Only Fools and Horses

Only Fools and Horses: The royalty-themed episode that David Jason and John Sullivan agreed was the worst ever

The episode was a nightmare to make and went down like a lead balloon with audiences

Only Fools and Horses Christmas special episodes are some of the most memorable TV programmes in British broadcast history with the annual specials breaking audience records. The 1996 special, for example, broken into three parts attracted more than 24 million viewers for its final instalment.

It may come as a shock then for fans of the show to find out that creator John Sullivan’s most hated episode was also actually a Christmas special, an opinion shared by legendary Del Trotter actor David Jason who agreed that they got the 1986 special, A Royal Flush horribly wrong.

Reflecting on his entire time with Only Fools and Horses in 2003, John said the one thing he would’ve done differently was to have never made this episode at all. There are several reasons for this ill-will towards the episode, despite it racking up 18 million viewers when it aired.

Creator John Sullivan named this episode as his one regret from his time writing Only Fools and Horses (Image: Chris Ridley/Radio Times/Getty Images)

The episode sees Rodney strike up a friendship with a young artist named Vicky, who it turns out is actually Lady Victoria Marsham-Hales, whose dad is the fictional Duke of Maylebury, second cousin to the Queen. The rest of the episode sees the Trotters rubbing shoulders with the upper classes as Del sees an opportunity to marry Rodney off into aristocracy and make them all rich.

The episode featured scenes at the opera, at a stately home, and outdoors clay pigeon shooting, and was a feature-length one, coming in at 76 minutes, making it quite a big task for the cast and crew. The size of the task is the first reason the episode is so disliked, with a number of setbacks meaning it nearly wasn’t finished in time.

Funnily enough the first of these was David, Nicholas Lyndhurst, and Buster Merryfield’s invitations to the 1986 Royal Variety performance, which pulled them away from filming for several days. Following this David then lost his voice for half a week and Nicholas got the flu.

By the time the filming was finished, there was barely time for edits and no time to play it in front of a studio audience to get a realistic laugh track. In fact, editing for the final scenes was only completed on the morning of broadcast according to legend. So fraught was the production that after it was finished, Boycie actor John Challis bought the whole crew T-shirts with a thumb and finger pinching the bridge of a nose, as this was the crew’s default stress pose when asked when the episode would be done.

The production was only half the trouble too, with the tone of the episode, and particularly Del Boy, coming across all wrong in the finished product. The normally jolly and likeable, if cheeky, character came across as spiteful, vindictive, and cruel in several of the scenes. Particularly a dinner party scene where he gets too drunk and starts mocking Rodney in front of his new friends before making a “killer” skiing joke despite knowing Vicky’s mum had died in a skiing accident.

These tonal issues combined with the lack of a laugh track made the mood of the episode plummet like a rock, and fans at the time were equally unhappy with the end product, many even now still naming the episode as their least favourite.

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