John Sullivan RIP

Comedy gold (click)

John Sullivan was born in South London, his Dad was a plumber and his Mum a cleaner. He left school at 15 with no qualifications. But none of that mattered, because what John Sullivan had was a quality and a skill that very few people have. Sullivan had an imagination, a craft of the English language and a determination to succeed.

For years after leaving school he did numerous low paying jobs but never gave up sending scripts to the BBC. Eventually he got himself a job at the Beeb in the Props department and in 1977 he made his breakthrough with the BBC commissioning a series called Citizen Smith. Who could forget Wolfie?

Power to the people (click)

What many people didn't know was that before Citizen Smith the Two Ronnies often used John Sullivan to write sketches for them, including Sid & George.

It's a duck (click)

Watching this clip, Sullivan's work had a very clever knack of being timeless, which much sketch comedy is not. His characters were always deadpan, surreal and vivid.

Sullivan's genius was that his comedy was both rooted in reality and given wings by sheer comic imagination. His characters spoke like people that he – and therefore his viewers – knew, but where the real market traders of Peckham may have called each other "wally" and "plonker" (and quite possibly much more) and longed to be rich, Sullivan's brilliance was to give Del Boy absurd pretensions, a bizarrely mangled vocabulary of half-learned French words, and to make him not an unpleasantly dishonest money-grubber, but a dreamer.

Only Fools is by most people's judgement the funniest and most consistenly funniest comedy show ever on British Television. Sure Fawlty Towers often wins the plaudits but there were only 12 shows made.

The popularity and longevity of Only Fools and Horses was a mixed blessing for Sullivan. I was kind of tied into the success of it, that I would suspect annoyed him as his terrific imagination wasn't allowed to compose anything else.

He did write other hugely successful shows though. His relationship comedy Just Good Friends, and as a teenager I used to love how cheeky Paul Nicholas as Vince was.

Wasn't Jan Francis sexy (click)

Just Good Friends was the nearest he got to a smartly tailored American sitcom, although his funny and quite melancholic Dear John was actually was made into an American sitcom (any of you Americans remember it?)

Both versions (click)

But it is Only Fools And Horses that will stand out as Sullivan's greatest achievement. The show was first broadcast in 1981, with the final Christmas special going out in 2003.

In those 22 years it became a British institution, making stars of its cast members including David Jason (Del Boy) and Nicholas Lyndhurst (Rodney).

One extraordinary night in 1996, caused nearly 24 million people to turn their sets on to the BBC. He ended the show's run by allowing Del Boy to achieve his stated dream of becoming a millionaire; then, when begged to revive the show by the BBC, realised that there was little humour in the characters being rich, and relieved them of their wealth once more.

He brought female characters to the fore, marrying off Del Boy and Rodney, and - in a genre which has since become increasingly and relentlessly teenage - added a note of maturity by having his characters deal with the ramifications of a miscarriage. And, when perhaps his actors no longer wanted to portray the characters that had made them national treasures, he retooled the series, first as the Boycie and Marlene spin-off The Green Green Grass, and then an Only Fools and Horses prequel, Rock and Chips, which sadly was to be aired the week Sullivan died.

Sullivan also wrote Roger, Roger, Heartbreak Hotel and Sitting Pretty.

What legacy John Sullivan leaves will emerge with the due passage of time. If he has imitators, they are not fashionable, but his influence is still likely to run deep. Any British show that has clear, well-rounded and only apparently simple characters is in his debt. Any comedy whose humour is based on character rather than verbal or visual gags or silly set-ups must tip a nod to his work. And anyone seeking to write comedy who is even only slightly aware of sitcom's lineage would be well advised to sit down with a DVD of Only Fools and Horses – or almost anything by Sullivan – and watch it to see how it is done by a master of popular, populist, intelligent and witty comedy.