The program began as an idea by writer John Sullivan, who constructed the first scripts under the title Readies and finally persuaded the BBC to risk making a whole series based on the dubious dealings of a personable cockney “fly-pitcher,” who made a precarious living selling shoddy goods and—quite without malice—duping customers (including his own family and friends) at every opportunity. Retitled Only Fools and Horses after the time-honored proverb “only fools and horses work,” the first series failed to attract much attention, but the quality of the scripts and the excellence of the actors gradually won a huge and devoted audience, and by the mid-1980s, special festive episodes topped the BBC’s Christmas ratings.

The leading role of the brash, streetwise Derek “Del Boy” Trotter, decked out with chunky gold jewelry and well versed in cockney rhyming slang, was developed to perfection by David Jason, who deftly realized the character’s combination of sentimentality and scheming unscrupulousness. Determined to improve his place in the world in the face of every setback, his Del Boy—like Minder’s Arthur Daly—became a byword for shady practices, although his endearing incompetence (embodied in the rusty, yellow three-wheeled van he drove) and his breezy vulgarity ensured that he always remained sympathetic. Time and again, Del Boy’s ambitious plans had to be abandoned in order to extricate another of the Trotter clan (or himself) from trouble. Often he was his own worst enemy, even when his motives were at their most pure. When he felt moved to touch up his mother’s monument in the churchyard, for instance, he used his own supply of suspiciously acquired paint, and when night fell found out to his horror that it was luminous.

Del Boy’s foil was his younger brother Rodney Trotter, gauche and easily misled (“a right plonker” according to his sibling, who used, or rather misused him) and played with pained indignation by former child actor Nicholas Lyndhurst. The relationship between Del Boy and Rodney lay at the heart of the series’ success, veering as it did from conflict and petty deceptions to pathos and genuine warmth and mutual reliance. The premise was that Rodney had never known his father and could not remember his mother, who had died when he was a baby, thus leaving him in the care of his scornful but devoted brother. The Trotter trio was completed by dotty old Grandad, played by Lennard Pearce, and, after Pearce’s unexpected death from a heart attack in 1984, by Grandad’s brother, Uncle Albert (played by Buster Merryfield).

The format changed little over the years, nor did the tasteless decor of the Trotter flat in high-rise Nelson Mandela House, Peckham, or the memorable clientele of the East End pub where the brothers congregated with such “business associates” as the shady but often fooled Boycie, nicknamed Jaffa (because he was sterile, thus like a Jaffa seedless orange), and the even more dimwitted road-sweeper Trigger (so named because he looked like a horse). There were, however, some changes in the Trotter household, notably Rodney’s disaster-strewn romance and eventual marriage to city banker Cassandra and Del Boy’s liaison with the actress Raquel, which led ultimately to the birth of the first of a future generation of Trotter entrepreneurs, the ominously named Damien.

After a glorious run of some ten years, with both Jason and Lyndhurst successfully involved in various other television projects, the series petered out with the exception of occasional specials, which effortlessly proved that the tried and tested formula still worked. The achievement of the series was recognized by a BAFTA Best Comedy prize in 1989 (the year of Rodney’s wedding to Cassandra). In a final, forgivably sentimental outing, Del Boy’s dreams of riches were unexpectedly realized by winning the lottery, although the viewers’ last sight of the Trotter trio was of the incorrigible Del Boy, Rodney, and Albert walking into the sunset discussing schemes to become even richer.