WHAT A PICTURE. This beautifully composed and subtly lit piece of photographic art is an out-take from an award-winning session that I did with Annie Leibovitz for a cover story in Vanity Fair magazine at the point where my career was really beginning to take off in America.

Oh, all right, then: no it isn’t. It’s a blurry snap taken in the late 1970s by hands unknown, with a Kodak Instamatic most probably, and then delivered, in all likelihood, to the local chemist’s for processing, prior to collection from that chemist’s in a glossy folder a fortnight later, if you were lucky. (Kids: there’s simply too much out-of-date stuff to explain here. Ask an adult who has got a free hour or seven.)

However, since then, this photograph has lived with me in various boxes and trays and drawers, growing no sharper or better lit with the passing years, but somehow accumulating meaning, at least from my personal point of view. Every time I come across it, it seems to strike me anew. It’s just a quick picture, grabbed behind the scenes in a theatre. Yet there’s something about it which seems to get to the heart of the matter and sum a few things up.

A few details about this noble image. We are backstage at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, a decent, 600-seater provincial venue, and the date would have to be at some point in October 1978. That makes me a willowy thirty-eight years of age – a veritable infant, I would argue, in thespian terms. Certainly the most prominent points of my life in the business are all ahead of me.

The play I am appearing in is called The Relapse – or, Virtue in Danger – a Restoration comedy, written in the late seventeenth century by Sir John Vanbrugh. This was only my second appearance in a piece from that period; as a member of the Bromley Theatre repertory company, in my first proper job as an actor, I appeared as Bob Acres in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals. These were perhaps not the kinds of roles you would expect an actor with my background to land. I had come out of amateur dramatics and hadn’t been to drama school or done a course in acting in which Restoration plays and their customs and techniques might have been part of your studies. So I was going on intuition, direction and what I could pick up from reading a bit around the subject. Which is why I’m in a position to tell you that, when he wasn’t busy writing plays, John Vanbrugh practised as an architect, during the course of which work (on, I like to think, an idle Sunday), he designed Blenheim Palace, the massive pad in Oxfordshire which has provided a stately home down the years to various Dukes of Marlborough. So Vanbrugh was no slouch, clearly. And on the subject of people who aren’t slouches, the director of this 1978 production of The Relapse was Jonathan Lynn, who was the artistic director of the Cambridge Theatre Company at this point in his career, but who is probably better known to you as the co-creator of the comedy series Yes, Minister and, later, Yes, Prime Minister. OK, Yes, Minister wasn’t exactly Blenheim Palace but it was pretty good, too, and for a decent portion of the 1980s, it was getting many more viewers than Blenheim Palace on a weekly basis.

I know that Jonathan Lynn directed The Relapse because, as well as the photograph reproduced above, I also have to hand a programme from the production – one of quite a number of programmes that I seem to have tucked away over the course of time, because a blend of sentiment and pride stopped me from parting with them. That said, it’s always a bitter-sweet experience to look back at the programme from a show that you were in and run your eye down the cast list. On the one hand, there are the actors who went on to have careers and whose names remain familiar to you. For example, in the case of this 1978 production of The Relapse, there’s Louise Jameson, who was very famously Doctor Who’s leather-wearing assistant during the 1970s, had big roles in Tenko and Bergerac, and later spent two and a half years playing Rosa di Marco in EastEnders. And there’s also Guy Siner, the comic actor who landed the nice part of Lieutenant Hubert Gruber in ’Allo ’Allo!.

But then there are the names that you never saw again. What happened to those people? They seemed so talented and capable at the time – as talented and capable as anybody else in the cast. Why didn’t it work out for them? Did they mind that it didn’t? Did they get happy doing something else? It’s a very fine line, is the sobering lesson here.

On a slightly less melancholy note, there’s another vivid memory which, for some reason, rises unbidden with great clarity as I gaze at the pages of this ancient theatre programme: namely, that someone at some stage threw the cast and crew a candlelit party, at somebody or other’s abode in Cambridge. And at this candlelit party in all of our honours, a stage assistant, perhaps in search of attention that wasn’t otherwise coming his way, devoted himself to going round the room eating all the candles.

Now, it’s beholden upon me at this point in the narrative to issue a brief but important lesson in human biology: candle wax does not sit terribly well in the digestive system. Moreover, I must stress that, if you are looking for something to ease the passage of candle wax through said digestive system, alcohol, in the form of beers, wines and spirits, will be of precious little use to you as a solvent. As a matter of fact – and as was amply proven that night – your predicament will only worsen. Indeed, there was a moment in the evening where, with the wax and the alcohol in this bloke’s body reaching saturation point, he would probably have burned at both ends. Which would have redefined the term ‘lit up’.

