Rock and Chips, Sunday 9pm, BBC One

Posted by Stewart Turner

Rock 'n' Chips © BBC

Last night’s Only Fools and Horses prequel was fantastic news for the three people who’ve been chuckling along to the post-Peckham exploits of Boycey and Marlene in The Green Green Grass for the past few years. For the rest of us, it was just another unwelcome attempt by the BBC to revive the twitching corpse of Del Boy and co rather than commission something new.

There were some big-hitters on board for Rock and Chips, essentially the story of how Del Boy and Rodney came to be brothers and yet differ in height by about three feet. Nicholas Lyndhurst did a reasonable job of rattling through his lines as Rodney’s cut-price Kray dad Freddie the Frog, and professional rent-a-cockney Phil Daniels was fairly convincing as a middle-aged version of Grandad.

But the jokes, oh my, the jokes… It was a wonder some of the actors were able to deliver their lines without crawling behind the vintage ‘60s furniture and waiting for the perfectly recreated set to swallow them up. One hilarious sequence involved nothing more than a hospital porter shouting “minge!” at the top of his voice for three minutes, while the creepy sequence of masturbation jokes involving Del Boy’s mum’s boss at the cinema was just too much.

There were a few nice touches, like the backstory about how the Trotters ended up living in Nelson Mandela house, but overall the whole thing played a bit like an episode of Heartbeat with fewer jokes. It did succeed in sucking me in, but that was entirely due to familiarity with the characters and absolutely nothing to do with the clunky, sub-Carry On script.

You can’t help thinking that if anyone other than Only Fools creator John Sullivan had submitted this script it would’ve been thrown out for making Hi-de-Hi look positively highbrow. See you next year for the prequel to the prequel.

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