by David Jason
So, on the appointed afternoon in March, I drive from my home in Buckinghamshire to Milton Keynes, pausing only to consume, by way of luncheon, a dead sandwich from a service station on the ring road, for such is the non-stop, 24/7, five-star glamour of the television actor’s life. Then, carefully following the instructions, I nudge the car down a bumpy and gradually narrowing road past the recycling centre and the cement works to the self-storage warehouse. Here, a dab of powder is tenderly applied to my face in the little side office which has been temporarily requisitioned as a make-up room for the day; and, after that, the plan is to lead me to a numbered unit in the main warehouse, not a million miles dissimilar from Derek Trotter’s old lock-up and storage space in the old strip of garages near the Peckham tower block. With a couple of cameras rolling, the doors of the unit will be thrown open to reveal a stash of props and artefacts and bits of furniture, as used on the actual sets of Only Fools. And with any luck, I will have a reaction to said props and artefacts – though at this stage nobody involved in the production, and least of all me, has any idea exactly how strong that reaction will be.
Incidentally, the bits and pieces of memorabilia that I will be perusing form part of the collection of Perry Aghajanoff, who is a founder of the Only Fools and Horses Appreciation Society. Perry runs the annual Only Fools fans’ convention. I’ve not been myself, because it’s not my kind of thing, but apparently people tip up in costume and spend a few hours reminiscing about the show, and if you thought that only Star Trek generated this kind of event, and this degree of fanaticism, then you’re wrong. Perry once got me to sign the bonnet of a yellow three-wheeled Robin Reliant, like the one that Trotters Independent Trading used. Just the bonnet, note. I don’t know what had become of the rest of it or who had made off with its three wheels. Anyway, this remains, I can confidently say, the largest individual item that I have ever put an autograph on, and also the most absurd. Perry continues to find stuff related to the show from who knows where, and what he doesn’t know about Only Fools isn’t worth knowing; and, as I find out in that lock-up on that spring afternoon, what Perry can’t somehow lay his hands on from the original programmes isn’t worth laying your hands on, either.
It’s Perry who escorts me to the lock-up, and it’s Perry who opens the doors to disclose his hoard – and what can I tell you? It’s overpowering. So many associations, all at once. A hundred feelings crowd in on me at the same time and I practically freeze to the spot. There are so many instantly familiar items here in this little walk-in space, from so many different places and times in the show, and wedged together in such tight proximity, that my senses can only reel.
Look at that! Here, against the wall, is the tacky green cabinet that stood in the Trotters’ kitchen and held the plates and dishes. So straight away I’m spun back onto the set and into that crowded old council flat, with all its glorious and not so glorious junk. And here’s the lion biscuit jar or – as recommissioned by Del – the cigar holder, with its daft lift-off lid, which I lift off again now, for old times’ sake. No cigars inside, alas. Empty. But that dopey-eyed lion was in every episode. If its agent was any good, it would be seeing repeat fees. I replace the lid and instead pick up the flat’s old pistol-shaped cigar lighter – that fancy ‘antique’ novelty ornament where you clicked the trigger to ignite the flame at the end of the barrel. All in the best possible taste.
But wait: put that pistol down because here’s a chunky knock-off mobile phone with its aerial sticking out – comically old-fashioned and brick-like now, but a swish, cutting-edge yuppie device back at the start of the 1980s, and something that Del was practically swooning with delight to get his hands on, albeit that when you pressed its buttons it changed the channels on the pub telly. So now, picking this phone off the table and remembering that scene, I’m whisked out of the flat and back down to the Nag’s Head – a short walk across the studio, if we’re going to be literal about it – and trading lines with Mike the landlord and Trigger and Boycie.