Nobody tried, fortunately. Suffice it to say, though, that I have never seen anybody so ill, who was still standing up and breathing unassisted, as that stage assistant the following day. But at least he survived. More or less.

Anyway, to return to the play: my part in The Relapse was Lord Foppington, who was (and you may be ahead of me here) a fop – a trivial dandy, all manners and affectations. Names that functioned as large-scale clues about the sort of people you were dealing with were always a big number for these Restoration comedy writers. Also in The Relapse are characters called Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, Sir John Friendly and Serringe, a surgeon. Lord Foppington, it turns out in the course of the play, was formerly known as Sir Novelty Fashion but then managed to buy himself a title. Scandalous. Would never happen nowadays, of course.

In the photograph, I’m not yet in costume, but I’m presumably just about to climb into it. I have just had my make-up done. It has been applied using a version of the Japanese kabuki method, where you slather the face completely in a thick white undercoat and then paint in the features over the top. It’s a bit like decorating a sitting room, I suppose, except on a slightly smaller scale and with less furniture to shift. On top of the white face mask, I have been given thickly blackened eyes and brows, and heart-shaped, ruby-red, permanently puckered lips. My hair, you will observe – which was still capable of providing an all-over covering for my head in those wondrous but, alas, far-off days – has been carefully trapped and flattened inside a net, from which there will be no escape for it, barring an explosion in the vicinity large enough to blow the pins out.

This use of a hairnet is in order to provide a suitably flat platform for Lord Foppington’s wigs which, in this production, were absolute works of art. The production was rather lavish altogether, as I recall. The Relapse was the last play in that year’s season at the Arts Theatre and there seemed to be money in the kitty – money which needed spending, or else the theatre would simply have its Arts Council budget cut the following year. So the production was an extremely well-furnished one, with Lord Foppington’s wigs in particular feeling the benefit. There were three of these in total, each more elaborate and foppish and ridiculous than the last, and culminating in a long, flowing cloud of ginger curls, which resembled nothing so much as a skinned and blow-dried poodle, or possibly two skinned and blow-dried poodles, glued together. When I say long, I mean long – and when I say flowing, I also mean flowing. When not in use, this big, final wig had to be hung up to stop it getting tangled, and when it was suspended from its hanger in the dressing room it was as tall as I am. Which – before you make the point yourself – is not all that tall.

But this wig was almost big enough, and agile enough, to have its own part in the play. I only had to walk on in it to bring the house down, and I don’t mind confessing that I used to milk the moment mercilessly, taking a moment or two to give the audience an affronted eye, as if to ask them what, exactly, they thought they were laughing at. As far as I could tell from my research, contemporary Restoration players were perfectly willing to involve and interact with their audiences, who were very vocal in those days. So I wasn’t being hammy, you understand; I was being authentic. Well, that’s my story.

Anyway, look at me in this picture, thrusting upward from the hips, cocking my head for the camera. I stare at this photo now and I’m thinking: ‘Who is this bloke? Where has he come from and what does he want? What is that pose he is already unthinkingly striking?’ Even before strapping on the absurd buckled orange boots, shaped like twin gondolas, and climbing into the orange brocaded frock coat with its floppy lace cuffs and equally floppy lace neck-piece, and then clambering underneath that ridiculous pile of wig, I seem to have turned into Lord Foppington – albeit Lord Foppington in his underwear. The truth is, when I look at the person in this photo, I don’t see myself at all, or anything that I think of as resembling myself. That bloke – the bloke that I’m obliged to live with the rest of the time, when I am not, as rule, wearing Japanese kabuki-style face paint – has gone. He has already done a runner. He has vanished under the make-up. He has disappeared through a side door and into the theatre.

That, I reckon, is why this arbitrary, casual snapshot is such a weirdly compelling image for me, why it exercises such a lasting fascination. It seems somehow to contain the essence of the thing that drew me in the first place – the thing that lured me into amateur dramatics as a shy teenager from a terraced house in north London, that persuaded me to dump the work as an electrician that I had trained for and which seemed to be my destined course in life, and, instead, give myself five years to try and make the grade as a repertory actor. That thing was the chance acting offered to be other people, people who weren’t me or anything like me – the possibility, however momentary, of absolute escape into other characters and other lives, of absolute escape from yourself, which sometimes, looking back now, the job has delivered, and in spades, and which sometimes it hasn’t.

