The Only Fools and Horses star who was told he’d get fired if he laughed during iconic scene

One of the absolutely classic Only Fools and Horses scenes nearly led to a pair of its stars being sacked just for laughing.

Nicholas Lyndhurst, who played Rodney on the iconic sitcom, revealed in an interview with TV legend Michael Parkinson that he and David Jason, who of course played Del Boy, were nearly fired for giggling while filming a scene.

The scene in question came in season two, episode seven ‘A Touch of Glass’, and involved breaking an extremely expensive chandelier, which Grandad, Rodney and Del Boy had been hired to clean.

“I was nearly fired because of that scene,” Nicholas recalled, “I’m a bit of a giggler when it comes to that sort of stuff.

“So Ray Butt our producer came up to me and he said ‘This chandelier cost six grand, we’ve only got one, we can only afford one, if you laugh that’s the entire scene blown.

“‘If we blow the scene the BBC won’t buy the series and that will be down to you. If you laugh I will fire you’.”

This is why when you watch the scene back, you’ll notice both David and Nicholas staring straight at each other rather than the chandelier after it breaks to avoid getting the giggles.

The chandelier genuinely did cost £6,000 despite being a fake one, and only one was made by prop company Trading Post.

In reality though because the shot was being filmed from multiple cameras and angles, had the two actors cracked it would have been easy enough to edit around, but Butt let them think otherwise to add even more tension and humour to the situation.

The idea for the entire chandelier gag actually came from something that happened to writer John Sullivan’s father. In the 1930s he and other workmen were fitting a new heating system into a stately home and had to move chandeliers, with the exact same mix-up you see in the episode coming to pass.

The entire episode was written around this story with the smashed chandelier always intended as the climax.