'The Boycie laugh just happened in rehearsals': John Challis talks Only Fools and Horses ahead of landmark milestone

Only Fools and Horses was watched by more people than any other comedy show and has received more votes from fans in polls.

The show will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year and so, ahead of that landmark, we caught up with actor John Challis, who played Boycie, to ask him a series of questions about the show.

Mr Challis lives near Ludlow and has been self-isolating for some weeks to stay safe.

He said: “I’m confined to barracks like everybody else.

“I’m not really used to this. I thought self-isolation was quite novel to begin with but I’m starting to get a bit twitchy because I’m used to dashing about.

“I’m doing a bit of gardening to make sure I do some exercise.”

We asked Mr Challis what it was like working with David Jason and the crew, and being part of the Only Fools And Horses phenomenon?

“In retrospect, it was the luckiest thing ever to be part of it. David Jason was a consummate comedy character actor, the best we’ve ever had.

“His comedy liaison with Nicholas Lyndhurst was so fortunate and so well-conceived because they were so different from each other.

“I put them up there in the same bracket as Laurel and Hardy, that sort of combination that just worked so well together.

“So I was lucky to be a supporting character for that. When I started, I just did the one episode, Go West Young Man, and there they were.

“It was only an afternoon’s filming, just one scene, a very funny scene, I had no idea it would go any further than that. As it went on, it crept up on us that we were onto something special.

“It was the first time most of us had been stopped in the street by people. They were coming up telling us how much they were enjoying the show.

“People started quoting lines and it was the first time it had happened to any of us.

“I remember, by the mid-1980s, we realised it meant so much to people.

“I thought it was very London-based because there was lots of cockney rhyming slang but we suddenly realised that the characters were very universal. Everybody loved it and it gets repeated and it’s still on, mostly on Gold. People have interested it to their children and those children have grown up and they’ve introduced it to their own children. You get three generations. It’s a phenomenon. It’s the only series where that really happens.

“Every time we go out, people come up and they can quote lines from it verbatim. I think the fans know it better than we ever did. We became a family and were all very proud of it.”

What was life like in between filming scenes. Did the characters play practical jokes on each other?

“There was a lot of joshing around, yes. You had to keep your end up.

“There was quite a lot of winding up going up, you just had to try and respond to it.

“Little tricks would be played. There was one time when Patrick Murray, who played Mickey Pearce, tripped up on his day off and cut his arm.

“He turned up at rehearsals with his arm in a plaster cast. It was a bit of a problem because we were halfway through an episode.

“We’d started off filming before he had a plaster cast – so John had to write a scene about why that had happened.

“He created a scene where the Drisscoll brothers came in and sorted him out. So we all went to the BBC make-up department and got plaster casts and he came in and the whole cast had got a plaster cast on.

“Kenny McDonald, who played the proprietor of the Nag’s Head, was a practical joker. One of his favourite tricks was to get a beer mat and take out a little triangle from that then stick it on his nose. He’d turned to the audience after his back towards them and say: ‘Who threw that?’”

How much of the Boycie character was your creation and how much was from the writer John Sullivan?

“I don’t remember any instructions at all. There was no instruction really about the character. I think it was the same with all of us. He just let everybody go. David Jason was about third choice for Del Boy, I think, which is extraordinary because you can’t imagine anybody else playing him. I’d done a character in Citizen Smith, a bent policeman, and that’s what John Sullivan liked. So he told me he’d see if he could use that again someday. So I started by doing a watered down version of that policeman but it became more and more extreme.

“The iconic Boycie laugh just happened. It was improvised in one rehearsal. The script said, ‘Boycie laughs’, and I remember a woman in the pub who laughed like a machine gun, so I just did it. Everybody else laughed at it and they told me to keep it in. if you look at the early episodes, he didn’t do it like that.

What’s your favourite episode and why?

“It’s difficult to pick up on a favourite because there were so many. I guess one was the Jolly Boys outing, which was a special. We got on a coach and went to Margate and had a jolly. It really was a jolly boys’ outing. For the first time we were in amongst the people of Margate so everybody was fascinated by us.

“It was different because we had to have a security cordon around us. We had a great time and a lot of people enjoyed it.”

How far in advance were you given the scripts and did you provide feedback to John Sullivan?

“I remember rehearsing one episode in the early days and we got a couple of pages delivered, new stuff, from John Sullivan. Then the director asked me if I’d be available the next week for filming? The reason was that John was such a perfectionist and he’d write right up until the last minute, honing it. Some of the scripts were very late. The same happened with the Green Green Grass, the spin-off, which we filmed in and around Shropshire, where John would be in the studio and changing things just before the audience came in. Because John was a perfectionist, nobody really made suggestions to him because the scripts were so perfect.

“He loved his jokes so he’d always try to work a new joke in.”

Who were your best mates on Only Fools?

“Kenny McDonald, who played Mike Fisher, the barman at the Nag’s Head. We lived quite close to each other. He was always ringing up with the latest joke, some of which were a bit doubtful. He was a terrible wind-up merchant, telling me he was going into the West End. If you explored it, it was all complete nonsense. He was a great character, a very generous guy, it was a real tragedy when he passed away at the age of 50. It was the year 2000.

“These shows can be quite competitive. David and Nick had all the lines and all the plots and I remember when Sue Holderness and I did the Green Green Grass and you’d get some terribly talented person coming along and stealing the whole show with one scene. Roger Lloyd-Pack was a bit like that, as Trigger.”

Would you bring it back if another episode of Only Fools was ever written?

“Well, I suppose we would but John Sullivan passed away in 2011, which was a terrible shock. And I think there was so much more to come. So I’m not sure there’d be anyone able to write it.”