Only Fools And Horses
- TV sitcom
- BBC One
- 1981 - 2003
- 64 episodes (7 series)
Sitcom about two market traders, Del Boy and his brother Rodney. Stars David Jason, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Buster Merryfield, Lennard Pearce, Roger Lloyd Pack and more.
- Series 3, Christmas Special repeated tomorrow at 12pm on U&Gold
Streaming rank this week: 55
Only Fools And Horses trivia
David Jason was cast as Del Boy after producer Ray Butt saw him playing Granville in Open All Hours.
The BBC now charge broadcasters up to £2,000 a time to show the clip of Del Boy falling through the bar. This was revealed by Sky's Soccer AM, who wanted to use the clip when they interviewed Roger Lloyd Pack. Sky decided they didn't have that kind of money to spend on a 10 second clip and so bought a live turkey for their Christmas special instead.
Source: Soccer AM, Christmas 2007
David Jason was not the first choice to play Derek Trotter, it was Scottish-born actor Enn Reitel. When David Jason was sent the script he thought it was to play Grandad Trotter. Jim Broadbent was also asked, but he was unavailable.
Production Manager Jo Austin was so unfamiliar with Cockney rhyming slang that initially she thought the actors were misreading the script in rehearsals.
Although there are now many duplicate vans across the globe, there were only ever a small group of Reliant Regals used in the series: one main vehicle, and two backups.
Original drafts of the Series 6 (1989) episode Danger UXD had the Trotters' iconic van being blown up. This was removed before the script was finalised.
Naming buildings after Nelson Mandela, like Nelson Mandela House, was a popular trend in the early 1980s by left-wing councils, after Margaret Thatcher reportedly claimed Mandela was a terrorist.
Elizabeth Hurley auditioned 'enthusiastically' for the part of Rodney's girlfriend Cassandra but was rejected because she was 'deemed too model-like'.
The original title of the series was The Readies but writer John Sullivan had insisted that Only Fools and Horses was a more apt title. He had used it before in the title of an episode of Citizen Smith.
Buster Merryfield, who played Uncle Albert, really had been a war hero - in the Royal Artillery and as a jungle warfare instructor - but he had also been a bank manager in Thames Ditton.
Costume Designer Phoebe DeGaye wanted Del Boy to have permed hair but David Jason declined. She found Rodney's green camouflage combat jacket in a throwaway pile in the BBC costume department.