Hang on again, though, because down on the floor here, right by my feet, is the leopard-print suitcase that accompanied Del to Florida for the ‘Miami Twice’ Christmas special episode that went out in 1991 – my favourite of all the Only Fools and Horses episodes, if push comes to shove. It was deemed that Del would have tasteless luggage in mock leopard-skin – just as in another episode, he would disport himself in Spain in leopard-print budgie smugglers, in the wonderfully deluded belief that the women would be cutting themselves in half to get to him in that ludicrous swimwear. (Lord, my delight when I opened the script for that Spanish-based episode. ‘Top work,’ I thought. ‘Some sun and some heat will go down nicely.’ But, of course, BBC budgets, which were somehow never as automatically generous for comedy as they were for drama, were in operation. We filmed those Spanish scenes around Bournemouth. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘We’ll light it so it looks like Spain.’ Never mind what it looks like, one was tempted to reply, what about our suntans?)
The budgie smugglers were acquired from a shop, to the best of my recollection, but the BBC props department had to have the suitcase for Miami made to order. A quality piece of craftsmanship it is, too. Bless him, you could just make Del so naff, which was one of the wonderful things about him and a huge part of what made him such fun to play. He had this beautifully bold and uncomplicated view of what worked for him, fashion-wise, and you couldn’t help but love him for it. And now, just seeing that leopard-print suitcase, I’m right back at Heathrow airport touting that bag proudly in the direction of the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk and then getting cross when some presumptuous bloke has the nerve to push in on the queue. (‘Anybody would think he owns the plane,’ I had to say at that moment, and when the bloke turned round, we got to see that it was Richard Branson. Whatever became of him? And whatever became of my free trip to Necker Island? Not a sausage.)
Wait a minute though, because here, directly behind the suitcase is, surreally, a bright orange lifebelt, rimmed with white rope and with a name painted on it in black capital letters: ‘INGE’, the boat that Del, Rodney and Uncle Arthur hired to travel to Holland on the trail of a batch of diamonds in ‘To Hull and Back’, the Christmas special from 1985. But wait another minute: are you kidding? What’s this big white thing the lifebelt is leaning against, all weathered and with its paint peeling? It’s only one of the Inge’s funnels. How the hell did Perry manage to lay his hands on that? (Perry merely stands to one side and smiles enigmatically.) So now I’m no longer at Heathrow, bound for Miami, I’m in the freezing cold North Sea, pitching and tossing in a battered, old, pockmarked tub of a boat, and shouting up to a bloke on an oil rig, ‘Excuse me, pal, which way is Amsterdam?’ – second for second, in terms of what it cost to shoot, probably the most expensive gag in the history of BBC comedy. (Fair play: the corporation got the chequebook out for us occasionally. But blimey, you had to pester them.)
Then, almost straight away, I’m off the boat, because here by the lifebelt is our old friend, the collie. So that sends my memory streaming back to the flat again, and suddenly, running my fingers across my canine chum’s cold head, I’m wondering what became of the collie’s mate – a strange-looking, white creature, much the same size and just as gawpy, which strayed onto the set one week and stayed there a while. It was part Dalmatian, as I recall, but perhaps with a bit of pottery greyhound in its ceramic ancestry. That was the dog which enjoyed a cameo role in the ‘Three Men, a Woman and a Baby’ episode, in series seven. It’s the episode more commonly known for the big scene at the end in which Del’s Raquel gives birth to their son Damien and Del carries the baby to the hospital window for his first view of the world, again stretching the limits of where comedies were supposed to go. It’s also, while I think of it, the episode in which Del has accompanied Raquel to a maternity class where some of the other future fathers have been rendered a little queasy by the instructional video, but not, as it happens, our man Del. ‘I was all right because I used to run a j
ellied eel stall.’ Oh, the joy of delivering zingers like that.
And it’s also the episode in which Del has bought a box of wigs off Mustapha, the Bangladeshi butcher. During the camera rehearsal, it occurred to me that Del might want to comb the wigs out a bit, and smarten them up – ‘dress’ them, as they say in the make-up department. And what better model or ‘wig block’ than the head of the spotless Dalmatian? Well, he wasn’t doing anything else at the time. So there’s a scene which opens with Del, in the lounge, sitting, straddle-legged, behind a china dog, combing a wig on its head, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for a man to be doing at home of a weekday evening. These were the moments in the shooting of the show that I really loved, when you added something daft that wasn’t in the script, found an additional bit of business to get up to and conjured an extra laugh out of nowhere.
