First of all, it's important to note that I don't dole out half star ratings lightly. Frequently, when you see a half star rating, it is a petulant reaction to a plot point that someone didn't want to happen despite the fact it made complete narrative sense, or an act of personal prejudice based on the foregrounding of a character who doesn't exactly match the reviewer's own gender or ethnicity. Half star reviews based on silly tantrums or ingrained bigotry litter review sites and soil rating systems so I try to ensure when I give a half star to something, I really mean it. I'm not the only one to saddle If They Could See Us Now, the ill-advised 2001 comeback episode of Only Fools and Horses, with the lowest possible rating but several reviewers seem to have been so angry that the show came back at all that they forgot to focus on the episode content itself. That's a shame, as there's plenty to justify the half star rating right there on the screen. I was not happy about Only Fools and Horses returning after the 1996 Christmas trilogy ended the story so perfectly, but had If They Could See Us Now been a decent episode in any way I would've reflected that in my assessment. But it really is very, very bad.
An immediate problem with If They Could See Us Now is that it attempts to reset the premise of the show by having the Trotters lose all their money and wind up back in Nelson Mandela House. Aside from the unlikelihood of this scenario, writer John Sullivan spends a good chunk of the first twenty minutes or so visibly struggling to justify it through pointless recaps (I doubt many people started watching the show for the first time at this point) and clunky-as-hell exposition. In one scene, the absence of the deceased Buster Merryfield is explained by Rodney announcing to Del how he is living with Elsie Partridge now, as if Del wouldn't already be fully aware of this information. Sullivan might as well have had Rodney turn to the camera and break the fourth wall! But the major problem with the status quo-restoring premise is that, while you can put all the game pieces back to their original places on the board, you can't change the events of the previous game. The quest to become millionaires around which so much of Only Fools and Horses was based is completely undermined as a premise if the characters have already been millionaires, even more so by the fact that they were millionaires who found the experience unfulfilling. That beautiful final scene in Time on Our Hands in which Del talks about how being rich is not like he dreamed it would be is pretty much torpedoed by this cheap reset, along with the themes of the whole previous Christmas trilogy.
Like I said though, these things would matter slightly less had If They Could See Us Now been a decent episode. But it's not. Immediately something feels off. The writing is terrible, obvious and crass. There are weird jokes about Damien peeping at Cassandra in the bathroom and Del looking at her pants. During a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire parody, the phrase "fastest finger" is paralleled with what Rodney and Cassandra are doing in the bedroom. Del deals with a disappointment by going to a lap dancing club. It all feels so much more lowest common denominator. This is not helped by the fact that the cast have either forgotten how to play their roles or are so unimpressed with the material that they're not really trying.
The death of Buster Merryfield should've been a sign not to push ahead with these episodes. The central three generations of Trotter were always crucial to the show's dynamic. When Lennard Pearce died the show was still in its infancy and Sullivan was able to bring in a convincing replacement. Even when Albert was comparatively marginalised in later episodes, his presence was always felt. But not as much as his absence is. Sullivan could always write pathos well but Albert's funeral is dashed off ham-fistedly with a lazy joke about the Trotters accidentally attending the wrong funeral of another ex-military man who was coincidentally also called Albert and who's funeral happens to be directly across the road. Though Del's anger at a man he thinks is disrespecting Albert gives us a passing glimmer of the tight family dynamic so pivotal to Only Fools and Horses' success, the fact that Del and Rodney miss their Uncle's funeral seems like a missed opportunity to have included some heartfelt scenes that reunite the old gang from the Nag's Head.
I'm in danger of criticising If They Could See Us Now for what it isn't, a classic move of the bitter and entitled fan, so I should get back to the amply terrible things that it is instead. If Merryfield's death wasn't a good enough reason to abandon these new episodes, the death of Kenneth MacDonald who played Mike should've been the final straw. Perhaps Sullivan was too far into the process to abandon the script by this stage, but Mike's absence (explained by him being in prison) necessitates the repurposing of Sid from the café, who is suddenly relocated to the Nag's Head where he was never seen previously. The writing for some of the other regulars is also off. Trigger, who's role Sullivan seemed to have mastered completely by the end of the original run, is given a very questionable joke that seems to suggest he is schizophrenic, casting his whole character in an uncomfortable light that doesn't even entirely make sense. There's a scene where Mickey Pierce calls Rodney pretending to be the Sultan of Brunai and Rodney believes him. Even when he was the naive young man at the very beginning of the series, Rodney was never portrayed as flat-out stupid as he is here.
About that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire parody I eluded to earlier. Originally, it was intended to actually be Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on which Del would appear, with Chris Tarrant cameoing instead of a visibly struggling Jonathan Ross. Ultimately, a deal could not be reached with ITV and the plot was changed, though not enough to disguise the fact that Millionaire was clearly the show in the original script. There's that aforementioned telltale "fastest finger" joke, as well as the fact that the plot uses a phone-a-friend lifeline and Rodney uses the standard WWTBAM approved parlance of "100%." In a way though, it would've been worse had ITV given their approval, exacerbating the feel of a bad Comic Relief spinoff sketch that already hangs over proceedings. The Millionaire crossover seems to have been the big guns that Sullivan was relying on to make his new script work. Elsewhere, we get a lazy retread of the costume comedy of Heroes and Villains, a broad stroke that Sullivan got away with once but which feels old hat and desperate here, especially since it is paired with a moment in which Del lurks smirkingly around an oblivious Rodney which is essentially a replay of a much better scene from the earlier Happy Returns.
I knew that If They Could See Us Now was going to be bad but I wasn't quite prepared for just how dreadful it was. I honestly found the viewing experience depressing. If memory serves, while they're still not good, I think the remaining two specials from 2002 and 2003 at least marginally improve on If They Could See Us Now. I will be very surprised indeed if this doesn't turn out to be the nadir of the whole series.
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