John Sullivan's 90-minute prequel to Only Fools and Horses turned out to be a wonderful surprise. With no laughter track and a minimum of slapstick, it is very different in tone to its successor. Rather than going for broad laughter it concentrates instead on an affair between the unhappily married Joan Trotter (Kellie Bright) and a local crook (Nicholas Lyndhurst). It is a simple love story played out against the backdrop of a pre-Beatles Britain, when money was short and the chance to move into a tower block was seen as the epitome of luxury. Rock & Chips works on its terms, and explains much about why Del and Rodney turned out the way they did.

Not that Del Boy would have even been troubled by the absence of quality control, but Only Fools and Horses continued several series past its sell-by date and ended up a pale, and stale, imitation of its once great self. Writer John Sullivan then flogged the dead horse even further by giving the least interesting supporting character, Boycie, an ill-judged and mirth free spin-off, The Green Green Grass.

So my expectations were suitably low as I approached Rock & Chips, a feature length Only Fools and Horses prequel set in 1960.

Guess what? It was terrific. Freed from the tyrannical demands of a studio audience, Sullivan was able to explore his characters in greater depth, fashioning a genuinely moving love story infused with poignancy and charm. The laughs may not have come as thick and fast as in Only Fools' sitcom heyday, but the comic moments were of the highest quality and beautifully crafted into the narrative. For once the description comedy-drama was fully appropriate.

Sixteen year old Del Boy (James Buckley) and his Nags Head cronies were all present and correct, seen mounting the first rung on the entrepreneurial ladder by selling nylon fibre carpets that electrocuted anyone who set foot on them. However, the focus of the film fell upon Del's mother Joan (Kellie Bright), and how she met Rodney's father, career criminal Freddie "The Frog" Robdal. In a crowd-pleasing piece of casting, Nicholas Lyndhurst played Robdal and did a fine job of it, nicely capturing the conflicted emotions of a ruthless, self-serving, amoral ex-con bewildered by love.

The period setting was lovingly recreated, the performances top notch and the script - apart from a couple of instances where Sullivan needlessly spelt out the jokes - was first class. Lovely jubbly work, John. Now leave it alone.

So the how-it-all-started flashback for Only Fools and Horses, Rock & Chips, kicked off hobbled by its grown-up self. And it wasn't helped by being about a 20-year-old sitcom that, though much loved in its time, is now nostalgia television. Nobody who's watching Glee is going to care what Trigger was like as a kid - the answer is: just the same, but younger. It was all utterly ­predictable, and predictably utter, an immeasurably long and plodding series of inevitable scenes set in 1960. The styling and sense of time was about as convincing as a junior-school history project. The amusing cameos had all the grim innuendo and constipated double entendres of an old Arthur Askey movie.

What was a dramatic surprise, though, was the lighting. I can't remember a BBC drama that looked quite this dreary and inconsistently illuminated. It must have been lit by two boy scouts with a torch and a halogen lamp. This was the laziest and most cynical and misbegotten use of a shrinking drama budget, a miserable example of licking an empty bowl. I expect, somewhere, someone imagines they're going to get a series out of it. I dearly hope not. This was The History Boys written by Chas and Dave.

Rock & Chips - which one could either regard as the prequel to Only Fools and Horses or the prequel to The Green Green Grass, depending on how gloomy one wanted to feel about the state of commissioning in British television.

As a 90-minute pilot, the conceit was, presumably, to show us what one of Britain's best-loved TV characters - Del Boy - was like as a teenager; hanging out with a similarly acned Trigger, Denzil and Boycie. Kind of like they did with Muppet Babies, but with Cockneys. You Muppet Babies, perhaps.

The point of the pilot was that Joanie - Del's brassy, put-upon mother - had to have an affair in which she conceived Rodney, so that Del Boy has someone to shout "You plonker!" at if Rock & Chips goes to series.

To this end, Nicholas Lyndhurst turned up as Freddie "The Frog" Robdal, in order to impregnate Joanie with the character he will later play in Only Fools and Horses. Technically, it's quite hard to categorise what such an act comes under: self-incesting? It's kind of like a paradoxical, existential uroboros. Or, in a nutshell, "Eugh - kinky TARDIS Rodders-sex".

