I began listening to Only Fools and Brotherly Forces a few months ago, and right from the first episode, when Jamie and Bobby stated that they wouldn’t be going into trivia and fun facts about OFAH, I was slightly dubious - it seemed a cop-out for having not done enough research.
As it happens, they do share a lot of interesting trivia throughout the OFAH-based episodes, and the production is very good. Having finished those, I’ve now begun listening to the other general British sitcom episodes, starting with My Family today, and the sloppiness is back. They claimed that they didn’t know if Robert Lindsay had ever done much comedy prior to My Family! How can you host a podcast primarily about a John Sullivan sitcom, and not know that Robert Lindsay did in fact have a *bit* of a background in comedy? One of them had never even heard of Citizen Smith - or Citizen Kane as they repeatedly refer to it. Ditto when they mentioned ‘a programme called Butterflies’ at the end. Most fans of OFAH would probably have heard of Butterflies as a previous Nicholas Lyndhurst vehicle, but if the first 76 episodes of your podcast were about Only Fools and Horses/Rock & Chips, you’d think that a bit of research on the writer and one of the lead actors would have been done.
The podcast is a comfortable enough listen, and fans of OFAH will enjoy it, but whether enough effort has been put into the content, or Jamie and Bobby have the knowledge to talk about British sitcoms generally, is doubtful.
