By the end of its third series, Only Fools and Horses had really hit its stride. The world was largely established, the actors had completely settled into their characters and writer John Sullivan had developed a mastery for creating tight, clever half-hour stories with intricate plotting and surprising twists. The 1983 Christmas special Thicker Than Water was tagged on the end of this breakthrough run and, once again, it was marked out as a special mainly though its Christmas setting and a shift into more downbeat subject matter. In this case, the story is based around the return of absentee patriarch Reg Trotter, an event that throws Del and Rodney's parentage into question. The stakes are high as issues of male pride threaten to drive a wedge between the brothers, much to Reg's apparent delight.
I'm not going to dance around the issue, Thicker Than Water is a masterpiece. In a third series that included exceptional classics like Homesick and May the Force Be With You, Thicker Than Water easily keeps up the standard with high stakes and a plot filled with twists and turns, culminating in an almost Agatha Christie-esque assembling of the main players for the final reveal. Dramatically engaging, Thicker Than Water also manages to be consistently hilarious in a way that never undermines the drama but also refuses to cede the stage to it entirely. Sullivan has written an incredibly quotable script here. My brothers and I still regularly reenact the scene of Del receiving negative test results. One joke about the brass section of a band just keeps building, with toppers for the preceding punchline arriving twice in a row. Resisting the temptation to reel off line after line in appreciation, I'll limit myself to my favourite one: "A right blindin' Christmas this has turned out to be; some people get wise men bearing gifts. We get a wally with a disease."
Thicker Than Water isn't quite perfect. Early on those same lazy jokes about women being dogs appear, thankfully then banished for the duration. You'd be unlikely to hear the punchline "The youngest boy was half-caste" in a sitcom these days. These fleeting dated moments are generally expected in vintage sitcoms, but Thicker Than Water has a couple of other problems. There's a joke that always bothers me in which Del appears to be laughing at the very real possibility that Rodney has an apparently very serious inherited blood disease. The joke, of course, is that he then realises the same might apply to him. It's a well performed moment but Sullivan seems so dedicated to the gag here that he inadvertently sacrifices the notion of Del's fiercely protective attitude to Rodney, which is the core of not only this episode but the entire series. Thicker Than Water's other major problem is the casting of Peter Woodthorpe as Reg. Physically he looks like a Trotter but his snivelling performance is a bit too overdone and it's a shame that a figure who looms so large in the Only Fools and Horses mythology is not played with a little more subtlety.
Ultimately though, these complaints feel a bit nitpicky when set against the overall excellence of the script. David Jason particularly shines as Del vacillates between anger, confusion and sadness, bringing significant comic and dramatic chops to the episode. On a sadder note, this was to be Lennard Pearce's final appearance as Grandad, which makes the happy ending seem like a fitting send off, albeit an unintentional one. Thicker Than Water was also the final half-hour Christmas special, with all subsequent ones running to at least an hour. Perhaps more unusually, very few of the later Christmas episodes were actually set at Christmas, freeing Sullivan up to explore a wider range of ideas without being chained to seasonal clichés or the oddly downbeat tendencies they seemed to bring out in him.
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