Buster Merryfield turned professional at nearly sixty and spent eleven years telling the same story about the war. Uncle Albert was the only part that mattered, and it was the right one: a replacement who never played it as one.
Fi1m perspective
The beard first, white and full, and under it a compact man with a Battersea voice who has something to tell you about the war. Buster Merryfield's Uncle Albert Trotter arrives in Only Fools and Horses in 1985, in Strained Relations, at the funeral of the grandfather whose chair he is about to take. It is a hard room to walk into. He walks into it talking, and he does not stop for eleven years.
He came to acting later than almost anyone. Merryfield was a bank manager with Westminster and then NatWest for nearly forty years, an amateur actor and director with the Characters theatre group from the 1960s, and he retired early at 57 to turn professional. The parts that followed were small: Professor Challis in The Citadel (1983), Sir Miles Honeyman in Shroud for a Nightingale (1984), where he worked alongside Lennard Pearce. When Pearce died, John Sullivan needed an old man for the flat, and the one he cast was 64 and had done very little television. Merryfield later said, "I did not fancy taking over a character that had already been played by somebody else. I wanted to put my personal mark on any part I played." He got his wish, largely because Sullivan wrote him a different one.
Albert is a former sailor, and Sullivan gave him the sea and the war rather than anything Pearce had done. Our review notes that he brings a whole new set of stories with him, and that is exactly what he does: "During the war" becomes the line the audience waits for. We came to those episodes braced to resent the new man, and we stopped keeping score sooner than we expected, because there was nothing in what he was doing to compare. The accent is not put on; the beard is his; the pleasure he takes in having listeners, even ones who have heard the story, is plainly real. In the pub scenes with David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst he is the third voice that lets the other two land, and he knows how long to leave before he speaks.
There is not much to set against this, and that is itself the caveat. He was nervous in the early recordings, and he was never given anything that asked him to be more than Albert. Thirty-seven episodes to 1996, occasional work until 1998, and then nothing, so the question of what else he could do never had to be answered. What he could do was hold a chair in a small flat opposite David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst, who had the flat before he did, and be liked in it, week after week, without ever asking to be. If you are starting the series, our advice is to persist past the thin first run. He is one of the reasons to.
Biography
Buster Merryfield was an English actor best known for playing Uncle Albert Trotter in the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses (1981). He joined the series in 1985, appearing in 37 episodes until 1996.
Born Harry Merryfield in Battersea, London, in 1920, he worked as a bank manager until retiring in 1978, after which he pursued acting professionally. He had previously appeared in amateur productions and took small television roles in the early 1980s. Merryfield died in 1999.
