Only Fools and Stories by David Jason

Author:David Jason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A nation trembles

‘TIME ON OUR Hands’, the third part of the 1996 Only Fools Christmas trilogy, is the most watched programme in British television history. It’s one of four episodes of Only Fools in the all-time top 12, in fact, meaning that the show occupies a third of that list. The 2001 Christmas Special, ‘If They Could See Us Now’, gets to number 10 with an audience of 21.35 million. It’s the only programme from the twenty-first century that figures in the chart, which tells its own story about the way television audiences have dispersed in the years since then. The first two parts of the 1996 trilogy, ‘Heroes and Villains’ and ‘Modern Men’, had audiences of 21.31 million and 21.33 million respectively. But it’s the final episode that earns top place. When it went out on 29 December, it was viewed by 24.35 million people, all drawn to their screens by the prospect of seeing the Trotters flog an antique watch at auction – Del actually passing out with excitement and disbelief at this outcome – and thereby finally fulfil Del’s constant and undimmed prophecy, that one day they would be millionaires.

You didn’t find out the audience figures straight away. There was no such thing in those days as ‘overnights’ – practically immediate assessments of viewer numbers from digital data. I’m not even sure how audience figures were arrived at in 1996, to be perfectly honest with you. Maybe the old analogue system was still in operation, whereby a selected group of people carefully logged their viewing habits in a printed notebook, and then handed it back in to be examined and extrapolated from. Maybe they had upgraded to set-top boxes by then, which is the current system. Or maybe the BBC was sending out an army of people with clipboards and biros to peer through the nation’s curtains. It doesn’t really matter. All I know is that we had to wait about a week before the results were in. And the results said: 24.35 million people.

It was perfectly amazing to me. You couldn’t get your head around the number. You simply couldn’t imagine that quantity of people in any way that made sense or rendered it graspable. You couldn’t put them into a theatre in your mind and imagine playing to them. Your brain ended up reeling. There was, however, one aspect of the whole thing that brought it into focus for me. Before the show was broadcast, we were solemnly informed that the national electricity grid was braced for action. They were anticipating some serious interest in the show and, by extension, in their product. Accordingly, in addition to all those television sets being switched on, it was understood that when the programme ended, the number of people going into the kitchen to put on their kettles and make a cup of tea would cause a surge in demand for electricity that the grid would be required to take measures to insulate itself against.

This notion really got to me – perhaps inevitably, as a former electrician myself.

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