From The Likely Lads to Detectorists... what makes a good sitcom
I
recently, and accidentally, found myself watching an episode of Only
Fools and Horses, a series I’ve had no time for these past
twenty-odd years. Although I watched it regularly across its first
few seasons, and would be the first to acknowledge that there was
some great comedy amongst those early episodes, I eventually went
cold on it. The episode I chanced upon was 1990’s ‘Christmas
Special’ – which is to say that it was broadcast on Christmas
Day, but contained no actual festive content as far as I could see. I
only stuck it for twenty minutes or so, which was more than enough
time to remind me why I’d given up on Del, Rodders and co. all
those years ago. Part of the problem was, for a sitcom, fairly
fundamental. It wasn’t really that funny. Most of what I saw
revolved around the disintegrating domestic relationship of Rodney
and his girlfriend, Cassandra, scenes which wouldn’t have felt out
of place in, say Coronation Street (although I’d venture to
suggest that there would have been more laughs in Corrie).
Only
Fools and Horses is still cited as one of Britain’s most
beloved sitcoms, and who am I to disagree? Well, bear with me. By
1990, the series had been on air for nine years, and would still be
hanging around, quite literally like the ghost of Christmas past,
until 2003. The dynamic between the characters – principally Del
and Rodney – was well established, and even the replacement of the
original Grandad with the cockney stereotype Uncle Albert hadn’t
affected the series’ popularity, which continued to grow and grow.
Then, in the late 1980s, writer John Sullivan decided to stir things
up by introducing an element that had been more or less absent from
the series until this point: love interest for both Del and Rodney.
There’s nothing wrong with that as an idea. The problem lay in its
execution, and here I’m going to refer to another example of the
same thing, in the form of The Likely Lads; an illustration of
how to mess with the formula and actually make it better.
In
its original incarnation, The Likely Lads contained no ongoing
love interest for Bob and Terry, which was exactly how it should be.
It did, however, contain a network of supporting characters,
reinforcing the idea that our heroes were real people, grounded in
the kind of everyday lifestyle that would be familiar to viewers.
Some of these supporting characters returned when the series was
revived in 1973 as Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. But
there was now a much more important component in the format, a
character that turned the series from a two-hander into, effectively,
a comedy trio. That character was, of course, Thelma, Bob’s fiancée
in the first series, and his wife in the second. It would have been
very easy for writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to have fallen
back on clichés about the pitfalls of married life, and portrayed
Thelma as a standard, shrewish ‘nagging wife’; but they were
better than that. As indeed was the actress chosen to play Thelma,
Brigit Forsyth. Thelma, in fact, was the pivotal character in
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, as across the two
series, Bob found himself torn between his loyalties to her and
Terry. Many stories hinge on the tensions created by Bob trying not
to upset either of the two most important people in his life, and the
writers don’t let him off lightly. Over the course of twenty-seven
episodes, Bob endures many personal indignities and even physical
injury, all of them directly attritbutable to his divided loyalties.
This may sound obvious, but it was very carefully worked out by
Clement and La Frenais, whose scripts allowed situations to develop
naturally before collapsing into disastrous consequences. Barely
married for a few months, Bob and Thelma split up, and the domestic
roles were suddenly reversed, with Terry moving in to support his
mate in a time of crisis. Throughout all this, the acting was of such
a high standard that the blend of drama and comedy never felt forced,
nor did the scripts descend at any time into sentimentality.
Sentimentality,
on the other hand, was at the root of what I felt to be the problem
with Only Fools and Horses, and it was the principal reason
why I stopped watching, or indeed caring about what happened to the
characters. Writer John Sullivan fell into the looming trap of
becoming too close to his creations, and once that happened, his
scripts became increasingly dominated by sentimentality. This doesn’t
just mean letting your characters off the hook: conversely, it tends
just as much towards the opposite pole, and a writer too in love with
his creations will often place them in heart-wrenching situations,
simply to enjoy the exhilerating release of stepping in as their
saviour. Of course, it works for viewers, but it’s a form of
simplistic emotional manipulation that the greatest writers recognise
and avoid. It’s this kind of writing that has spoiled the latter
day Dr. Who, and it can be seen clearly in the Only Fools
and Horses episodes post-dating the introduction of Del and
Rodney’s love interests.
