The third series ran from November-December 1983, followed immediately by a Christmas Special. Please join me as I rank them, and associated specials, from worst to best...
If you were in school in the UK in 1984, then you may have experienced the same thing I did... the big telly getting wheeled out, and a teacher telling you that you were going to see a special episode of Only Fools and Horses..... Yet the excitement probably dissipated quite quickly once you realised it wasn't a regular edition, but a special educational short on the nature of the oil industry.
Produced for the Maureen Oilfield Consortium to encourage school leavers to get into the industry, there are changes to fit the demographic... when Del cracks open a can, it's Coke, not alcohol, and Grandad is a "soppy old goat", not a "soppy old git". Yet the concept of Page 3 was so ingrained into society back then - strange looking back - that there's a Page 3 gag in it.
Now, when people come to rank the funniest things David Jason ever said in the series, no one's ever likely to pick "Not a single item on this table could have been made without the aid of oil, and its by-products methane, propane, butane and of course... something else." But this was a treat back at school, being able to watch characters from a racy sitcom doing their thing especially for us.
What's most significant is that it was Lennard Pearce's last appearance as Grandad. He died on 15th December 1984 after a heart attack, before his work on the fourth series was completed. (Of which more next time.) He does, sadly, seem very flat in energy, though it could just be he can't time his performance as well without a studio audience... though all of the location shoots for the regular show would be under those conditions.
Should you watch this? Not particularly. It's one for completists, but it's not horrible, and you might be glad you took a look. There's even a special end song, performed by John Sullivan.
Chat show host Russell Harty presented an edition of his show on the 21st December 1983 which featured Jason, Lyndhurst and Pearce in character as their OFAH roles.
Recorded in a home for children and old people, the audience is made up of the residents, and so there's uncomfortable moments where not much laughter can be heard. It's not that the skit isn't funny - and it does get laughs - it's just that it's not the same as performing in front of a warmed up studio audience ready to see a comedy show being performed.
The skit, including introduction from Harty, lasts for 6 minutes (or 6'21m if you want to be exact). It has some funny lines, but there's nothing more uncomfortable than seeing the cast delivering joke lines only to be met with dry coughs from the blue rinse brigade. There's also some racy stuff, including Del remarking on how the BBC is full of homosexuals (which included the host) and, aging quite badly, Del jokes that Rodney could be Jimmy Savile's love child. Despite some bizarre suggestions in some areas of the net that they improvised the skit (!), there's a credit for John Sullivan as writer at the end of the overall show.
Quite charming, there's no way this one can be ranked in among the "proper" episodes, but it's definitely worth a look.
Del buys a woodworm-infested sideboard that he tries to palm off as an antique. When an antiques dealer visits the flat, she isn't interested in the sideboard, but is interested in Del - and an old painting on the flat wall.
There are no bad episodes in the third series, so this one comes last just because one has to. This said, there are some character issues. John Sullivan would regularly adjust the intellect of the characters in order to initiate the comedy - or, to it simply, if he needed a cheap laugh he'd make Del thick for the week.
Del being taken in by a conwoman isn't such a big deal - he had a contingency plan, after all - but it's strange to see him asking Rodney for advice on how to talk to women. How has that happened after all the things we've seen in the first two series? This moment is also significant in that it takes place in the flat's kitchen - the first time we've seen it in the show, barring a glimpse through the open door.
The same scene also has Rodney confronting Del over the fact that he can't actually speak French. It's an odd moment that looks behind the curtain, as it were. For if Del is forced to admit that he can't, then why would he continue to do so in future episodes? (A similar event occurs in Homesick where Rodney takes Trigger to task over calling him "Dave" - but there it works to cement a joke that hadn't taken with the audience up until that point.)
A point of trivia discussed in articles on other shows has been that many television programmes of the age, particularly on the UK's PAL system, suffered from distortion, or "Moiré" patterns with certain designs. This happens a reasonable amount in OFAH, particularly with a lot of Del's outfits, including his cross-checked hat. However, it's particularly strong in this edition with his striped shirt, which, as can be seen in the screenshot above, reacts badly with the camera. (He can be seen wearing the same shirt with the same problem in May The Force Be With You.) Talking of mistakes, watch out for him to accidentally call Grandad "Dad" in this episode before correcting himself.
Yet back to that troubled plot. Del ends the episode revealing he knew all along that she was after a painting that she claimed was worthless - his plan being to get rid of stolen goods. But if he knew that, why was he so excited about seeing her, and still holding out hope for a relationship? It doesn't quite add up.
A weekend fishing expedition in an isolated cabin takes on a more serious tone when the Trotters learn that a mad axeman has escaped and is on the loose in the area.
A fair bit of fun, even though it's arguably the most unorthodox episode out all of Only Fools and Horses..... In all honesty, I did expect this one to rank much higher, and it is engaging, but maybe some of the others stand up more to repeat viewings, or are nearer to the core concept. This said, I still feel it's possibly a little too low here.
Last time around we discussed the 2015 UK Gold series Only Fools: The Favourites, which saw David Jason give brief introductions to the favourite episodes as chosen by the viewers. Friday the 14th was voted the seventh most popular episode by fans, which may come as quite a surprise due to how out of the ordinary it is for the show.
One of the biggest laughs from the studio audience is a moment where Del claims a police helicopter is "Barratts", after a famous house builders advert. It gets a big laugh from the studio audience of the time, but, 43 years later, it's one of the then-contemporary references of the show that is somewhat lost to time. In the UK Gold feature in The Favourites, David Jason accurately notes that "it probably doesn't work so well now".
Roy Slater, an old schoolmate of Del's, is back in the area. Rodney thinks Del will be delighted, and invites him back to the flat - only to discover that Slater is a ruthless police inspector.
Because of the very nature of these articles - watching the episodes again to rate them - it can make some fall higher or lower than expected. This one I expected to place much higher (as with the previous entry, in fact) but it's so engineered towards the final payoff that it means it doesn't stand up quite as well as some of the others for rewatch value.
What makes this one particularly noteworthy is Jim Broadbent guest starring as the villainous policeman Slater. When casting for Del Boy, actor Enn Reitel was the first choice, followed by Broadbent. In his autobiography Being Boycie, John Challis reminisced: "Given that Jim Broadbent had been an earlier choice for Del Boy, it was interesting to see them working together and speculate what might have been. It worked well - well enough for Jim to come back and do two later episodes between jobs in his increasingly busy movie schedule."
That's not a particularly Boyciecentric quote there, and his other appearance in this series (Wanted) is little more than a cameo, too. But surprisingly for a show so long running and popular, only four actors from the show have written autobiographies to date: John, David Jason, Paul Barber and Buster Merryfield. So we take what we've got, in an effort to get a view on the show "from the horse's mouth", as it were.
We do get some more backstory here, incidentally, with Slater and Del revealed to have gone to school together - as they later say they played with Trigger, it's implied that Trigger also went to the same school. This gradual arguable retcon would eventually see Boycie dragged into the mix, saying he'd seen Trigger's birth certificate at school during the fifth series.
Talking of Trigger, then he covers when Slater asks if Del has a brother called Rodney... which suggests Trigger - who is sharper in these earlier episodes - very definitely does know Rodney's name isn't Dave, and is just winding him up deliberately.
Perhaps the real disheartening thing about this episode is that it pushes the lead characters into being full out criminals who we're supposed to side with over the police. Okay, it's a comedy show, and we've known from the first episode that they're into dodgy deals. But this one pushes it from "rogueish" behaviour and into explicit criminality. Del Boy nicking a microwave might be funny... unless it's your microwave he'd nicked.