoolboys, but John Sullivan's drama was less interested in them than in the brief affair between Joanie, Del's mum, and Freddie "The Frog" Robdal, a career criminal, played here (naturally) by Nicholas Lyndhurst. Less interested, too, in straightforward sitcom than an unsatisfactory hybrid of classic Trotter cheekiness and something much more melancholy and heartfelt. The soundtrack was like an antique jukebox and there were some sly touches of period detail (a cigarette machine in a hospital waiting room), but the narrative's focus was blurred and the pacing weirdly off - quite a lot of the time you were well ahead of the drama and hanging around for it to catch up with you.

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.

I'm not sure what to think of this new show, which is of course a prequel to the ever-so-famous Only Fools and Horses; it certainly wasn't laugh out loud funny, but I'm loathed to knock anything written by John Sullivan, as he's one of my heroes.

However, whilst there was undoubtedly value in the nostalgia element of seeing Del et al as teenagers, and Nick Lyndhurst playing Rodney's dad, 'Freddie The Frog' Robdal, the jokes were, at best, hackneyed.

But somehow, whilst I'd normally be the first to say that the worth of any comedic pudding is in how well the humour can be swallowed, on this occasion, it felt rather like putting on a pair of comfy - albeit new - slippers.

The attention to detail of the props was without fault though, including a ciggy machine in the hospital. I remember when smokers had a room to smoke in on every ward, so that brought a wry smile to my face. Liberated days indeed.

But again, for every upside there seemed to be a downside, and the on-screen chemistry between Lyndhurst as Robdal and Kellie Bright as Joan Trotter - matriarch of the grown up Trotters we know and love - just didn't work.

In fact, it felt a bit... icky. Something of the roll-your-owns about it was of course simply because Lyndhurst played Rodney, so to see him canoodling with his mum was odd. It's just nigh on impossible for me to move on past seeing Lyndhurst as anyone other than Rodders.

But back to the plus points, I really enjoyed being reintroduced to Trig, Boycie and of course, Del. It was all a bit Back to the Future, but no less rewarding for that. And there were of course several reference points to which we could relate. It was interesting too to see how the Trotters first arrived at Mandela House.

In fact, all the back-stories were compelling and fun viewing, even if, as I mentioned earlier, the jokes were rather lame and infinitely predictable. But to be honest, if they hadn't been, I suspect it would've lost some of its charm.

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.