The US version of Only Fools and Horses: lovely jubbly or potential plonker?

Following the recent announcement that Taxi and Back To The Future star Christopher Lloyd has joined the cast of the US remake of Only Fools And Horses – he’s playing the Granddad/Uncle Albert substitute, in case you hadn’t guessed – it’s perhaps time to put aside one’s initial reservations and give this project a chance.

True, the idea of parachuting one of Britain’s best loved and most culturally specific sitcoms into an American setting does, on the face of it, seem rather odd and potentially disastrous.

But the more you think about it, there’s also no reason why a comedy about a pair of blue-collar Colombian-American brudders trying to get rich in the Bronx shouldn’t work, just as long as it retains the charm, wit and depth of the original. As far as the performances are concerned, Lloyd is of course a great comic actor, and John Leguizamo – the American Del Boy – is a charismatic turn. Furthermore, the pilot was written by a pair of Scrubs scribes, and although I was never a huge fan of that series, it was obviously a cut above your standard sitcom fare.

And yet there’s understandable reason for caution, as the history of British to American sitcom remakes is littered with more point-missing duds than successes. For every The Office or All In The Family (the hit US version of Till Death Us Do Part), there’s also the likes of Amanda’s, the justifiably short-lived remake of Fawlty Towers, in which the irreplaceable comic stylings of John Cleese were in fact replaced by Bea Arthur playing a character who in no way resembled Basil. So why bother? What’s more amazing is that it was one of three – count ‘em – unsuccessful attempts to remake the show, one of which coincidentally starred Arthur’s Golden Girls co-star Betty White.

Then there was the doomed pilot for The Rear Guard, a rehash of Dad’s Army in which the subtle interplay of Mainwaring and Wilson was deemed inferior to the hilarious spectacle of two Jewish and Italian-American stereotypes trading crass racial insults.

But the holy grail for appalled connoisseurs of bewildering US remakes is probably the unaired pilot for The Young Ones, in which Nigel Planer actually reprised the role of Neil, and titled Oh, No! Not THEM! Planer apparently loathed the experience, which, given that the writers were reportedly influenced more by Benny Hill than Ben Elton, is hardly surprising.

Sadly it’s doubtful that we’ll ever be allowed to gawp at this travesty, although you can, if you wish, find a brief clip of The Rear Guard on YouTube. And while you’re at it, look up the early Lucas and Walliams sketch in which they envisage a terrible desecration of Only Fools in which Del is recast as an ultra-successful entreprenuer - “Nice jubbly!” - and Granddad as a wisecracking robot. It’s a very funny parody of the worst excesses of American remakes, but surely it could never actually come true. Could it?

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