Picture from BBC
Thanks to a friend of Mandi's we have a pile of VHS tapes of Only Fools and Horses in the house which I have been keen to get stuck into now that we have finished Jeeves and Wooster. The collection of tapes is fairly random and incomplete but I have worked out some kind of chronological order in which we should watch them. I remain a big fan of the series although I did get a little bored with seeing the same episodes on a loop on GOLD. Now we only have Freeview and as any fellow Freeview viewer will know, your viewing is a little dodgy because the picture tends to pixilate as soon as you get to the punchline to a joke or a vital plot point in Eastenders. The other delight with Freeview is that the range of channels you have changes on a regular basis and if you fancy something different like Dave then you have to retune and run the risk of losing BBC1 or something. Therefore the GOLD channels are no longer something I bother with and I am now ready to watch Only Fools with renewed interest.
Mandi isn't keen on the character of Granddad, played by Lennard Pearce until his death in 1984 but we decided to watch them as I enjoyed his and Buster Merryfield's Uncle Albert for different reasons. The early episodes haven't lost any of their magic and have had us laughing thanks to the combination of acting and writing from all involved. It's weird to think that the first series was a flop and only gained a following due to a strike necessitating a repeat run to fill a gap in the schedules. As funny as the scripts still are we have the original VHS releases that haven't had the same politically correct edits made that happen prior to television broadcast and although bad language was never an issue it is a bit of a shock to hear words like 'paki' and 'chinky' being casually tossed out - the most notorious being during the episode The Russians Are Coming - but it is not our place to criticise the standards of the past based on today's values. Other elements that date it slightly are the strange little things; smoking in pubs, using the pub payphone, and odd little pop culture references that would have been topical at the time.
It's interesting (to me at least) that the first three series (possibly others but as I said I don't have a complete collection) end with a Christmas themed episode, later of course the Christmas special was a stand alone feature length episode that didn't mention Christmas. This might have been based on Eric Morecambe's insistence that the Morecambe and Wise special had no Christmassy element to ensure a repeat showing during the summer bringing with it a repeat fee. In later years they did away with the series altogether and just brought out a long episode for broadcast on Christmas Day, as did Morecambe and Wise and one day perhaps Doctor Who will follow suit. I don't know if cassette tape was expensive to produce compared to DVD but it was quite rare for a complete series to be released on tape, most of these episodes come packaged as three or four chronological episodes or a tape containing just a Christmas special. One of the tapes is a 'best of' compilation which is a bit messy as it contains both Granddad and Uncle Albert episodes, and one when I assume Lennard Pearce was on his last legs as he doesn't feature at all.
We still have a way to go with this collection so I might come back to the subject later on when I have nothing better to write about.
The Sunday Alternative #56 is available from here.
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September housekeeping
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