Boycie & Beyond

by John Challis

  ‘Here. Your place,’ they replied.

  Just for a moment, I felt hurt on behalf of our beloved house, then I thought of the location fee, and maybe now we could repair some of the fifteenth-century plasterwork.

  The pilot for the proposed Boycie & Marlene show was to be shot on location around Ludlow (where a suitable house for Boycie’s Peckham residence was found), around the farm next door to us, in the surrounding lanes and fields, and at the Bridges Inn at Ratlinghope, deep in the Shropshire Hills, near Church Stretton.

  Although they were going to film around Wigmore Abbey from the outside, the interiors would be shot at Teddington Studios. I was very used to the business of filming, but I experienced an entirely new feeling when the crew started to descend on my own place, in surroundings that were now my reality, among people I knew, liked and respected.

  Sue and I met several times during the planning of it all; she was delighted that the shooting would take place in my home patch; it seemed somehow to give us a little extra say in what was going on. We knew we would have to be on top form, as leaders of the company, and although we’d met some other members of the cast, we couldn’t yet tell if we would all gel satisfactorily into a cohesive unit that gives the best results.

  Inevitably there was a lot of excitement locally, everyone agog to see what would happen and how the process of filming worked. Everybody wanted to know if Del Boy and Rodney were suddenly going to pop out of the shrubbery. I had to say I didn’t know, but I doubted it, and I hoped not – it was important, I thought, that the show should stand on its own.

  Naturally the local press were in no doubt that the pilot would turn into a series, however much we tried to explain the uncertainty of these things. The truth was that, although John Sullivan’s own track record was unquestionable, and Boycie and Marlene were already well established, iconic figures in the public’s mind, there was always the possibility that one person in the upper echelons of the BBC wouldn’t rate it and the whole thing could be binned.

  Tony Dow, who had worked on Only Fools almost from the start and directed it since 1988 was directing our show too. David Hitchcock was the designer, and several of the old Only Fools team were on board as well. Another very welcome old face was Paul Barber, as Denzil, who, sad to say, appeared only in the first part of the Boyce’s new adventure.

  Sue and I had to get used to the idea that we were in a far more crucial position than we’d been before. Where in Only Fools we might have just a couple of telling scenes in an episode, in this show we were driving the narrative in nearly every scene.

  There were other minor worries, too. Living in the country with a superb cook, I had naturally put on a bit of weight since my last outing as Boycie had been filmed in 2001. As the episode featured Boycie apparently going off for jog after breakfast, I was a little sensitive about how this might look, knowing that I never cut an impressive figure with my knocked-kneed style of running.

  I didn’t have to worry too much when it came to it. Boycie simply trots around the corner, climbs into a waiting taxi and lights up one of his trademark panatellas.

  Having kicked the dust of Peckham off his heels, Boycie tries to interest Marlene and the chubby Tyler in the joys and benefits of country living, although of course, he’s there primarily to escape the aggressive attentions of the Driscoll Brothers. The Boyces have been welcomed to the house by the incumbent farm manager, Elgin Sparrowhawk, played by David Ross, who tells them that he and the staff are as good as fixtures and fittings, and Boycie reckons they aren’t going to be disposed of lightly.

  We had a lot of fun making the pilot, not least for the pleasure of filming around my own house and the country I now knew well. The studio audience loved it, and at the end of it, we thought, at least we’ve buckled down and made the pilot, given it our best shot, even if, in the end the BBC decide not to run with it.

  Shortly before Christmas, not long after the pilot episode was cut and ready, the BBC announced that they wanted us. The series was to be called The Green, Green Grass. John Sullivan was chuffed to smithereens; he was absolutely thrilled to have found a way to carry on what he’d started back in 1981 with Only Fools & Horses, after all, nearly a quarter of a century before.

  Newspaper stories appeared: Boycie and Marlene get their own series! What would Del Boy and Rodders think about that?

  The BBC also thought the pilot was good enough to go out as the first episode, which made us a little nervous; we couldn’t help thinking that if we’d known it was the real thing, we would probably have done it better.

