{"id":3211,"date":"2020-10-16T09:44:52","date_gmt":"2020-10-16T09:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/?p=3211"},"modified":"2023-09-28T12:44:52","modified_gmt":"2023-09-28T12:44:52","slug":"only-fools-and-horses-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/television\/only-fools-and-horses-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"Horror in the Britcom: Only Fools and Fridays"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Horror in the Britcom<\/h1>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Only Fools and Fridays<\/h4>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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A.J. Black’s series looking at horror in British comedy discovers the ‘not-so-hidden’ horrors in one of Britain’s most beloved sitcoms, Only Fools and Horses…\u200b<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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only fools and horses<\/h1>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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While the spectre of horror might not come instantly to mind when considering the jocular working-class pathos of Only Fools and Horses<\/i>, John Sullivan\u2019s iconic sitcom debuted in the midst of the American slasher\u2019s rise to dominance.<\/strong><\/p>

1978\u2019s Halloween<\/b><\/i>, from John Carpenter, popularised through Jamie Lee Curtis\u2019 Laurie Strode the theory of the \u2018Final Girl\u2019, as Michael Myers\u2019 unstoppable, masked killer scythed his way through the youthful population of Haddonfield. Two years later, teenage campers at Crystal Lake in the American heartland were picked off in Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i>\u00a0(Sean Cunningham) by Mrs Voorhees and later, in the subsequent franchise, her son Jason Voorhees, victims themselves of the selfish whims of casually promiscuous teenagers. By 1981, the year Sullivan introduced the Trotter family to the British populous for the first time, both Halloween<\/b> <\/i>and Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i> were about to debut sequels. A Nightmare on Elm Street<\/b><\/i>\u00a0(Wes Craven, 1984) was just around the corner. The traumatised, male victim turned monster had arrived in American horror, and the 1980s saw an increased boom in American cultural transfers to British shores.<\/p>

This surely accounts for an episode like \u2018Friday the 14th\u2019, which aired on BBC One on November 24th, 1983, an episode which directly references not just the Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i> franchise\u2014now three films strong following the release of Friday the 13th Pt III<\/b> (Steve Miner)\u00a0–<\/b>earlier that year\u2014but the broader trend of the slasher movie generally. Sullivan uses the episode to place, as he often would, Del-Boy, Rodney and in this case Grandad (later Uncle Albert) in positions that would showcase them in out of their depth situations; indeed he would frequently across the run of the series play with cinematic tropes or spoof well-known movies as a means of doing this. \u2018Miami Twice\u2019, set in Florida, riffs on The Godfather<\/b><\/i> (Francis Ford Coppola 1972). Numerous episodes reference popular films and play on them, such as \u2018Fatal Extraction\u2019, \u2018From Prussia With Love\u2019 or \u2018May the Force Be With You\u2019. Outside of Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i> and this particular episode, however, there is one other horror film which consistently is utilised as a comical reference point in the series: The Omen<\/b><\/i>.<\/p>

What becomes clear is that Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i> contains a surprising underbelly of anxiety in regard to horror tropes, and what they might reflect about the key socio-political factors at the heart of one of Britain\u2019s most beloved sitcoms.
In an era of streaming services asserting dominance over a legion of established television channels, it is easy to forget just how popular Only Fools and Horses<\/i> was in the \u201880s and \u201890s.<\/p>

\u2018Friday the 14th\u2019 takes place in the third season, during the years in which Sullivan\u2019s sitcom was finding its feet, before the death of co-star Lennard Pierce forces the Grandad of wheeler-dealing market trader Derek \u2018Del-Boy\u2019 Trotter and his feckless young brother Rodney to be written out in the fourth year, replaced by Buster Merryfield\u2019s iconic Uncle Albert. The years beyond his introduction, as Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i> dabbled increasingly\u2014and rather unprecedentedly for a BBC sitcom\u2014in longer-form, feature-length episodes (had it been made a decade earlier it would almost certainly have been given a lacklustre feature film adaptation), established the show as the most successful and adored British sitcom of all time, not to mention a staple for many years of Christmas Day viewing. The viewing figures for 1996\u2019s (at the time) final episode \u2018Time on Our Hands\u2019 broke records then for a BBC comedy broadcast (1) at 24.35 million, a record that remains to this day, and have rarely been matched in the quarter of a century since.<\/p>