Hold up again, though: this place is like Aladdin’s cave. Over here on the floor are some unopened bottles of Peckham Spring Mineral Water, from the 1992 Christmas special, ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, where Del enterprisingly uses the product of the kitchen tap to enter the burgeoning refreshment business. It’s good to see them, although, as it happens, these items are not so startling to me, because I’ve got a couple of bottles of Peckham Spring at home, which I have ‘laid down’, as I believe the wine experts like to say. They’re the centre piece of my own comparatively meagre Only Fools memorabilia collection, which otherwise only really includes the following: a small, framed ‘Trotter Air Gets You There’ poster which was on the set during Rodney’s futuristic dream sequence at the beginning of ‘Heroes and Villains’, wherein Rodney fantasises that the Trotters have successfully expanded, Branson-style, into the airline business; a couple of Del’s jumpers, which may be a little snug in the fit these days, but sentiment precludes me from junking them; and Del’s very first sheepskin coat, which I don’t have much occasion to wear around the house, it’s true, but to which I am sentimentally attached, and for which, by the way, I paid the BBC wardrobe department a fee. This was midway through the show’s life, when Del was deemed to have moved on a bit and become slightly more yuppie in his aspirations. The original, market-trader look wasn’t relevant any more, and the sheepskin – a magnificent item, made using patches of many different sheep, it would appear – was cluttering up the wardrobe. Did I want it? I was asked. Well, yes I did – how much?
‘I don’t know,’ said the wardrobe person. ‘Twenty quid?’
‘But surely it must be worth more than that,’ I replied, not wishing to rip off the BBC which is, after all, publicly funded by the licence payer (and also feeling slightly offended on behalf of Del, whose precious coat it was, after all).
‘It’s only going to be chucked out,’ said the wardrobe person.
‘Even so,’ I said. ‘What about sixty quid?’
‘Thirty,’ said the wardrobe person.
‘Fifty,’ I replied, in best Del Boy dealing mode.
‘Forty.’
‘Forty-five.’
‘Done.’
There you go – no flies on me. We shook hands, with me having forced the deal up to £25 above the original asking price. I’ve had the goods ever since. In my innocence, I thought it would make a really good winter coat – heavy, yes, but extremely warm, if not stylish. Of course, the minute I put it on, I became recognisable as Del Boy everywhere from Land’s End to John O’Groats. So it went in the cupboard and has largely lived there since.
Anyway, back in the lock-up, I turn slightly, away from the Peckham Spring bottles, and see the urn from the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ episode in series two – the colourfully painted china pot which held the precious mortal remains of Trigger’s grandfather, Arthur. Or, at least, it held them until Rodney mistakenly rested the urn on the pavement and its contents got inadvertently sucked up by a road-cleaning lorry. Me and Rodney had to tell the bloke in the cab: ‘Stop! You’ve just sucked up our urn.’ And the bloke in the cab says: ‘Oh my God. What was he, a little kitten?’ We had a huge problem with that scene because the cameraman was in the cab, shooting down at us, and every time the driver said that line, he would laugh and shake the camera, and then me and Nick would go, too. We must have tried it about six times. Eventually we had to get the cameraman out and put somebody else in.
But I can’t think about that for too long, either, because next to the urn is some jewellery – a couple of Del’s gold sovereign rings and the matching dog-tag bracelets that he and Rodney wore in a show of their brotherliness. Rodney’s, of course, said ‘Rooney’, rather than Rodney, but Del convinced him otherwise. Hold up yet again, though, because next to these exquisite bits of bling is, God love us, the showpiece item, I guess – the crown jewel at the heart of this memorabilia collection: the actual ‘gold’, eighteenth-century fob watch that Del unearthed in his lock-up, in the 1996 Christmas special, and casually tossed aside, but which later sold at Sotheby’s for £6.2 million, meaning that finally – finally – the Trotters were millionaires. Quite a few people saw that episode: 24.3 million, to be precise, a British record for an entertainment show and one that isn’t likely to be broken any time soon. I weigh the fob watch very fondly in the palm of my hand and ask Perry how much he paid for it, but he won’t tell me. Quite a lot less than £6.2 million, I’m fairly sure. Not that it isn’t, in its own way, a very rare and precious item, of course. Mind you, there was more than one made for the show, as I recall. We had to have one that could be chucked about with impunity because when Del first turns up this precious item, he flings it onto an old gas cooker to convey its worthlessness. Going by the weight and the detail, the one I’m holding here is the smart version, as seen at Sotheby’s. Whisper it, but neither version was gold. They both had cases made of brass.