CHAPTER TWO

The things some people keep

IT’S AN EARLY spring afternoon in March 2017, and I am in a lock-up unit in a storage depot on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, staring in wonderment at a life-size ceramic statue of a collie dog.

‘Blimey, is that the actual one?’

It is, indeed, the actual one – the actual mock-porcelain mutt that, for many episodes of Only Fools and Horses in the 1980s, sat looking a bit gormless in the sitting room of the Trotters’ flat on the twelfth floor of the Nelson Mandela House tower block in Peckham, which was, of course, a set in a BBC studio, but you know what I mean. That ceramic dog wasn’t the only thing that sat looking a bit gormless in that flat, it has to be said, because Rodney and Grandad also had their moments. But, unlike them, perhaps, the dog had a decent excuse.

And now here I am, three decades and more later, in this chilly storage depot, eye to eye with that extraordinary beast again, this absurd, ornamental Lassie lookalike – man’s best friend, only in very shiny and very still form. Who seems to be in quite good shape, I am pleased to see, after all this time: bright-eyed, no more chipped than he was back when the two of us enjoyed each other’s company on a regular basis. OK, he’s not much livelier than he was back then, either; he’s still just sitting there, just as gormless, and not saying much. Probably just as cheap to feed, too. And as I reach forward and run my hand over the smooth, cold surface of this ridiculously naff, waist-high piece of sitting-room statuary, memories, as absurd as it may seem, come flooding back that are almost painful in their poignancy.

But before we get into all that, perhaps I should explain why, in the seventy-seventh year of my life, I am spending a midweek afternoon stroking a pottery dog in a Milton Keynes storage facility. Not for an episode of Antiques Roadshow, let me immediately tell you – although no doubt you and me both would be surprised, and possibly even stunned, to learn how much a mock-china collie that had regularly appeared in Only Fools and Horses would be worth these days, were those numbers available to us.

But I’m not here to get anything valued by Fiona Bruce. I’m here because I’ve agreed to film a sequence for a documentary programme that UKTV is doing about the making of Only Fools. UKTV is a cable channel that devotes a lot of its airtime to reruns of Only Fools and has, in a sense, become the show’s second home during its prolonged and seemingly ceaseless afterlife. Now they want to make six one-hour programmes about the series, going back to the locations where the show was shot and talking to the key people – the ones of us who are still alive, at any rate. Those members of our family who have sadly passed since the making of the programme get a free pass. And, on the grounds that this sounds like it isn’t going to turn into one of those cheap and cheerful ‘tribute’ shows, where they show you clips from the programme in question and then get a familiar-looking talking head (who is frequently a comedian, for some reason) to say something about the clip that is less funny than the clip was, I’m on board.

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 jellied 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.

It all sprang from here – these bits of paper. I set John Sullivan’s old scripts back in their plastic crate and wonder aloud how many laughs there must be in that one box.

CHAPTER THREE

Derek Trotter, a brief history

SO, WHO WAS Derek Trotter? Who was this bloke who came to occupy so much of my life and to reach so deeply into so many other people’s lives? To get to the heart and root of him, you probably have to understand where John Sullivan, the writer, was coming from – a place, coincidentally, not so far, culturally and geographically speaking, from where I came from.

I grew up in a small terraced house in Lodge Lane in Finchley, London, with no bathroom, a tin bath on the kitchen door, an outside privy and a little concrete backyard. John grew up (starting six years later) in a small terraced house in Zennor Road in Balham, London, with no bathroom, a tin bath on the kitchen door, an outside privy and a little concrete backyard. My mum worked as a charlady. John’s mum worked as a charlady. My dad was a fishmonger. John’s dad was – guess what. You’ve got it – a plumber. OK, so that was a difference. Both of us left school at fifteen, without sitting any exams, and, whereas I went into the employment centre and pulled out the card for a job as a mechanic’s help at Popes Garage, John started work as a messenger boy, first at Reuters news agency and then in an advertising company. At one point he apprenticed as a plumber with his dad, but he didn’t take to that really, much as my apprenticeship at Popes Garage fizzled out and I went off and trained as an electrician. Instead of plumbing, John cleaned cars and then had an unsuccessful stab at selling them, and he eventually wound up working in a Watney’s brewery, packing beer crates.