\"only<\/p>

In other words, Only Fools and Horses<\/i> <\/b>was a comedic juggernaut that, for many years, was an unstoppable force. Certainly by 1988, as the show evolved into a 50-minute, drama-length format for the last two standard series, it had outgrown its own comedic sub-genre. The aforementioned two-part \u2018Miami Twice\u2019 really is a blockbuster in sitcom terms; produced in the United States, shot on film, no laughter track, replete with a score, it was the apogee of the show\u2019s even transatlantic reach. One Foot in the Algarve<\/b><\/i>, mentioned in the previous piece in this series (2), would never have been produced by the BBC without it. Del-Boy, Rodney & Uncle Albert remain, to this day, on a par only with Basil Fawlty or Alan Partridge (3) as the most immediately culturally recognisable comedy characters in British sitcom history. So, by that logic, what was John Sullivan doing writing both a pastiche of Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i> and indeed broader horror tropes of the traditional, classical ghost story? Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i>, a story about a fast-talking, ill-educated, working-class wideboy trying to make his fortune, while carrying his educationally middle-class aspirational brother, surely has little connection to horror as a sub-genre?<\/p>

\u2018Friday the 14th\u2019 is interesting because it works to highlight the inherent venality of the Trotter family. While Del, Rodney & even their crafty Grandad, are at heart good people (and Only Fools would not shine away from outright sentimentality at points), they are crooked, opportunistic, and will happily run away from a situation if they feel the long arm of the law bearing down on them. In this case, what appears to be the offer of a nice country cottage, rent-free, in Cornwall that the trio can escape to comes with a caveat – Del has made a deal with his old friend Boycie, who owns the cottage, to illegally salmon poach in order to make money from and exploit the local area. This makes the episode, to some extent, a cautionary tale. The Trotters are threatened by a dangerous external force for their hubris, for emerging from the moral vacuum of the crime-ridden, urban London landscape in order to remove natural resources from Mother Nature. Del placing a tub of writhing maggots on the dinner table as Rodney eats a curry with rice foreshadows this juxtaposition, suggesting horror before they even leave the homestead.<\/p>

Upon arriving in Cornwall, episode director Ray Butt accentuates the foreboding. Thunder, lightning and heavy rain accompany the Trotters\u2019 classic three-wheel van (memorably sporting their company slogan \u2018New York. Paris. Peckham\u2019) travelling dark and lonely country roads to reach their destination. They could be heading for the foresty remoteness of Camp Crystal Lake, and indeed they encounter a version of Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i>\u2019s Crazy Ralph in the jovial police officer who nonetheless works to fill in key exposition and provide these out of their depth outsiders with a warning: a man known as the \u2018Axe Murderer\u2019 has escaped an institute for the criminally insane on the moors, so they should be extra vigilant while on their break. Rodney and Grandad, ever frightened and cautious, immediately encourage retreat but Del represents the bullish ignorance of the City boy – he has profit to make, so they press on. Financial reward comes before any warning of local legend, myth or dangerous, unknowable force.<\/p>

In this sense, Sullivan plays very clearly with tropes audiences are by now familiar with. Don\u2019t go into the woods. Don\u2019t approach the crazy man. Don\u2019t stay alone in the big, remote house etc\u2026 all played out in literature and cinema for many decades. Only Fools here is explicitly cashing in on the transatlantic popularity of the slasher, and particularly Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i>, at this time. Butt places a figure in the bushes watching the Trotters arrive at the cottage, heavily breathing and groaning in the rain with a calloused, old hand; this could be Jason in his hockey mask or Michael Myers about to stalk innocent teens. A man appears at the rainy window of the cottage looking in, who only Rodney sees, before seemingly disappearing. An ominous figure knocks loudly at the door. The fact such a figure has escaped onto the moors evokes the Gothic horror of The Hound of the Baskervilles<\/b><\/i>\u00a0(Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902) or the work of Daphne du Maurier<\/a>; an open, enigmatic space with a gloomy remoteness that could be hiding any number of spectres. In the case of Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i>, it feels right that the menace is from exploitation horror as opposed to the classical literary sources of One Foot in the Grave<\/i><\/b> (BBC, 1990-2000).<\/p>

There is, after all, an opportunistic cheapness to Del-Boy\u2019s world (in which those around him all orbit). As the series transforms him from unlicensed trader emerging from a \u201870s of working-class hardship and economic downturn (4), into a wannabe \u2018yuppie\u2019 (5) and product of aspirational, neoliberal Thatcherism, he becomes a tragic example of failed British meritocracy. Del-Boy only gains his fortune, in the end, through dumb luck – a centuries-old pocket watch that lands the Trotters millions of pounds. By \u2018Time on Our Hands\u2019, the Trotters have become as much extended family to the viewer as they are to each other, so their success reads as cathartic, but it is a cheat. Sullivan\u2019s message across the run of Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i> is that Del-Boy is destined to always be a victim of Thatcherism and a Britain feeding class warfare and City prosperity, and even when Rodney graduates art college and marries into the middle-class, his working-class family origins, and his tether to proxy guardian Del, frequently threaten the aspirational life he seeks to build for himself. We might love the Trotters but in the best tradition of comic British heroes, they are losers. At times, they are even victims.<\/p>

