Newest BBC du Jour, Plus a Big "What If?"

LUCKY FELLER
One series, 1976
Starring David Jason

Lucky Feller is somewhat of an amalgamation of Jason's biggest hits, Open All Hours and of course Only Fools and Horses. His character is similar to the virginal, dopey Granville of Open All Hours, but the setup is very similar to what would later become OFAH. From the creator/writer's son, who only found out about the show himself a few years ago when he stumbled on some VHS tapes in his dad's attic:

If I was to tell you of an old sitcom starring David Jason about two working-class brothers living by their wits in a council flat in south-east London, one a wide-boy the other a bit simple, what do you immediately think of?

Only Fools And Horses, I presume.

And, yes, it’s about the adventures of two working class lads from Lewisham. They live in a council flat. One’s a bit of wide-boy, the other’s a bit dim and drives a funny little car. And so on … The big difference is that David Jason played the slow one, not the wide boy.

I've watched about half the series and it's laugh-out-loud funny. How wasn't this a bigger hit?  How did this become a "lost" sitcom? Frisby may have the answer:

Have you ever wondered why it is that the BBC made so many sitcoms that have since become classics and ITV so few? The pool of talent the two broadcasters were drawing on was pretty much the same. ITV actually paid better. The answer lies in the policy of the broadcasters towards repeats. The BBC used to put their stuff out in blocks of six or seven, often first on BBC2, then repeat them on BBC1, and then repeat them again, sometimes even a fourth time, as a warm-up for the next series. They could do this because they had control over their channels. ITV – or LWT – couldn’t, because different companies were vying with each other for the slots, so sitcoms and dramas were rarely repeated. About the only exception was (the wonderful) Rising Damp, but that only got repeats after years of single showings.

The BBC’s Fawlty Towers is widely regarded as the greatest British sitcom of all time. The first series (6 episodes) was broadcast in 1976 to 1.5 million viewers. The reviews weren’t great. Richard Ingrams described Cleese as, ‘Long John short on laughs’. The series was repeated and got 3 million viewers. It was repeated again and the number went up to 6 million. The fourth repeat got 12 million. Everybody in the country knew and had talked about the show for years yet there had only been six episodes. The second six episodes weren’t shown till 1979. If the BBC hadn’t repeated that first series, Fawlty Towers, may well have been forgotten and the second series never commissioned. Imagine that. A Britain with no Fawlty Towers, no ‘Don’t mention the war’ (from the last episode of the first series), no ‘He’s from Barcelona’, no ‘Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically …’ and all those other wonderful gags and phrases now in the national lexicon.

Something similar happened with The Office, which was nearly dropped after its first showing on BBC 2 back in 2001 so poor were the viewing figures.

Since the show wouldn't be getting the full-on rerun treatment, Frisby decided it wasn't worth busting his ass doing a 2nd series, and the show stopped there. But the bigger question is: if Lucky Feller HAD continued, and been repeated ad nauseum until it caught on, could Only Fools and Horses have existed? Hell, besides the setting and the characters, David Jason even drove a three-wheeled car!! If Lucky Fellar had been burned more into the public conscience, surely OFAH would've been quickly dismissed (if even conceived at all) as being too similar.

Hard to even fathom a world without Only Fools and Horses, and yet it could've easily happened were it not for a quirk in the policies of the BBC et al.