8 Silly TV Plot Conveniences Made Possible By Utterly Stupid Writing

2. Millionaires No More - Only Fools And Horses

Our penultimate choice was once considered the funniest thing on British television, capturing the national zeitgeist and using it to make the show relatable in a way few others have ever managed. For those of you who don't know, Only Fools and Horses is about two working class brothers who keep trying get-rich-quick schemes that inevitably fail, with one of the older brother's many catchphrases being: "This time next year we'll be millionaires!" It left viewers rooting for the protagonists to finally make it, and eventually they did! The characters find a watch that, when sent to auction, gets them tens of millions of pounds. The final scene has the brothers saying goodbye to their stingy working class flat which they had lived in since childhood, a moving affair which left some viewers in tears. Rags-to-riches stories aren't exactly rare on the British Isles, yet Only Fools and Horses crafted their's with such love and originality it stuck in the public's mind more than almost any other. But why let a dead donkey rest? It's always best to kick it a few more times to see if you can get anything else out of it, don't you think? No? Well the makers of Only Fools certainly did. A few years after this moving episode the writers decided to have the characters lose all their money in stocks, a rather childish plot convenience used to drag the show's corpse a few more feet and rake in whatever cash they could. The move actively damaged the legacy of the show, rendering the moving episode that previously served as the finale a triviality that meant nothing to the overarching plot.