'Only Fools and Horses' actor John Challis has claimed he invented his character Boycie’s iconic laugh in the sitcom.
John Challis
The 78-year-old actor got the part of the used car salesman in the beloved comedy after the show's creator John Sullivan was impressed with his turn as a policeman in 'Citizen Smith', which Sullivan also wrote.
As well as being famous for shouting his wife’s name “Marlene!” in exasperation, Boycie is also best known for his machine gun-like laugh, and Challis has claimed that it was him who inserted the laugh having been inspired by a female pub goer who he knew, and Sullivan then decided to make it a permanent trait of the character.
Speaking on the 'Eyes & Teeth' podcast, Challis said: “It was a complete accident really. I nicked it from somebody else I knew, who was actually a woman. "She had this extraordinary machine gun laugh, she would be in the pub and was one of those ladies who you sometimes used to see who was always on her own and would have a bottle of stout or something and she didn’t say anything to anybody really but every now and again she would laugh and, if you can imagine Boycie’s laugh in a female fashion, it then made everybody else laugh, people used to come to the pub to hopefully hear her laughing.
“It said in the script, ‘Boycie laughs at one of his own jokes.’ And I just did it and everybody laughed and Sullivan said, ‘Keep that in.’ It got into the scripts, ‘Boycie does one of his laughs.’ And I’ve been doing it ever since.”
As well as starring in 'Only Fools and Horses' - in which Sir David Jason played Peckham wheeler-dealer Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter - for over two decades, Challis also got the chance to play Boycie opposite his on-screen wife Marlene – portrayed by Sue Holderness - in his own spin-off series 'The Green Green Grass', which saw the two characters relocate to the country.
The programme ran for four series from 2005 to 2009 but was cancelled by the BBC and Challis thinks it ended "slightly prematurely".
He said: “We were very flattered they thought the characters were strong enough to have their own series, but we were completely terrified as well, because how do you follow something like 'Only Fools and Horses' which is so popular.
“We did OK, we did four series and could have done more. It was suddenly taken off, our particular champion at the BBC left for pastures new and a new regime took over and they didn’t like us quite as much and so we came to an end, slightly prematurely I think, but I would say that."
Tagged in John Sullivan Sir David Jason