Only Fools and Horses gets a repeat run on BBC One from tomorrow. Kicking off with the very first episode Big Brother, the corporation is showing two episodes a day…
Here, bestselling author Steve Clark, writer of our brilliant new book Only Fools and Horses: The Official Inside Story – which is fully authorised by the family of the show’s creator John Sullivan – reveals how the first day of filming didn’t go well…
“The show’s producer and director Ray Butt – who’d been working with writer John Sullivan for months to get the programme into production – suffered a slipped disc the night before. He was in agony and was rushed to hospital. David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst and the rest of the production team were left waiting in a market while another director could be found to fill in.
‘With Ray off we were in deep trouble,’ John Sullivan told me. ‘Our producer and director had been taken into hospital and all the actors were sitting around down in a market somewhere waiting to start filming and wondering what the hell we were going to do.’ Eventually another director was found to fill-in and filming got under way. Ray Butt ended up staying in hospital for three weeks.”
Read more in Only Fools and Horses – The Official Inside Story (Splendid Books, £9.99) Click here to order your copy.
Read an extract of A Greater Love in 
