by David Jason
It all sprang from here – these bits of paper. I set John Sullivan’s old scripts back in their plastic crate and wonder aloud how many laughs there must be in that one box.
CHAPTER THREE
Derek Trotter, a brief history
SO, WHO WAS Derek Trotter? Who was this bloke who came to occupy so much of my life and to reach so deeply into so many other people’s lives? To get to the heart and root of him, you probably have to understand where John Sullivan, the writer, was coming from – a place, coincidentally, not so far, culturally and geographically speaking, from where I came from.
I grew up in a small terraced house in Lodge Lane in Finchley, London, with no bathroom, a tin bath on the kitchen door, an outside privy and a little concrete backyard. John grew up (starting six years later) in a small terraced house in Zennor Road in Balham, London, with no bathroom, a tin bath on the kitchen door, an outside privy and a little concrete backyard. My mum worked as a charlady. John’s mum worked as a charlady. My dad was a fishmonger. John’s dad was – guess what. You’ve got it – a plumber. OK, so that was a difference. Both of us left school at fifteen, without sitting any exams, and, whereas I went into the employment centre and pulled out the card for a job as a mechanic’s help at Popes Garage, John started work as a messenger boy, first at Reuters news agency and then in an advertising company. At one point he apprenticed as a plumber with his dad, but he didn’t take to that really, much as my apprenticeship at Popes Garage fizzled out and I went off and trained as an electrician. Instead of plumbing, John cleaned cars and then had an unsuccessful stab at selling them, and he eventually wound up working in a Watney’s brewery, packing beer crates.
All the time, though, he was writing – just as all the time I was doing amateur dramatics. John was determined to break into television comedy. This probably seemed as remote a likelihood to him as making it as a professional actor seemed to me. But he had noticed how Johnny Speight, in the sixties, had gone from a humble background in Canning Town in London to a career as a celebrated scriptwriter by creating the legendary character of Alf Garnett and coming up with Till Death Us Do Part. He saw how Ray Galton and Alan Simpson had done much the same with Steptoe and Son. Inspired by those successes, John was constantly devising his own comedy shows and sending proposals and pilot scripts to the BBC – refusing to be set back by the standard rejection letters which inevitably flopped onto the doormat a few weeks later, but, instead, sitting down again and writing another proposal, another script.
He used to say that it was a hobby – and one that had the advantage of saving him a fortune in beer money because he would stay at home in the evenings and write rather than head off up the pub. But even if it was just a hobby at first, this was clearly a man who had entirely convinced himself that it would eventually amount to more than that. Someone once said to me, in the early stages of my career, ‘If you want to be a comic, you’re going to need an idiotic determination to succeed.’ I think they were trying to be encouraging. But whatever they were trying to be, they weren’t wrong. The phrase has stuck with me: an idiotic determination to succeed is what it takes. And the same goes, clearly, for comedy writers. John believed that if he just kept working and knocking hard enough, he would eventually break through.
He was right, too, of course – but it took a cunning move on his part to bring the desired ending about. John applied for a job in the props department at BBC Television Centre – humping the furniture around for The Morecambe & Wise Show and I, Claudius and all sorts – and thereby tunnelled himself into the beating heart of the organisation where he could become his own advocate and start to lean on people a bit more heavily. A very shrewd ploy, that. If the corridors of power won’t come to your house, go and live in the corridors of power. This was in the mid-seventies, and at one point, John found himself in a position to saunter up to Dennis Main Wilson, the vitally significant BBC comedy producer who worked with the Goons, Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes, Marty Feldman – in fact, pretty much every one of the great names of British television and radio comedy alive at that point. And Main Wilson was clearly persuaded enough by John’s confidence to sit down with him and hear him out and give him some advice, the most significant piece of which was that if John wanted to make it as a scriptwriter, his best way in was to start out smaller and write some sketches – short, one-off numbers for variety shows.
