Rodney - A rhinoceros has escaped from a zoo, there are 300 dead bodies covered in rhinoceros footprints, there’s a lock up garage two and a half foot deep in rhinoceros crap... and Charlton Heston suspects the butler!
Del has interfered in Rodney’s life a lot in past episodes. We have seen him take over and control of the situation a few times, most notably in series 4 with ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’. Both there and here, Del never sees the bigger picture but uses the situation to make a short term profit. This time it turns out he was right to do so, but we see Rodney lose more and more control of his night school film project. John Sullivan based this on a true story of a college film project where the equipment mysteriously went missing.
Rodney’s first mistake is roping in Mickey Pearce as director - Mickey is now working for Boycie on pirate films and dirty movies. Rodney doesn’t see the danger of this conflict of interest when he hands him control of the camera. Del then elbows his way in, finding weddings and christenings for Mickey to film.
Del hinders Rodney’s plans by giving him an old typewriter, but Rodney being so submissive when Del is so aggressive doesn’t challenge anything but tries to accommodate everything. Del then presses ahead with his money making scheme by promising to include what looks like hundreds of local people and a list of businesses to advertise in the film, even the people paying a tenner a day to be a part of it! Then he tries to get his “Rhino loose in the city” story going as he knows “where a rhino is going cheap!” Nothing really makes sense in Del’s plot, it sounds chaotic but is entertaining to watch his imagination run riot. This scene is revisited but with added drunken silliness when the brothers are looking to recoup their lost millions in the final episode ‘Sleepless in Peckham’.
Del - It’s got all the essentials of a hit doesn’t it. I mean it’s got a lot of suspense, a lot of killings and a bit of Humpty Dumpty! I mean look, this is a disaster movie!
Rodney - Disaster? It’s a calamity!
As Mickey works out he can cut out the middle man on the dirty movies by filming his own and distributing through Boycie’s network, Rodney manages to get himself on the first film accidentally. Del flips out when he sees Rodney on it and we hear that Boycie’s business backers are the Driscoll Brothers. This is the first we have heard from them, but the fact that Del is scared of them is all we need to know for now, we will hear more of them in future episodes and meet them for the only time in ‘Little Problems’.
Both Boycie and Trigger feature in this episode. We discover the Boycie has struggled to father a child because he’s got a low sperm count, or “firing more blanks than the Territorials!” We also learn that Trigger doesn’t know who his dad is - we had a throwaway line back in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ from Trigger that “he died a few years before I was born”, now we learn that his birth certificate reads “some soldiers” as the father...!
This episode helps to set up a lot coming in the future but ultimately tests Rodney as he tries to assume responsibility for something, but is ultimately thwarted by Del and the company that he keeps.
Tomorrow’s episode: Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
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