A lost episode of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ will air on TV for the first time this year.
The 1984 episode, ‘Licensed to Drill’, will be seen on current documentary series ‘The Story of Only Fools and Horses’ – which airs on GOLD on Tuesdays until October 3 – and features the final appearance of Grandad, played by Lennard Pearce.
In the 19-minute ep, Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter (Sir David Jason) has his eyes on a new get-rich-quick scheme after buying an oil rig for £400, but, as usual for the Trotters, things don’t all go to plan.
‘Licensed to Drill’ was originally made in 1984 as a special educational episode to teach kids at British schools about the oil industry.
It sees market trader Del tell his hapless brother Rodney Trotter (Nicholas Lyndhurst) and Grandad: "We just lay low in our boat for a while and we wait for one of the big oil companies to move off the oil field and then we whip in a bit lively and use their hole."
Last Friday (08.09.17) marked 36 years to the day since ‘Only Fools and Horses’ first aired, on September 8, 1981.
The show has gone down in British TV history after spanning seven series, 64 episodes and 16 specials, and still holds the record for the largest audience for a British sitcom after 24.3 million tuned in to ‘Time on Our Hands’, the final episode of the 1996 Christmas trilogy.
Earlier this year, David admitted he would’ve loved to have done more ‘Only Fools’, but it is simply not possible following the death of writer John Sullivan, who passed away in April 2011 aged 64.
He said: "It would be good to do ‘Only Fools and Horses’ but we haven’t got a writer, if we had the wonderful writer, the lovely John Sullivan, we would I tell you, but we haven’t got a writer and my partner Nick has gone on to do other things, so you’re stuck with ‘Open All Hours’ now!"
Only Fools and Horses episode to air for first time