Yet, strange as it may seem, amid this array of objects – the watch, the urn, the rings, the lifebelt, the china lion cigar holder – with all their specific attachments to particular stories and with all the individual memories that flow from them, it’s the cardboard boxes that hit me hardest. It sounds stupid, I know, but it’s true. They’re piled up at the side of the lock-up – just a stack of empty containers, printed up to look like they hold dodgy Russian video cameras. Yet their impact on me is bewildering. The flat was always stacked with boxes – Del’s latest acquisitions, ready for the market – and now, confronted with them again, they’re the trapdoor that plunges me right back into the heart of those times. Nothing around me sums up the Trotters’ home in all its glorious impermanence like the cardboard boxes, and nothing so immediately kick-starts the feeling that I used to get when I walked on the set in those years. The boxes were what the flat was, really. They bring back to me the sense of constant change, the continual toing and froing of the characters against that ever-shifting backdrop of dodgy boxed goods.
I say ‘dodgy’, but the stuff was never stolen, it’s important to insist. The goods were cheap and tacky and very often broken, yes, and they may have owed their availability, somewhere back down the line, to a little underhand activity here and there, perhaps involving lorries and the cover of darkness. But they were always legitimately acquired, at least by Del, because Trotters Independent Trading was, at heart, a straight organisation, which people sometimes forget in the retelling. Del was a geezer who sold dodgy things, no question: but he was not at heart a dodgy geezer and I’m not sure the country would have come to love him so wholly and unreservedly if he had been.
The goods certainly came and went, though. As, indeed, did the furniture. I remember saying one day, ‘Shouldn’t we have the furniture changing as well?’ It had occurred to me: wouldn’t the Trotters’ furnishings be up for sale, if a deal could be done, as much as anything else in the flat? I was remembering somebody I knew who did a bit of antique dealing. When you went round his house, you would suddenly notice that the chair you were sitting on had a price tag on it. And then you would notice that the lamps, too, were price-tagged, and all of the ornaments and the coffee table … The stuff was
in and out: nothing was permanent and everything had its price.
So, one week we changed the Trotters’ sofa. No explanation was offered: we just shipped it out and had another one brought in. At which point I suggested keeping the plastic wrapping on it, to imply that this sofa, too, might not be hanging around too long. So the family had to sit on a plastic-covered sofa for a while; and then that one, too, changed and in came another, and so on it went.
But these cardboard boxes … Oh my. Of all the unlikely time machines. In the movie Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox had a specially tricked-out DeLorean car to blast him back into yesteryear. For me, it wasn’t even a Robin Reliant, or any individual part thereof: it was a pile of bogus packaging, rigged to look like it might have contained a batch of hooky electronics. Which says it all, really, about Only Fools.
Just before we finish filming in the Milton Keynes lock-up – and before I get back in the car and head for home, greatly tenderised by the experience – a plastic crate is brought in and set down on the floor. Inside it is a batch of John Sullivan’s original typewritten scripts. I reach into the crate and lift a few out, and it’s genuinely stirring to find my hands on those sheets of paper again. Right away I’m remembering the excitement and eagerness I used to feel, pulling them out of the envelope when they were sent to me at home. ‘What’s he come up with this time?’ you’d be thinking. I’d be like a boy with the latest edition of a comic. I thumb through a few pages now, observing the difference in weight between the early, half-hour ones and then the fatter ones from the sixth series onwards, when we persuaded the BBC to take the show from the seemingly statutory sitcom thirty-minute length, up to a more drama-like fifty minutes per episode. Because that’s what Only Fools was, really: a drama. A drama with thick streaks of comedy in it.