John duly went away and did so. It just so happened that, around this time, his day job found him humping the furniture on and off the set for Porridge, the great Ronnie Barker prison-based sitcom – in which, the gilded annals of broadcasting history will show, I took the part of Blanco Webb, an ancient inmate, imprisoned for murdering his wife, though continually and convincingly professing his innocence, even while preferring to stay in prison rather than accept the pardon that has been granted to him by the prison governor. I loved playing Blanco – and, of course, I got that great story-clincher of a moment in an episode in series three, called, ‘Pardon Me’, where Ronnie Barker as Fletcher, after much painstaking and concerted effort, finally persuades Blanco to accept the official pardon and leave jail. As Blanco readies himself to walk out into the world, Fletcher begs him to promise that he’s not to go getting himself into trouble by avenging the man who genuinely did murder his wife. Whereupon Blanco says, ‘No, I know him what did it. It were the wife’s lover. But don’t worry – he died years ago, that I do know. It were me that killed him.’
It was a lovely and completely unforeseeable twist, wonderfully enhanced by the freeze frame on Blanco as he turns to leave, which just gives you a beat to absorb the gag before the end of the show swallows it – a comic effect of the highest order, worked to perfection by the director, Syd Lotterby. There was a neat and satisfying roundedness to the construction of that twist, too, because justice had been served, albeit it in a circuitous way: Blanco had been wrongly imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, but he had also served his time for the one that he actually did commit. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the writers of Porridge, knew what they were about.
Incidentally, in the final scene of that episode, just prior to his release, Blanco was to be seen for the first time out of his prison clothes and back in the suit that, imaginably, he was wearing when he was put away, and there was a notion that the suit shouldn’t really fit him any more, after all this time. I had the additional idea, though, that it would be even funnier if it looked as though the jacket and trousers had been folded up and left in a drawer for twenty-five years. So I spoke to the wardrobe people about it and got them to iron some strong creases into the clothing so that it had these really stiff lines across it in the wrong places and hung really badly on Blanco’s body, as well it might if it had been folded away for a quarter of a century. The suit and its condition were never alluded to in the script. It was one of those gags that was just left there: you might notice it and get the joke, or you might not, but it was in there anyway, ready to provide a bit of added value for any takers.
Did John Sullivan’s and my paths cross during that happy time on Porridge? Not so that either of us ever did recall. But John certainly crossed paths with Ronnie Barker and was bold enough to put some of his freshly written sketches into Ronnie’s hands with a plea that he should consider them. Ronnie didn’t just consider them; he used them in The Two Ronnies. They were the Sid and George sketches – little bits and pieces in which two cockney geezers sit in a pub and chew the fat, mostly at cross purposes with one another. More than that, Ronnie organised for John to get put on contract at the BBC as a writer, a fantastic break for him, meaning he was now getting paid to come up with material for, not just the Ronnies, but shows with Dave Allen and Les Dawson which were right at the centre of the BBC’s Light Entertainment roster in those days.
Yet another parallel, then, between us. It was Ronnie Barker who took me, too, under his wing – using me, at the recommendation of the producer Humphrey Barclay, for sketches in Hark at Barker and then eventually getting
me to play Granville opposite his Arkwright in Open All Hours and becoming in the process my biggest influence and closest friend in the industry. John, then, like me, had the door into mainstream television held open for him by Ronnie B, without whom who knows how differently things might have panned out for both of us.
