Perfect pitch

Our attitude to the past of our own youth is like our feelings towards an old grandfather: we love him, admire him for what he’s done, but, goodness, we don’t half patronise him.

Our attitude to the past of our own youth is like our feelings towards an old grandfather: we love him, admire him for what he’s done, but, goodness, we don’t half patronise him. ‘Gosh, grandad, you mean if you weren’t at home, nobody could phone you? How did you find anything out without Google?’ Television does this mixture of affection and condescension very well. Rock and Chips (BBC1, Sunday) was John Sullivan’s prequel to his astoundingly successful sitcom Only Fools and Horses. It was set in 1960 and told the back story. But this was scarcely a comedy at all. Apart from the names of the characters, it had only the faintest link with Only Fools. There was no laugh track; we were in a bleak, sub-fusc East London world of poverty, crime, stunted ambition and rather good rock music. The rogues here weren’t loveable villains flogging fake Rolexes, but nasty, grubby, selfish, violent people, too stupid and lazy to be anything else.

This was, Sullivan says, the world he knew, and he’s clearly nostalgic. But like all viewers of his age, he could look down on it. ‘Do you like Rossini?’ ‘Oh, I’ll drink anything.’ If your taste in booze was more sophisticated, you drank ‘chee-anty’. People actually wanted to live in tower blocks — at least before they did. They had their own respectability. Woman getting ready for a night out: ‘I am not getting tarted up, I am getting dolled up.’ The period details were nearly perfect: Bob Dawes as the creepy cinema manager, lusting after the young Mrs Trotter.