  Still, there it was; we’d obviously done well enough, and we waited with high expectation for the rest of the scripts for the series – the first of many, we dared to hope.

  On New Year’s Day 2005, it was announced that John Sullivan had been awarded the OBE for Services to Entertainment. In my view there was no doubt that he had earned the honour. His writing had entertained millions in the way it so accurately and warmly portrayed responses to changing attitudes in society, using poignant humour and compassion.

  John threw a party at the Dorchester Hotel for family, friends and the actors who had benefited so much from his talent. Throughout the evening’s festivities, he wore the bauble around his neck with slightly apologetic but clear pride. I guess he couldn’t be sure what his late father – a life-long Labour supporter – would have made of this symbol of approval. John had always done a lot in his writing to champion the common man, attacking pomposity, snobbery and the English class system. And here he was, being recognised by the Establishment which he professed to loathe.

  He told us he’d thought about not accepting the gong for a while, before saying to himself, ‘Fuck it, why not!’

  It was here that Sue and I had thought we might hear what the rest of the Only Fools cast thought about our new series but not one of them mentioned it, apart from David Jason, who exclaimed when I came and sat down late for the speeches, ‘I suppose he thinks he can do what he likes, now he’s got his own series!’

  Much later, as the celebrations continued late into the night at the Dorchester, in the bars, on the roof terraces, John’s wife Sharon almost had to restrain him from booking rooms in the hotel for everyone who still had a glass in their hand.

  We all knew how much we owed him, and this mighty piss-up was a fitting tribute to a man who had changed all our lives and given enormous pleasure to tens of millions of Only Fools fans all over the world.

  We were scheduled to start making our first series of The Green, Green Grass during May and June, 2005. I had greeted the news that the BBC had already decided that they were going to use the pilot as the first episode of the seven projected with mixed feelings. On the one hand it was gratifying to hear that the BBC thought the pilot good enough (especially as it would save them around £400,000 in fresh production costs); on the other hand, neither Sue nor I felt we’d been quite ready for that first outing. As it happened, some scenes from the pilot had to be re-filmed to correct technical imperfections; I’d taken off some weight now, in readiness, and in the first episode of GGG that was ever shown, Keep on Running, close observers will notice Boycie’s waistline fluctuating with changing scenes.

  The BBC were also determined to save money when it came to hiring the ‘talent’. My agent, Barry Burnett (AKA: Barry Brunette) was in the box-seat as he represented both Sue and me. He suggested a fee for us – which sounded like the fair, going rate – only to have it dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. Inevitably that made us feel a little unloved, after we’d done 25 years in the most popular comedy series the BBC had ever produced. When they suggested that if we were going to ask that kind of fee they would find someone else, Tony Dow put his foot down, saying, ‘Right – we’ll get someone else but they’ll have to look exactly like John Challis and Sue Holderness.’

  We didn’t know what kind of point they were trying to make in the casting department but it left a sour taste in our mouths as we started preparing for the series
proper. We also had to address the ticklish business of the location fee for the house. A rough schedule of the days on which the house would be required was produced. On the one hand, given that they were going to do a lot of filming there, and they’d chosen it, not us, we were inclined to get as much as we thought we could get away with; on the other hand, we didn’t want to make it unattractive for them to do an endless number of further series there, and we didn’t feel we should be too grasping – not yet, anyway.

  The producer sent down a recce team to prepare the way. Our house became ‘Winterdown Farm’ and photos were taken of the rooms inside so that something similar could be produced for the interior studio recording.

  Boycie was trying to become a ‘gentleman farmer’ in a place called ‘Oakham’. Signs were already sprouting with ‘Welcome to Oakham’, a sign for the village hall appeared and the rickety old post office/general stores in Bucknell was identified as being suitable for the mythical village of Oakham.

  Sue and I had a session with the rest of the cast for a read through at the dear old Acton Hilton which was increasingly becoming a storage facility for BBC wardrobe and administration. Everything was changing there; all the familiar studios and dressing rooms, make-up and wardrobe departments were being hired out to independent production companies, who then made the programmes which they flogged to the BBC for transmission. John Sullivan had set up a new company named Shazam Productions after his wife, Sharon – known as Shazza. John’s agent Tim Hancock was the other half of the company.