\"onlu<\/p>

While \u2018Friday the 14th\u2019 takes place a good while before many of these developments in the characters\u2019 lives, by choosing to lampoon exploitative horror such as Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i>, Sullivan makes the point that while the Trotters often are victims of their own innate na\u00efvet\u00e9, stupidity or ignorance, their cheap attempts to raise their status, make a quick buck and build an empire can quite literally place them under physical threat. The teens slaughtered by Jason in the Friday the 13th<\/b><\/i> series might be examples of sexual liberation run amok, of a countercultural horniness at the end of the \u201850s that results in an abrogation of duty to protect the innocent, but \u2018Friday the 14th\u2019 instead suggests the Axe Murderer could visit upon the Trotters punishment for their own economic drive, and the temerity they have to try and move beyond their station. This being a comedy of course, \u2018Friday the 14th\u2019 doesn\u2019t end with Del & co chased across the moors by a knife-wielding maniac, indeed the crazed killer\u2014who poses as a policeman to break into the Trotters\u2019 sanctuary\u2014ends up being exploited himself by Del to make money, but the point is clear.<\/p>

In this instance, the killer represents an external force crashing into the Trotters lives, one of abject terror, that they could not possibly have foreseen but who represents a challenge to their own hubris. There is even an attempt to explore the psychology of the murderer, who Grandad attempts to quantify in cinematic tropes he understands when asked what a \u2018psycho\u2019 is. \u201cIt\u2019s a bloke what dresses up in his mother\u2019s clothes\u201d which of course directly references Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock<\/a>\u2019s Psycho<\/b><\/i> (1960), and gets a big laugh from a savvy studio audience. The killer does turn out to be a victim of his parents, oddly enough, just in a different way. Del manages to exploit him after he admits many of his issues stem from wanting to be a \u2018loser\u2019, as a stern and violent father was obsessed with making him a winner. Del, as it turns out, comes from opposite stock – his father, who abandoned he and Rodney as children (though Rodney\u2019s biological father turns out to be a different man \u2013 more on that later) is a parasite who didn\u2019t care enough about his children to make them anything after the premature death at a young age of their mother Joan. In fiction, do not most psychotic killers\u2019 rage stem from parental actions or failures? Jason, Michael, Freddy Krueger, the Axe Murderer here – the list goes on.
What is interesting about Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i> is just how powerfully the spectre of parenthood plays on the Trotter family across the series. Though she was clearly a troubled woman with mental health and abandonment issues, Del venerates their late mother, a woman he knew, and Rodney never did and spits venom at their father. This also perhaps explains one of Only Fools\u2019 finest long-running, latter-day jokes which taps into audience recognition of The Omen<\/b><\/i>, Richard Donner\u2019s 1976 chiller: Rodney\u2019s growing conviction that Del and his partner Raquel\u2019s unborn child is the Antichrist, accompanied by The Omen<\/b><\/i>\u2019s sonorous, recognisable \u2018Ave Satani\u2019 by Jerry Goldsmith, played over Rodney\u2019s growing expression of terror.<\/p>

It stems from a joke in the seventh series episode \u2018Three Men, a Woman and a Baby\u2019, in which Del and the heavily pregnant Raquel are thinking of boy\u2019s names, and Rodney sarcastically quips \u201cWhy don\u2019t you just call him Damien?\u201d, only for it to stick, much to his horror. Once Del later confirms they\u2019ve had a boy, the music chimes in as Rodney\u2019s unnatural fears come true. In the next episode, \u2018The American Dream\u2019, Rodney hears the music as Damien is being christened in church, sinking into his own terrified reverie. As Damien grows into a toddler and a young boy, Rodney sees instances of naughty or cheeky behaviour which Del laughs off, but Rodney sees as evidence that he\u2019s pure evil. The beginning of \u2018Heroes and Villains\u2019, the first episode of Only Fools\u2019 intended final episodes in 1996, even features a protracted, dystopian sci-fi inspired dream sequence of a future in which a devilish older Damien (played by character actor Douglas Hodge), rules the entire world with Rodney and his wife Cassandra reduced to the role of supplicants and servants. The question is why Rodney jumps to this conclusion about Del\u2019s child. What fills him with such existential horror?<\/p>

For me, the answer returns to the key issue of family trauma which ripples across Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i> and is grounded inside the horror inspirations the series draws from in these examples.<\/p>

