Only Fools and Fridays

You faithful readers will know that one of my favorite Only Fools and Horses episodes is the Halloween-styled Friday the 14th. Here's an article that digs deeper than the mere tropes and parodies set up by the horror genre, and more about the Trotters themselves:

‘Friday the 14th’ is interesting because it works to highlight the inherent venality of the Trotter family. While Del, Rodney & even their crafty Grandad, are at heart good people (and Only Fools would not shine away from outright sentimentality at points), they are crooked, opportunistic, and will happily run away from a situation if they feel the long arm of the law bearing down on them. In this case, what appears to be the offer of a nice country cottage, rent-free, in Cornwall that the trio can escape to comes with a caveat – Del has made a deal with his old friend Boycie, who owns the cottage, to illegally salmon poach in order to make money from and exploit the local area. This makes the episode, to some extent, a cautionary tale. The Trotters are threatened by a dangerous external force for their hubris, for emerging from the moral vacuum of the crime-ridden, urban London landscape in order to remove natural resources from Mother Nature. Del placing a tub of writhing maggots on the dinner table as Rodney eats a curry with rice foreshadows this juxtaposition, suggesting horror before they even leave the homestead.

There is, after all, an opportunistic cheapness to Del-Boy’s world (in which those around him all orbit). As the series transforms him from unlicensed trader emerging from a ‘70s of working-class hardship and economic downturn, into a wannabe ‘yuppie’ and product of aspirational, neoliberal Thatcherism, he becomes a tragic example of failed British meritocracy. Del-Boy only gains his fortune, in the end, through dumb luck – a centuries-old pocket watch that lands the Trotters millions of pounds. By ‘Time on Our Hands’, the Trotters have become as much extended family to the viewer as they are to each other, so their success reads as cathartic, but it is a cheat. Sullivan’s message across the run of Only Fools and Horses is that Del-Boy is destined to always be a victim of Thatcherism and a Britain feeding class warfare and City prosperity, and even when Rodney graduates art college and marries into the middle-class, his working-class family origins, and his tether to proxy guardian Del, frequently threaten the aspirational life he seeks to build for himself. We might love the Trotters but in the best tradition of comic British heroes, they are losers. At times, they are even victims.