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'The Dickens of our generation': Only Fools And Horses writer and working class genius John Sullivan dies aged 64

John Sullivan, who died yesterday of viral pneumonia, aged 64, was the writer who has made us laugh more than any other these past 35 years.

A clever, lovely man, he used his working-class background to define, through television comedy, some of the changes that have occurred in British life in recent decades.

Because John was the comic genius who created and wrote every word of the nation’s favourite TV series, Only Fools And Horses, as well as Citizen Smith with Robert Lindsay as Wolfie in a Che Guevara beret, the much-loved romantic comedy of Just Good Friends and Dear John, about a divorced man.

On Thursday, the BBC will show his latest creation, a prequel to Only Fools And Horses, Rock & Chips.

Few of us can have watched his characters without recognising aspects of ourselves, our friends and families. But we didn’t laugh at them so much as laugh with them, and in so doing, at ourselves.

This was never demonstrated better than in the Only Fools And Horses episode when working-class Rodney takes out middle-class Cassandra for the first time and is mortified when she gives him a lift home to Peckham. Deliciously funny, it was also sad. John could make us cry, too.

For all his social observations, John, a self-made man, dipped deeply into his own background.

Born in 1946, he grew up in a tough part of Balham in South London, where his father, who had been released from a German PoW camp a year earlier, worked as a plumber and heating engineer – ‘although we never had central heating in our house’, he would remember.

After failing the 11-plus he was educated at a secondary modern school where the only lesson that interested him was English.

‘We had a teacher with a glass eye who would read Dickens,’ he once told me. ‘He was probably a frustrated actor because he would act out the dialogue and make the words come alive.’ When he found success, John would still read Dickens, buying himself a complete set.

There was never any possibility of taking O-levels. ‘That had been decided the day we joined the school at 11,’ he would say. ‘Those who had school uniforms sat O-levels, those of us who wore jeans didn’t.’

Finally he decided to write to the BBC and ask for a job and was amazed to be taken on moving
scenery with the strict warning not to annoy the stars. He didn’t. He watched and learned. He already had an idea for a series about a Trotskyite character he used to see in a pub in Chelsea who was always saying that as soon as the pub closed he was going to start the revolution.

‘He was pathetic, but funny. I thought there might be something there so I mentioned it to a producer who challenged me to either write it or shut up about it. I took a fortnight’s holiday and wrote a single play.’

It was accepted. Citizen Smith had been born. It was 1977. Catching the moment, it ran for three years over 28 episodes.

John immediately gave up his job and became a full-time writer. He was 30 and could now do no wrong.

Class differences and the changing sexual attitudes were nearly always present in what he wrote, but in a gentle, never vulgar way, shown to massive effect in the relationship between the upmarket modern girl Jan Francis and the charming chancer Paul Nicholas in Just Good Friends. This, too, was in part autobiographical. His wife Sharron, whom he met in Chelsea in 1972, came from a ‘comfortable background’ with a nice job as a secretary in the West End.

‘She earned more than me, while I was living with four blokes in a flat in Battersea and having a good time.’

Then when John noticed that many of his friends were getting divorced, and that newly single men found it difficult to cope, he wrote the funny, though sad, series, Dear John, starring the late Ralp