Only Fools and Horses: The episode the gang filmed solely on a studio set after a disastrous previous episode
A previous attempt to recreate a warm climate had been quite a misfire
Only Fools and Horses was filmed over a number of different locations, both in London itself as well as Bristol and elsewhere over the course of the nine seasons, as is well known.
In fact, there are very few episodes of the iconic sitcom that weren’t filmed in any location, and were entirely shot in a studio.
The story behind one of these is quite funny in itself and sounds like just the kind of thing Del Boy might have done.
The episode, like most Only Fools episodes, is a classic called The Unlucky Winner Is from series six.
In this episode Rodney wins a competition after Del enters a painting he did as a child into it.
The prize for winning is to go to sunny Spain, which Rodney does with Cassandra, and naturally Del Boy comes along.
The big laughs of the episode come from Rodney being forced to act as a schoolchild in order to not lose the prize as he was too old for the competition.
The episode was set mostly in Spain but for obvious budgeting reasons the BBC wasn’t flying the cast and crew to the Mediterranean, so instead it was filmed purely on a studio set.
In a previous season two episode, It Never Rains, the setting was supposed to be Benidorm which again of course the BBC couldn’t afford.
But it was the different path they took for filming this first time round that meant The Unlucky Winner Is was only filmed indoors.
As Benidorm itself was out of the question the cast and crew bussed down to Dorset, filming the ‘sunny’ episode in what was a very cold Poole.
The setting was so unconvincing the crew had to turn all the lights they had up to the max to try and create that sunny feel.
It was remembering all this trouble when writing season six that John Sullivan made sure to write the ‘Unlucky Winner Is’ episode so it could all be filmed nice and easily in a studio.
