No Ride Into the Sunset... Sitcoms and Sentimentality

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.