Dennis
Potter spoke of it happening to him during the writing of his serial
Pennies From Heaven, and brilliant though the series was, this
aspect of the writing is quite obvious on screen – lead character
Arthur Parker (Bob Hoskins) may end up being hanged, but he still
gets to come back for one last song-and-dance sequence.
The
difference with Clement and La Frenais’s scripts was that, although
Bob and Terry were characters whom they knew and understood in
intimate detail, they always maintained a kind of writer’s
objectivity, a detachment that allowed them to put their creations
through the wringer, without necessarily offering any hope of
resolution. If you want an example of that, consider the ending of
the Likely Lads feature film script, which has Bob stranded on
a merchant ship bound for Bahrain. We, the viewers, know
instinctively that the status quo will eventually be restored, but
the resolution is never offered on screen. The same formula was used
successfully throughout Whatever Happened to... and can also
be seen at play in Clement and La Frenais’ writing for Porridge.
Bob and Thelma’s marriage is continually subjected to stress and
trauma, but the reconciliation is rarely depicted. A sentimentalist
would have wallowed in the making-up, but Clement and La Frenais
never waver.
Compare
this with Only Fools and Horses, where the ‘girlfriends’
simply served as a distraction for the main characters, a simple
focus for love interest, rather than key plot movers in the manner of
Thelma. When Rodney and Cassandra split up, it all feels forced, a
mere excuse to justify the inevitable sentimental resolution, and
this, regrettably, became more and more the norm for the series, with
epiphanies awaiting our heroes at the end of each interminable
Christmas special. Del finally becomes a father... then ends up a
millionaire thanks to the auction of a valuable antique. This is, in
effect, a ride into the sunset, something that Bob, Thelma and Terry
were never allowed, and a cliché that the greatest comedy writers,
from Stan Laurel onwards, have studiously avoided.
Whatever
Happened to the Likely Lads was, in fact, very much akin to a
soap opera, with its storylines developing across multiple episodes,
and its characters frequently found themselves in the kind of
situations that have been well explored in the soap genre. The
difference is that Clement and La Frenais, with their detached
relationship to Bob and Terry, were able to inject some very sharp
humour into their scripts. There’s not much comic potential in
watching two characters enjoy the fruits of a successful marriage,
but place it under the kind of strain that Bob and Thelma’s is
subjected to, and the humour comes thick and fast. Such is the way of
human nature. No contrivance was necessary; with Whatever Happened
to the Likely Lads, Clement and La Frenais created a potent
cocktail of characters and situation that continues to impress over
forty years later.
It’s
a formula that, more recently, has paid dividends for the writers of
Channel 4’s Peep Show, a series where it was quite clear
from the outset that there would be no sentimental relationship
between the creators and their characters. A similar dynamic can be
found in BBC4’s Detectorists: two close friends whose lives
are subject to the tensions created by their relationships with
other, mostly female characters. It’s hard to tell if writer/
director McKenzie Crook has fallen into the sentimentality trap, and
his scripts tread a fine line at times, contrasting the harsh
treatment regulatly meted out to the protagonists of Peep Show,
and continued in the recent and excellent Mitchell/Webb vehicle
Back.
These
three series all share something of their comic DNA with Whatever
Happened to the Likely Lads, but unfortunately, writing of this
quality has become the exception rather than the rule. The cloying
sentimentality that scuppered Only Fools and Horses is very
much alive and well and embodied in just about every sitcom
commissioned by BBC1, notably the execrable Mrs. Brown’s Boys,
which doubtless appeals to all those who once delighted in the antics
of Del Boy and Rodney.
Myself,
I’m sticking with those old Likely Lads episodes. There won’t be
any better comedy writing on British television, and today’s best
examples owe much, if not everything, to the work of Clement and La
Frenais.