Anyway, as encouraged by Dennis Main Wilson, John graduated from sketch-writing to full-length scripts, coming up, almost straight off the bat, with the enormously successful sitcom Citizen Smith, starring Robert Lindsay as Wolfie Smith, the faux-Marxist leader of the Tooting Popular Front, who campaigned assiduously, albeit largely unsuccessfully, for ‘freedom for Tooting’ and ‘power to the people’. Citizen Smith ran for four series between 1977 and 1980 before John came to the conclusion that he had taken those characters about as far as they would go and decided to move on. John was football-mad – something I never shared with him, but each to his own – and the next project he came up with was a show entitled Over the Moon, about a failed and failing football manager endlessly attempting to bring his team back from the dead. He had his lead actor in place – Brian Wilde, who played Mr Barraclough, the gullible prison warden in Porridge, and Foggy in the practically never-ending Last of the Summer Wine – he seemed to have the enthusiasm of the BBC behind him, and he had a formidable director, Ray Butt, about whom these pages will have much more to say. Ray had directed a number of episodes of Citizen Smith, not to mention The Liver Birds, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Are You Being Served? – all of them series that would come to have some staying power. A pilot of Over the Moon was made and, after the BBC had had a look at that, John was given the nod to go away and start writing six episodes for a first series.
All was clearly set fair, then, for another ratings-grabbing success, à la Citizen Smith and lashings of ginger beer for all concerned – or not, as it happened, because the BBC promptly turned round a few weeks later and cancelled the project. Apparently the Light Entertainment department had decided in the meantime to make a sitcom about boxing (Seconds Out, starring – that man again – Robert Lindsay) and the BBC felt that that was probably enough comedies on a sporting theme for now. Thus does the mysterious corporation move, its wonders to perform. Seconds Out, incidentally, lasted two series and mustered very little in the way of repeat action (just one rerun, for the second series). We’ll never know now, of course, whether the BBC backed the wrong horse, but I know what my suspicions are telling me.
Anyway, from the point of view of this tale, it’s a good job Over the Moon did get cancelled, given what then happened. John was understandably miffed, but, as we’ve already established, he was not the sort of person to take a setback personally or brood for very long. He only had a couple of months left on his annual writing contract at this point, so he immediately got together with Ray to try and come up with something as fast as possible to replace the football comedy. In the course of those discussions – and quite possibly out of expedience as much as anything else – John returned to an idea he had hatched a while back for a show that featured a street-market trader and all-round wheeler-dealer. The downside was that John had already run a version of this idea past the BBC once, a year or so earlier, in the form of a page-long treatment, and had seen it cast aside without ceremony by the then Head of Light Entertainment, Jimmy Gilbert. A programme centred on a working-class market trader and fly-pitcher, with a roll of notes in his back pocket and a casual approach to the principle of taxation was not, at this juncture, the BBC’s idea of a good time, apparently.
Ray Butt, though, hadn’t heard the fly-pitcher idea before, and he loved it. It didn’t only seem potentially strong as a comedy; it seemed timely. We’re talking about that period at the beginning of the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was setting off on a long period in power and preaching free enterprise and deregulation, thereby (inadvertently or otherwise) creating a mini boom time for dodgy entrepreneurship and the black market. Wheeling and dealing, get-rich-quick schemes, flogging the family silver – these things were the fabric of the daily news at that time. John’s fly-pitcher could sit very comfortably in the context of all that.
That said, the actual models for Derek Trotter (in so much as you can ever pin these things down) seem to have preceded the Thatcher years and included, so far as I’m aware, various would-be shysters and likely geezers that John had come across during his time in the second-hand car trade. There was also, in particular, a bloke that John had known in south London with the excellent name of Chicky Stocker. Chicky, in John’s descriptions of him, was a special kind of cockney archetype: a working man, but imposing and always immaculately turned out, with hair just so and rings on well-scrubbed fingers, intent on cutting an impressive figure in the pub, peeling notes off a wad of readies. ‘Readies’, in fact, was the title that John gave to this new show in its earliest incarnation. I believe he also toyed for a while with the idea of calling it ‘Big Brother’, which was the title of episode one. But apparently another sitcom writer – a certain George Orwell – had beaten John to that phrase and it wouldn’t have been clever to imply that there was any link between this new sitcom set in Peckham and a dark vision of a fascist future. Very soon after that, though, he came up with the notion of slightly abbreviating the old saying ‘only fools and horses work’ (a saying coined by nineteenth-century American vaudeville performers, apparently). John preferred the obliqueness of that title, the way it pulled you up a bit short and therefore potentially snagged itself on the edges of your mind – though it was a touch too oblique for the BBC initially, it seems, who wanted him to find a name for the series that hit the nail more squarely on the head. John prevailed, though, as he tended to do – largely, in this case, I think, by pretending that he simply couldn’t think of anything else. The old ‘play dumb’ tactic: always worth a try.
