Simon J. Ballard looks back at Britain’s favourite sit-com and explains why it is that we all still love John Sullivan’s hilarious Only Fools and Horses…

Above and right: Jolly Boys of Peckham: David Jason as Del Boy Trotter, Nicholas Lyndhurst as Rodney and Lennard Pearce as Grandad

If it hadn’t been for Minder, there may not have been Only Fools and Horses…That’s not to say John Sullivan cribbed the idea of the dodgy wheeler dealer Arthur Daley for Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter - that idea had been brewing pretty much all his life- but the Euston Films series for Thames did convince a sceptical BBC that a sitcom based around the lives of working-class people could be a hit.

BBC sitcoms around the time of Only Fools’debut on 8 thSeptember 1981 were middle class and upwards on average, with shows like Terry and June and Butterflies enjoying regular success. Indeed, nearly 24 million viewers watched the finale to series one of To the Manor Born in 1979, record ratings for a non-live event that wouldn’t be broken until 1996, and we’ll come to that a bit later!

As far as dear old Auntie Beeb was concerned, working class life just wasn’t funny, which is odd when one considers just how phenomenally successful the rag and bone-centred Steptoe and Son was, in an age when the sitcom format was initially establishing itself thanks to Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

This was a show that wallowed in pickled onions and pathos, hilarious one moment, gut-wrenchingly heart-wringing the next as Harold Steptoe - much like Hancock - had intellectual as well as class aspirations, but could never shake off his father Albert, and his working class roots. Appropriately, Steptoe would prove to be a huge influence on John Sullivan when he came to craft Episode One of Only Fools, called Big Brother (which very nearly became its overall title), with a strong mixture of humour and dramatic background character established from the off, much in the same vein as that Comedy Playhouse pilot The Offer which introduced us to the father and son of Oil Drum Lane.

Only Fools and Horses was voted the number one sitcom in a 2003 poll and was voted the most loved BBC Show based on a poll conducted by The One Show in January 2022. What is it about this series that we love so much? Why, despite an initially lukewarm reception, did we take to the Trotter family and their endeavours to be millionaires?