The third episode of Rock & Chips actually marks the end of a comedy era. A full 30 years after Only Fools and Horses first hit our screens in September 1981, its characters have rarely been off the TV for long. Minor characters Boycie and Maxine appeared in spin off series The Green Green Grass soon after the final Only Fools
TV special, and then this series of occasional prequels to the original Trotter saga began in 2010. Only now, with the death of creator John Sullivan, does the sitcom franchise seem likely to come to an end.
The Frog and Pussycat picks up the story in 1961 with Joan Trotter (Kellie Bright), mother to the teenaged Del Boy (Buckley) and the infant Rodney, juggling two jobs, working both as a cinema usherette and as char lady and, in fact, lover to gangster Freddie the Frog Robdal (Lyndhurst). Yet DI Thomas (Smith) is watching Robdal closely.
As with 1980s sitcom prequel First of the Summer Wine (which saw Compo and friends in a pre-war setting), fans of the original show will enjoy working out who is who and watching the pieces in the Trotter family jigsaw puzzle slowly fitting together. A box set of the prequels, Rock & Chips: The Story So Far, containing all three prequels is also being released at the same time. Only Fools and Horses was famously slow to gain a popular following with TV audiences, only achieving its status as perhaps the best loved British sitcom over a period of a decade. In time, Rock & Chips might have done the same.
But I doubt it. The truth is Rock & Chips completely lacks the charm of the original series. Although he obviously provides a link with Only Fools and Horses, Nicholas Lyndhurst is completely miscast as a hardened criminal. The sequences dealing with Joans sexual harassment seem misplaced and sit uncomfortably in a show which is generally light. And while The Inbetweeners James Buckley delivers a valiant effort to capture the young Del Boy, his presence merely serves as a gnawing reminder that a major part of the original series appeal David Jason is missing.
John Sullivan was a great comedy writer and will be sorely missed. But the sad fact is that even Only Fools and Horses had run its natural course by about 1990 and the endless Christmas specials and the two inferior spin-offs have only threatened to diminish the original brand.
Overall Verdict: Lovely jubbly? Not really. A far cry from the best of Only Fools But still a lot better than The Green Green Grass.
Reviewer: Chris Hallam