  To begin with everything went swimmingly. We were confident that there were going to be some great characters in the show. For a start, there was David Ross’s character, Elgin Sparrowhawk, whom he played with rustic relish; there was a large moon-calf of a stockman in the hands of Ivan Kaye; an affable, lumpen cropman, played by Peter Hepplethwaite, and the cleaner, Mrs Cakeworthy, who never cleaned but stuffed herself with an awful lot of biscuits and had a funny way of talking bucolic gobbledy-gook, brought memorably to life by Ella Kenion. Another regular was a rival farmer from Wales, Llewellyn, played by a rival actor from Wales, Alan David.

  Boycie and Marlene’s baby son, Tyler, had grown up into a tricky teenager, portrayed by Jack Doolan, who made a good start in the ensemble, as far as I was concerned, by announcing that he was an Arsenal supporter.

  I found it strange at first to be in the position of ‘leading man’, and to be in practically every scene. A sense of responsibility descended on Marlene and me like a voluminous, heavy cloak. I wondered if David and Nicholas had felt the same in Only Fools.

  Boycie had first to introduce his unappreciative family to the rolling countryside of the Welsh border country.

  ‘Look at the view, Marlene!’ he declaims from the top of a high grassy ridge, with hills disappearing dramatically into distant mid- Wales.

  ‘Stuff the view,’ Marlene comes back. ‘Where’s Debenhams?’

  Tyler tries to skate his urban board down the grassy slopes below them and soon comes to a halt. ‘I hate the country,’ he moans.

  The only happy member of the party is Earl, the family Rottweiler who bounds along excitedly, in reality desperate to get at the doggy treats held tightly in my hand to keep him interested.

  Earl had replaced, Duke, the Great Dane that had been Boycie and Marlene’s dog in Only Fools, since Marlene had first appeared in 1985. He should, in reality, have passed on to doggy heaven about seven or eight years before, but in any case, he wouldn’t have survived in The Green, Green Grass as it was intended not to let the new show be seen simply as an add-on to its illustrious parent.

  On 1 September, almost exactly 24 years after Boycie’s first appearance on Only Fools in Going West Young Man, the first episode of The Green, Green Grass, entitled Keep on Running, was aired and achieved over nine and a half million viewers – an amazing result at the time.

  This sort of figure, however, wasn’t expected to last. And it didn’t. As viewers who had been hoping that Del Boy and Rodney were going to be part of the action found they were not, we dropped about one and a half million for the second episode, A Rocky Start, eventually settling at six and a half to seven million. Under the new conditions of widespread multi-channel viewing, this was considered better than expected, and things looked very positive.

  There was no doubt from the start that the series was going to be very good fun to make. In Rocky Start, it seems that Boycie had bought a ‘gay’ bull to cover his prize herd of three hundred Fresians. Clive Gurney, a farmer who was a neighbour of ours and a Parish Councillor agreed to provide one if his beasts to play the role of Rocky, a Hereford bull that was supposed to ‘take guard well outside off-stump.’ Clive was asked to get Rocky to stand in certain places and move off in certain directions at the appropriate time.

  In one scene, Rocky is supposed to spot Boycie and Marlene tentatively approaching, at which he was required to paw the ground menacingly and then charge.

  We started the shoot, the camera rolled, and Rocky refused to budge an inch. He wouldn’t even lift his front hoof, let alone paw the ground and charge. It was a stand off.

  The cameraman left his carefully positioned camera and joined Tony and the rest of us for a strategy confab.

  As if someone had just shouted ‘action!’ again, Rocky lifted his head, sniffed the air and charged like a steam train straight at the camera and up to the gate over which Boycie and Marlene were supposed to leap. It reminded me of the time Al the Gator in the Florida Everglades had charged at Del and Rodney.

  We didn’t know what had got him going but we were impressed. Clive went and got him back to his mark, the cameraman slightly altered the position of his tackle, Sue and I got on our marks and Clive did his best to ginger up the bull once again.