Rodney was essentially raised by Del after Joan died when he was very young, but Del never pretends to be, nor often acts like, a father figure. He frequently bemoans Rodney\u2019s lack of gratitude at the sacrifices he made to bring him up and look after him, Del often throwing in his face during times of conflict that if not for Rodney he\u2019d be a high flyer in the City (a fantasy he needs to believe but would never have been true), and Rodney\u2014equally as high-tempered and indeed cunning in his own way as his brother\u2014frequently fires back in a way no father-son relationship would allow. When Rodney discovers in the final episode \u2018Sleepless in Peckham\u2019, that his true father wasn\u2019t wastrel Reg Trotter but rather legendary gentleman thief Freddie \u2018the Frog\u2019 Robdal, making him only Del\u2019s half-brother biologically, their bond as brothers is nevertheless reaffirmed but Rodney\u2019s constant sense of a life without a true parental figure has haunted him. Del, meanwhile, canonised Joan to such a degree that in \u2018Sickness and Wealth\u2019, amidst a seance above favourite haunt The Nags Head, a message from her from beyond in fact orchestrated by Uncle Albert through his paramour, spiritualist medium Elsie Partridge, is what it takes for him to go and see a doctor about crippling stomach pains likely caused through stress at unpaid debts.<\/p>

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Rodney, therefore, in his own way, is a product of parental trauma, and this anxiety extends to his imagination of Del\u2019s child being some kind of turbo-charged, post-Thatcherite representation of his brother\u2019s tactless excess. While the musical and visual iconography of The Omen<\/b><\/i> is utilised repeatedly to successful comic effect, Rodney does not fear Damien will be a literal Antichrist spelling the End of Days, but that he might represent the more repellent and self-destructive aspects of his brother and by extension their father. These are Rodney\u2019s own unresolved issues about being the product of a highly dysfunctional family. Jason, Michael, Freddy – they all went on to become the archetypal bogeyman, a representation of the American fear of children or teenage innocence being violated, and the post-war nuclear family contract being ripped apart. Rodney fears that Damien could, if unchecked, represent the product of \u201880s (and later 2010s) Britain: an unregulated, immoral sense of personal prosperity at the expense of those around him; what Del could have been had he not a conscience, a sense of underlying morality behind his cowardice and hucksterism, and a family to care for and ground him. Rodney\u2019s fear is that the victim could become the monster.<\/p>

Only Fools and Horses<\/b><\/i> boasts a coda that many considered unwise, returning for three feature-length specials over successive Christmas holidays between 2001-2003, in which John Sullivan removed the multi-millionaire lifestyle of the Trotters and grounded them back, largely penniless, in their flat within Nelson Mandela House. At the time, it felt unfair. We had wanted Del & Rodney to succeed, to find personal happiness, but in retrospect, Sullivan perhaps understood that financial gain was never the point of the series. Del always believed being rich was the aim of the game when, in fact, Raquel & Damien made him the happiest he had ever been. The final episode of the series might not have directly been written as a finale, the door open for a return that following Sullivan\u2019s death in 2011 is unlikely ever to happen, but it works in some sense better than \u2018Time on Our Hands\u2019 precisely because it allows Rodney the closure on the family issues that have haunted him, and to a degree, Del, since his childhood. He wonders whether he is anything like his true father, Freddie the Frog, but Del counters that he was \u201ca womaniser, a home-breaker, a con-man, a thief, a liar, and a cheat… So, no Rodney, you’re nothing like him.”\u00a0<\/p>

As Rodney becomes a father himself (naming his new daughter Joan after his long lost mother), and after losing a child previously thanks to Cassandra suffering a miscarriage, he is able to let go of the past in understanding his true parentage, and why he was so different in aspiration and personality so often to Del, allowing him and his family to move forward.\u00a0<\/p>

The Trotter family might be poor again, but they are victims no longer. Luvvly-jubbly.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sources<\/u>:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.barb.co.uk\/resources\/tv-facts\/tv-since-1981\/1996\/top10\/<\/p>

https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/television\/horror-britcom-series-one\/<\/p>

https:\/\/www.chortle.co.uk\/news\/2020\/05\/24\/46173\/alan_partridge_named_britains_greatest_comedy_characterhttps:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/business\/2012\/dec\/07\/britain-recessions-historyhttps:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yuppi<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A.J. Black is the author of Myth-Building in Modern Media: The Role of the Mytharc in Imagined Worlds. He writes and podcasts about popular culture in entertainment on his blog, Cultural Conversation, and podcast network We Made This. He lives in Birmingham, England.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A.J. Black’s series looking at horror in British comedy discovers the ‘not-so-hidden’ horrors in one of Britain’s most beloved sitcoms, Only Fools and Horses…\u200b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":123010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"no-sidebar","site-content-layout":"page-builder","ast-site-content-layout":"normal-width-container","site-content-style":"unboxed","site-sidebar-style":"unboxed","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"disabled","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[441,442,446,445,447,449,440,439,443,448,444],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Only-Fools-and-Horses-1.png?fit=680%2C423&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3211"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128230,"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions\/128230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horrifiedmagazine.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}