Intriguing time-travel ethics to one side, however, Rock & Chips was, at root, a feature-length dose of nothing: the period details of the Formica-topped tables holding more interest than wringing out, and re-using, these tired old characters from Peckham yet again. Please, BBC, let them die. I've got to square with you: they really weren't that interesting to begin with. They should all have just been background extras in Minder.

Rock & Chips Review

Overall, Rock & Chips wasn't a total disaster, but it felt like a pointless excuse for John Sullivan to revisit his biggest success, now that David Jason has called it quits and present-day adventures are impossible.

Last Night's Television: Rock & Chips

Del Boy Trotter as a teen? Except they've only bleeding well forgot the jokes, Rodders!

Rock & Chips, BBC One, review

Benji Wilson wasn't very impressed by BBC One's new Only Fools and Horses prequel, Rock & Chips.

Rock & Chips was a strange affair, a 90-minute amplification of one of the running gags in Only Fools and Horses, that concerning Rodney's dubious parentage. All the old gang - Del and Trigger and Boycie - were on hand as schoolboys, but John Sullivan's drama was less interested in them than in the brief affair between Joanie, Del's mum, and Freddie "The Frog" Robdal, a career criminal, played here (naturally) by Nicholas Lyndhurst. Less interested, too, in straightforward sitcom than an unsatisfactory hybrid of classic Trotter cheekiness and something much more melancholy and heartfelt. The soundtrack was like an antique jukebox and there were some sly touches of period detail (a cigarette machine in a hospital waiting room), but the narrative's focus was blurred and the pacing weirdly off - quite a lot of the time you were well ahead of the drama and hanging around for it to catch up with you.

In its one-off revival last night as Rock & Chips, Only Fools and Horses, the BBC's over-loved hit from the Eighties and Nineties, performed a genre-bend. A broad, sentimental, Cockney sitcom became a comedy-drama of charm and subtlety that did its writer John Sullivan nothing but credit. It is possible, I concede, that as an irregular viewer I missed nuances in the original, but for most part Only Fools stays in the mind - does it not? - for the chandelier smash, Rodney and Del Boy's foggy transformation into Batman and Robin, and David Jason's perfect fall through a non-existent bar, a moment pilloried with splendid unfairness by the comedian Stewart Lee for being repeatedly voted television's funniest moment.

There was almost no physical comedy in Rock & Chips, a prequel set in 1960 (it felt earlier). Del Boy was a teenager, Rodney not yet born and their mother, Joan, not merely still alive but, in Kellie Bright's winsome portrayal, still sexy. (I'll never think of Kate Aldridge, whom she plays in The Archers, in the same way again.) The 90 minutes' broadest point was Phil Daniels's moustache, donned to complete his misjudged turn as Grandad. Joan's boss's lascivious attentions to her bosom would also count as seaside postcard humour were they not undercut by the seediness of his masturbating after each of their encounters.

Instead of big laughs we were delivered a genetic explanation for why Rodney was as he was in Only Fools: melancholy, disappointed, brighter intellectually than his half-brother Del but without his neon-glare personality. His father, an unknown quantity in the series, turned out to be a ruthless jailbird with an artistic streak called Freddie Robdal (pun), who seduced his mother right under the careless supervision of Del's idle father, Reg. Nicholas Lyndhurst who, of course, played Rodney, here played his father, Freddie, and produced a detailed performance that suggested the con's psychotic tendencies could be tamed by the right woman. It was from Freddie that Rodney must have got his brains, for Joan was so thick she did not get a single joke that Freddie pushed her way. From Joan, he clearly inherited his stoical sadness.

As the really boyish Del Boy, James Buckley conveyed during his relatively brief screen time his Oedipal feelings for his mother and an early surefootedness in business, if not in society. Joan, looking down at her new baby, predicts, not unreasonably, that Del will be rich one day. From another high rise Freddie looks down on them. She nods her head. He raises his glass in pride. His paternity has finally been acknowledged. The question posed by Rodney in the last Only Fools and Horses, did his father love his mother, has been answered. Full of astute period details, such as the family planning clinic where a room of Mrs Smiths await their pregnancy tests, and with enough good lines to get by on (a snail looks like "a bogey in a crash helmet"), Rock & Chips was better than the sequel that preceded it.