John Sullivan, who died yesterday of viral pneumonia, aged 64, was the writer who has made us laugh more than any other over the past thirty five years.
A clever, lovely man, he used his own working class background to define through television comedy some of the changes that have occurred in British life in recent decades.
Because Sullivan was the comic genius who created and wrote every word of the nation’s favourite television series Only Fools And Horses, as well as Citizen Smith with Robert Lindsay as Wolfie in a Che Guevara beret, the much loved romantic comedy series Just Good Friends with Jan Francis and Paul Nicholas, and Dear John, about a recently divorced man. On Thursday the BBC will show his latest creation, a prequel to Only Fools And Horses, Rock & Chips.
Few of us can have watched his characters without recognising aspects of ourselves, our friends and our families. But we didn’t laugh at them so much as we laughed with them, and in so doing, at ourselves.
This was perhaps never demonstrated better than in the Only Fools And Horses episode when working class Rodney takes out middle class Cassandra for the first time and is mortified when she gives him a lift home to Peckham. Deliciously funny, it was also sad. Sullivan could make us cry, too.
For all his social observations, Sullivan, absolutely a self-made man, dipped deeply into his own background. Born in 1946, he grew up in a tough part of Balham in South London, where his father, who had been released from a German prisoner of war camp a year earlier, worked as a plumber and heating engineer… “although we never had central heating in our house”, he would remember.
After failing the 11-plus he was educated at a secondary modern school where the only lesson that interested him was English. “We had a teacher with a glass eye who would read Dickens to us,” he once told me. “He was probably a frustrated actor because he would act out the dialogue and make the words come alive.” When he found success Sullivan would still read Dickens, buying himself a complete set collection.
There was never any possibility of taking O-levels. “That had been more or less decided on the day we joined the school at eleven,” he would say. “Those who had school uniforms sat O’levels, those of us who wore jeans didn’t.”
The result was that he left school at fifteen with no qualifications and got a job as a messenger with Reuters news agency in Fleet Street. The result was his eyes were opened to a whole new world of professional people.
“I suppose I was intelligent enough to know that I’d had little education. So I used to spend my weekly wages buying all those Teach Yourself books…maths, English, history…German, even. There was a German receptionist at one place I worked and I dearly wanted a second language. I never managed it though.”
Eventually he moved to an advertising agency, again as a messenger, after which he went to work cleaning cars. He didn’t know it then but the characters for Only Fools And Horses were already forming out of the dodgy dealer world of the second hand motor trade, just as much as they’d been conceived in the street market in Balham where he’d had a Saturday stall while at school.
“The characters were incredible: fly-pitchers, guys with sovereign rings and camel haired cats. The whole atmosphere had a rich vein of humour.” He was, he would discover, one of life’s observers.
He was 19 when he wrote his first script. It was, in an early sign of the direction his comedy would take, about social change and pride.
About an old man who kept a beautifully polished, copper plated Gents and who had to change his style when a new one with Muzak opened down the road, it was turned down by the BBC.
But he’d caught the writing bug and for the next ten years as he went through a succession of jobs…in a brewery, as a plumbers mate, a lorry driver, a building labourer and even cleaning carpets at the House of Commons, he kept writing and failing to get anything accepted.
Finally he decided to write to the BBC and ask for a job where he might get some experience from the inside and was amazed to be taken on moving scenery with the strict warning not to annoy the stars.
He didn’t. He watched and learned. He already had an idea for a series about a Trotskyite character he used to see in a pub in Chelsea who was always saying that as soon as the pub closed he was going to start the revolution.
“He was pathetic, really, but funny. I thought there might be something there so I mentioned it to a producer I’d got to know who challenged me to either write it or shut up about it. I took a fortnight’s holiday and wrote a single play. It was accepted. Citizen Smith had been born. It was 1977. Catching the moment completely, it ran for three years over 28 episodes.
Sullivan immediately gave up his job, and became a full time writer.” He was thirty and could now do no wrong. Class differences and the changing sexual attitudes were nearly always present in what he wrote, but in a gentle, never vulgar way, shown to massive effect in the relationship between the upmarket modern girl Jan Francis and the charming chancer Paul Nicholas in Just Good Friends.
This, too, was in part autobiographical, his wife Sharron, whom he met in Chelsea in 1972, coming from a “comfortable background” with a nice job as a secretary in the West End. “She was earning more than me, while I was living with four other blokes in a flat in Battersea and having quite a good time.”
Then when Sullivan noticed that many of his friends were getting divorced, and that newly single men found it difficult to cope, he wrote the funny though sad series, Dear John, which starred the late Ralph Bates who was to become a close friend. The American version of the series would run for over seventy episodes.
Writing so many episodes for series meant his work load was impossible, and he skirted around the edge of a breakdown a couple of times, but he always managed to produce his brilliant and funny scripts.
Inevitably he will be remembered for ever in television for his creation of the characters in Only Fools And Horses – Del Boy, the pathetic older brother always looking for a quick deal in his Reliant Robin, Rodney, whom he would say was “a teeny bit like a young me…a naive dreamer”, and Boycie and Marlene for whom he wrote a series of their own, The Green Green Grass.
And yesterday as news of his sudden death was announced, Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, said “his work will live on for years to come. He had a unique gift for turning everyday life and characters…into unforgettable comedy”. David Jason who played Del Boy said, “We have lost our country’s greatest comedy writer, but he leaves us a great legacy, the gift of laughter.”
John Sullivan wasn’t given an easy start in life. But he made a great career and life for himself by discovering and then using his innate talents, and never giving up through years of rejection. He is survived by his wife, their daughter, two sons and two grandchildren.
