Picture from Wikipedia
Our trawl through a pile of donated Only Fools and Horses videos brought us today to the 1986 Christmas Day episode A Royal Flush, in my opinion the worst outing for this great programme. This was another episode filmed without a laughter track, although a re-edited version ten minutes shorter exists with a laughter track added on. You can see why they had to add canned laughter because it is difficult to know where the funny is, what viewers sat down to on one of BBC television's biggest days of the year was very disappointing.
Del Boy has held Rodney back on other occasions but you can see Del's point of view as he has his little brother's best interests at heart. After all he did bring him up from childhood after their mum died and dad left them to it so he has had to play the role of both parents. In the early episodes Rodney comes across as a gormless kid who needs guidance but in this episode it was different. Rodney meeting an aristocratic artist who turns out to be in line to the throne was never going to be a happily ever after anyway but Del's conduct throughout the episode was cruel rather than big brotherly. Every move Del made was to engineer money out of the family to the point where he blackmailed the father of the girlfriend in order to keep Rodney away and stop talking about marriage. This happened after he had turned up at the house one weekend and used a sawn-off shotgun to take part in the clay pigeon shoot and made a boorish drunken fool of himself over dinner, including dropping it into conversation that Rodney had a conviction for possession of cannabis and making a bad taste joke about a skiing accident despite knowing that the girlfriend's mother died that way.
This episode was fraught with tension off screen and it shows in the finished result. John Sullivan was away filming Just Good Friends while A Royal Flush was being filmed so he wasn't around to guide the production like he usually was to re-write when necessary. So rushed and shoddy was this episode that editing was still happening on Christmas morning itself, with a contingency plan in place to have David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst turn up at Television Centre on Christmas Day to film the final scene live just to patch it together. A better idea would have been to fall asleep on the sofa full of dinner and wine like everybody else.
The Sunday Alternative Podcast #58 is available from here
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