  Once again, the bull simply stood there, tugging the odd mouthful from a nearby tussock, quite indifferent to any urgings, bored and uninterested in what was going on; he wouldn’t move.

  As soon as we gathered for another discussion, he was off, charging straight past us and up to the gate again.

  This time the cameraman had stayed at his post and got the charge. All that was left was for Boycie and Marlene to run and leap over the five-bar gate, which we achieved with one take.

  Rocky watched us, evidently bored to death now that we were doing something and put his head down to pick a bit more grass.

  For the Christmas Special that was to wind up the first series, I was a little apprehensive when John told me he was writing the Driscoll Brothers back into the script. He had strategic reasons for doing it as he ultimately wanted them to track Boycie down in his rural hideaway.

  It was of course, a long time since I’d anything much to do with Roy Marsden who had played Danny Driscoll in his previous appearance in an episode of Only Fools called Little Problems. His affair with Sabina, which had casued me so much distress when we were all working together in The Relapse, had happened 16 years ago.

  I remembered the agony of indecision I’d been through, having previously arranged for him to appear in an episode of Only Fools & Horses, when John subsequently offered to write his part out of the script if I didn’t want to go through with it. But I’d chosen in the end to let it happen; I felt that blanking out Roy would have been weak and petulant, and as a result, the Driscoll Brothers were introduced as Peckham’s answer to the Krays.

  They had never appeared again in Only Fools, but they had a key role in providing Sullivan with the only reason he could find for for sending Boycie off to the sticks, and thereby allowing The Green, Green Grass to happen. The supreme irony of this hadn’t escaped me.

  When I saw Roy for his appearance (albeit in a series of bad dreams Boycie was having), he was at his most charming. We were, I think, both aware of the change in our relative circumstances now that I was leading man in the show. In fact, given that I’d been happily married to Carol for ten years, I felt no rancour whatsoever that he had relieved me of Sabina and it was fun to see him again.

>   We laughed a lot, and I was happy to see Roy again when he appeared in two later episodes, having tracked Boycie to his rural refuge. I reflected on the old adage that Time is the Great Healer.

  The episode went out as a fifty-minute special One Flew over the Cuckoo Clock on Christmas Day 2005 and did well. The BBC seemed happy enough with the performance of our first series of The Green, Green Grass to commit themselves to a second. We were sent John’s scripts for the eight episodes of Series Two starting with Testing Times.

  By June we’d finished making the second series, including another Christmas special, feeling that we had another good bunch of shows in the bag. Despite the amount of work involved as one of the leads in the show, I still had plenty in reserve and I was relieved that other work hadn’t dried up completely.

  One of the jobs I enjoyed doing that year was in a great show for BBC Radio Four, Getting Nowhere Fast written and produced by Mervyn Stutter. Mervyn was a wonderfully talented, eccentric singer, songwriter and comedian, who happened also to be married to Moira Downie. I had once been close to Moira, as they say, when she’d helped me with my own play while we were touring South Africa in a production of Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linen for six months of 1977. It was fun to see her again, and I loved working with Mervyn. He wore colourful clothes and had an agit-prop background – this didn’t necessarily make him a bad person and he’d had great success at the Edinburgh Fringe. He’d also been a founder member of the Flying Pickets band which had been very popular during the miner’s strikes of the ’80s.

  He had come up with an idea for a show in which a bunch of disparate characters, living in a kind of commune left adrift in the hippy aftermath, are trying, but mostly failing, to deal with the modern world. It was a great platform for Merv to rail against society’s shortcomings – its iniquities and contradictions, its inability to connect to the common man. Merv used his talent for satirising to the full, using song and a bunch of great character actors, including Martin Freeman, Andrew Sachs and Tracy Ann Oberman. Getting Nowhere Fast became a cult hit on Radio Four and ran for four years, but although the audiences kept growing all the time, the BBC in their inexplicable perversity decided to take it off. I was very sad that my character, an ageing, mostly drunk actor laddie, Dibden Purlieu, was never heard of again.