All the time, though, he was writing – just as all the time I was doing amateur dramatics. John was determined to break into television comedy. This probably seemed as remote a likelihood to him as making it as a professional actor seemed to me. But he had noticed how Johnny Speight, in the sixties, had gone from a humble background in Canning Town in London to a career as a celebrated scriptwriter by creating the legendary character of Alf Garnett and coming up with Till Death Us Do Part. He saw how Ray Galton and Alan Simpson had done much the same with Steptoe and Son. Inspired by those successes, John was constantly devising his own comedy shows and sending proposals and pilot scripts to the BBC – refusing to be set back by the standard rejection letters which inevitably flopped onto the doormat a few weeks later, but, instead, sitting down again and writing another proposal, another script.

He used to say that it was a hobby – and one that had the advantage of saving him a fortune in beer money because he would stay at home in the evenings and write rather than head off up the pub. But even if it was just a hobby at first, this was clearly a man who had entirely convinced himself that it would eventually amount to more than that. Someone once said to me, in the early stages of my career, ‘If you want to be a comic, you’re going to need an idiotic determination to succeed.’ I think they were trying to be encouraging. But whatever they were trying to be, they weren’t wrong. The phrase has stuck with me: an idiotic determination to succeed is what it takes. And the same goes, clearly, for comedy writers. John believed that if he just kept working and knocking hard enough, he would eventually break through.

He was right, too, of course – but it took a cunning move on his part to bring the desired ending about. John applied for a job in the props department at BBC Television Centre – humping the furniture around for The Morecambe & Wise Show and I, Claudius and all sorts – and thereby tunnelled himself into the beating heart of the organisation where he could become his own advocate and start to lean on people a bit more heavily. A very shrewd ploy, that. If the corridors of power won’t come to your house, go and live in the corridors of power. This was in the mid-seventies, and at one point, John found himself in a position to saunter up to Dennis Main Wilson, the vitally significant BBC comedy producer who worked with the Goons, Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes, Marty Feldman – in fact, pretty much every one of the great names of British television and radio comedy alive at that point. And Main Wilson was clearly persuaded enough by John’s confidence to sit down with him and hear him out and give him some advice, the most significant piece of which was that if John wanted to make it as a scriptwriter, his best way in was to start out smaller and write some sketches – short, one-off numbers for variety shows.

John duly went away and did so. It just so happened that, around this time, his day job found him humping the furniture on and off the set for Porridge, the great Ronnie Barker prison-based sitcom – in which, the gilded annals of broadcasting history will show, I took the part of Blanco Webb, an ancient inmate, imprisoned for murdering his wife, though continually and convincingly professing his innocence, even while preferring to stay in prison rather than accept the pardon that has been granted to him by the prison governor. I loved playing Blanco – and, of course, I got that great story-clincher of a moment in an episode in series three, called, ‘Pardon Me’, where Ronnie Barker as Fletcher, after much painstaking and concerted effort, finally persuades Blanco to accept the official pardon and leave jail. As Blanco readies himself to walk out into the world, Fletcher begs him to promise that he’s not to go getting himself into trouble by avenging the man who genuinely did murder his wife. Whereupon Blanco says, ‘No, I know him what did it. It were the wife’s lover. But don’t worry – he died years ago, that I do know. It were me that killed him.’

It was a lovely and completely unforeseeable twist, wonderfully enhanced by the freeze frame on Blanco as he turns to leave, which just gives you a beat to absorb the gag before the end of the show swallows it – a comic effect of the highest order, worked to perfection by the director, Syd Lotterby. There was a neat and satisfying roundedness to the construction of that twist, too, because justice had been served, albeit it in a circuitous way: Blanco had been wrongly imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, but he had also served his time for the one that he actually did commit. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the writers of Porridge, knew what they were about.

Incidentally, in the final scene of that episode, just prior to his release, Blanco was to be seen for the first time out of his prison clothes and back in the suit that, imaginably, he was wearing when he was put away, and there was a notion that the suit shouldn’t really fit him any more, after all this time. I had the additional idea, though, that it would be even funnier if it looked as though the jacket and trousers had been folded up and left in a drawer for twenty-five years. So I spoke to the wardrobe people about it and got them to iron some strong creases into the clothing so that it had these really stiff lines across it in the wrong places and hung really badly on Blanco’s body, as well it might if it had been folded away for a quarter of a century. The suit and its condition were never alluded to in the script. It was one of those gags that was just left there: you might notice it and get the joke, or you might not, but it was in there anyway, ready to provide a bit of added value for any takers.

Did John Sullivan’s and my paths cross during that happy time on PorridgeThe Two Ronnies