COME ALONG, MARLENE (REMEMBERING JOHN CHALLIS)

Some actors become synonymous with certain roles.

Despite an accomplished film career, Peter Falk will always be Columbo.

Kelsey Grammar will always be Frasier.

The role people most associate with William Shatner is Captain Kirk.

Across the Atlantic, it was impossible to associate John Challis with any role other than Boycie from the BBC1 sitcom 'Only Fools and Horses'.

A used car salesman who made a bit of money and looked down on his associates in the working class London district of Peckham, Boycie was a popular supporting character throughout the 22 years the hugely successful sitcom ran.

He also got his own BBC1 spin-off 'The Green Green Grass' with his beloved Marlene, played by Sue Holderness, in which the couple fled the organised crime duo, the Driscoll Brothers in Peckham and landed in rural Shropshire.

Challis was originally from Bristol and was born during wartime in 1942.

However the family moved to South East London when he was a year old.

Educated in Ottershaw School in Woking, near Surrey, he flirted with a career as a trainee estate agent before becoming an actor.

He performed in Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre productions in the 1960s.

However he also cut his teeth on episodes of popular British television shows like 'Dixon of Dock Green,' 'The Sweeney,' 'Doctor Who' and on CBS's 1974 version of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' with Jack Parlance, Simon Ward and Nigel Davenport.

Challis secured a regular beat as Sergeant Culshaw in the popular BBC1 police drama 'Z Cars' between 1971 and 1975.

A conversation with the writer James Saunders about his time working in a garden centre while taking a break from acting also inspired the Richard Beckinsale led BBC2 sitcom 'Bloomers'.

Originally intended for Challis, he was deemed not famous enough to star in it but wasn't bitter about Beckinsale getting the part instead.

Challis did get to play the role of a policeman in an episode inspired by a real incident that happened to him involving an attempt to steal a Christmas tree from a roundabout.

Unfortunately only five episodes of the show were made, with Beckinsale suffering a fatal heart attack.

However the show was aired, with his widow's blessing, to much acclaim.

Challis's big moment was to come when he was cast in 1981 as Herman Terrence Aubrey Boyce in the second episode of John Sullivan's 'Only Fools and Horses'.

Sullivan had been impressed by Challis' performance in an episode of his Tooting Popular Front sitcom 'Citizen Smith' with Robert Lindsay.

The actor had no inkling, however, during filming of the episode just how popular the show or Boycie and his onscreen wife, Sue Holderness's Marlene would become.

"When I started, I just did the one episode, Go West Young Man, and there they were," he told the Express and Star in Wolverhampton in April 2020.

“It was only an afternoon’s filming - just one scene, a very funny scene.

"I had no idea it would go any further than that. As it went on, it crept up on us that we were onto something special.

“It was the first time most of us had been stopped in the street by people. They were coming up telling us how much they were enjoying the show.

“People started quoting lines and it was the first time it had happened to any of us.

“I remember, by the mid-1980s, we realised it meant so much to people.

“I thought it was very London-based because there was lots of cockney rhyming slang but we suddenly realised that the characters were very universal. 

"Everybody loved it and it gets repeated and it’s still on, mostly on (UK) Gold. 

"People have interested it to their children and those children have grown up and they’ve introduced it to their own children. You get three generations. It’s a phenomenon. It’s the only series where that really happens.

“Every time we go out, people come up and they can quote lines from it verbatim. I think the fans know it better than we ever did. We became a family and were all very proud of it.”

Boycie's distinctive laugh - usually when Del Boy suffered some kind of misfortune -was something Challis accidentally landed upon.

During rehearsals, he remembered a woman laughing like a machine gun in a pub he was once visiting.

He recalled: "Everybody else laughed at it and they told me to keep it in. If you look at the early episodes, he didn’t do it like that."

Now a household name, Challis found a lot of small screen work in popular shows like 'Juliet Bravo,' 'Ever Decreasing Circles,' 'Coronation Street,' 'The Bill,' 'One Foot in the Grave,' 'Open All Hours,' 'The New Statesman,' 'Soldier Soldier,' 'In Sickness and In Health,' 'My Family,' and 'Last of the Summer Wine'.

He also appeared in two episodes of Noel Edmonds' popular BBC1 Saturday night show 'Noel's House Party' in 1992 and 1996.

Challis was chuffed when Marlene and Boycie got their own sitcom spin-off in 2005 with 'The Green Green Grass' and while the BBC1 show got off to a strong start in the ratings, audiences fell away after four series. 

In later years, he was a regular pantomime performer and also lent his voice as the narrator in a touring production of 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' in theatres across the UK.

When 'Only Fools and Horses' got a whole new lease of life as a West End musical, Challis was hugely supportive - giving his time to actors who stepped into Boycie's shoes like Jeff Nicholson.

Challis also wrote two autobiographies 'Being Boycie' and 'Boycie and Beyond' and even resurrected the character months before his death in a Covid campaign message to encourage people to abide by social distancing rules.

He was made an honorary citizen of Serbia on the back of 'Only Fools and Horses' popularity there and made a documentary 'Boycie in Belgrade' in which he tried to understand why the show was so popular in the Balkans.

An avid Arsenal fan, Challis was married four times.

His wedding to his fourth wife Carol was in Brighton in 1995 and he remained with her until his death from cancer.

It is a measure of the affection for Boycie that Challis' passing commanded as much media attention as the death of Spurs, Chelsea, West Ham and England football legend Jimmy Greaves on the same day.

Tributes immediately poured in from Sir David Jason, Sheila Ferguson of The Three Degrees, 'Allo Allo' star Vicki Michelle and Chrissy Rock who played his onscreen wife in the ITV sitcom 'Benidorm'.

However the most touching undoubtedly came from Sue Holderness who commented: "John Challis was my partner on screen and stage for 36 years and my beloved friend.

"RIP, darling John. I will miss you every day."

Millions of 'Only Fools and Horses' fans across the world will know how she feels.

They will definitely miss him too.

(John Challis died at the age of 79 on September 19, 2021)