Anyway, Ray Butt knew exactly what John was getting at with this project. After the war, Ray’s father had converted an ex-army wagon into an ice-cream van and had driven around London, flogging ice lollies. He had also worked the local markets on a stall selling ladies’ stockings one week, shampoo the next, sweets the one after – whatever was to hand. This was a comedy that was quite literally up Ray’s – or his dad’s, at least – street.
I, too, related closely to all of this. When I eventually read John’s first script, the person that Del instantly brought to mind was a kind of Chicky Stocker figure from my own past – a bloke named Derek Hockley whom I had stumbled across while working for the electrical business that I set up in my twenties with my mate Bob Bevil. For the full and unadulterated history of B. W. Installations of Lodge Lane, Finchley (‘no job too big or too small, estimates gladly supplied on application’), you will need to refer back to my first autobiographical volume which is still (did I mention this?) widely available from outlets of distinction. But, to recap briefly: casting about for business, Bob and I had gone door-to-door in selected areas of London, offering our bespoke services, and had lucked out when we knocked at the premises of a building contractor in the East End, who just happened to have the contract for doing up London’s still war-battered Ind Coope pubs and was therefore in a position to offer a whole pile of work to a couple of willing sparkies. The man in charge of this East End operation was the aforementioned Derek Hockley, a proper, working-class cockney geezer and yet a guy who dressed like a king, with a fastidious attention to detail; the pricey-looking shirt, the beautifully knotted tie, the spotless camel-hair coat, frequently worn on the shoulders as a kind of Napoleonic cloak. He also had a superbly curated hairstyle, moulded with grease and set to perfection. This was a man who profoundly understood the power of appearances and how a little care in the area of what you wore could massively boost your social standing.
Quite coincidentally and rather conveniently, I also had a fascination of some long-standing with fly-pitching. I mean, I’m not saying it was a hobby of mine on the weekends, or a burning ambition, but it was definitely an object of curiosity for me. Th
rough the 1970s, I was living in a rented flat in Newman Street, north of Oxford Street, slap bang in the centre of London. One of the things that made me happy about this location was that, when I was in a play in London, I could simply walk to work in the afternoon, head down across Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue and ‘theatreland’, strolling with my hands in my pockets, absorbing the buzz and very much fancying myself the young and swinging actor about town. Crossing Oxford Street on that journey, where the crowds of shoppers were normally thick, I would often stumble across hawkers, who had thrown down a blanket on the pavement and set up a pitch, maybe flogging perfume or watches or transistor radios, sourced from who knows where. I’d stop off and watch them because I loved the way they worked: the patter, the bluff, the banter, the teamwork, the way they would position a plant in the crowd, one of the lads who would eventually step forward and buy something, which would then encourage other people to take the plunge. There might also be the lookout guy, checking up and down the pavement for strolling coppers on the beat, at which point the alarm would be raised and the blanket would be snatched up with the gear folded away inside it, and the operation would vanish down a side alley as quickly as it had arrived. I was enthralled by all this. It was like street theatre to me – and really, without wishing to cast aspersions upon my noble craft and the law-abiding gentlefolk who nobly practise it, there’s quite a lot in common, all in all, between an actor with a role to play and a spiv with a bundle of hooky radios to flog. Both are playing a part, both are trying to hold people’s attention, both are trying to hook an audience with some lines they’ve learned, both are doing their best to persuade. Frankly, they’re as good as in the same business. Sir Laurence Olivier and Darren from Herne Hill with a knocked-off box of Latvian Chanel No. 5: one struggle.