The day Del Boy fell out with Rodney

Actor DAVID JASON reveals how he and Only Fools and Horses costar Nicholas Lyndhurst caused panic during a huge row in a new memoir which lifts the lid on the iconic comedy loved by TV viewers

LOOKING back, I think it was boredom that led to the almighty row — a truly monumental shouting match — between my co-star Nicholas Lyndhurst and me back in 1986; the only time, I can honestly report, that this happened in the entire course of Only Fools And Horses.

It had started during the morning in the caravan we shared whenever we were filming. Words were exchanged and, I’m afraid to say, one or two loose items that happened to be at hand were flung angrily against the walls.

The row had continued with Nick throwing open the caravan door and exiting in a hurry, visibly upset, shouting: ‘That’s it! I’ve had it! I’m not working with him any more.’

Whereupon, he’d stormed off to the canteen with me yelling after him: ‘Yeah, that’s right! Run off and cry to the crew, why don’t you?’

The argument was as surprising for its violence as for the way it blew up out of nowhere, and these must have been genuinely shocking scenes for those obliged to witness them.

After several hours of stalemate, the script writer, John Sullivan, was phoned at home. Recognising that the row presented a potential disaster for the future of his show — by then into its fifth series with audiences of up to 18 million — John agreed to drive out to the location to negotiate a truce.

Fortunately for him, a second call reached him just before he left. Nick and I had cracked. The whole thing had been a huge wind-up — a staged spat, planned by the pair of us during a quiet moment in the caravan at the start of the day.

The best bit, as we happily explained, our eyes damp with laughter, was being able to see everybody’s frozen reactions out of the caravan window while we were in there bellowing at each other and chucking the ashtray against the wall.

For some reason the rest of the crew seemed not to find the big reveal at the end of this gag quite as funny as Nick and I did. Obviously, they were relieved, but they appeared to be not so much amused as . . . well, unamused.

I guess it’s true that you can allow these things to go on too long and, in this case, Nick and I may have misjudged it by maybe an hour or two. Or three. Or four.

Only Fools And Horses threw Nick Lyndhurst and me into a working partnership that lasted more than 20 years, over seven series and a clutch of Christmas specials between 1981 and 2003.

A pair of unlikely brothers on screen, we became, during those intense years, the same in real life, too.

It sounds a bit corny, I know, to say that the chemistry between Nick and me, and our co-star Lennard Pearce as Grandad, had been there straight away. But I don’t know what else to tell you, because it absolutely was.

THE three of us were as good as strangers when we auditioned together in the early Eighties. But you could hear from the get-go, in the blend of voices, that this thing was going to fly. Far from being a whiskery old man in battered clothing, Lennard was a welldressed and rather dashing gentleman of the theatre.

But that wonderful, cracked, grumbly tone was entirely convincing as the voice of a Peckham tower block-dweller from the moment he opened his mouth.

The same went for Nick’s deliberate, gawpy take on Rodney. For me, the line that in many ways sums up Rodney is: ‘If there is such a thing as reincarnation, knowing my luck I’ll come back as me.’

Nick had the perfect tone and expression for that sense of put-down hopelessness.

I don’t think any of us had been given reason to believe at that point that we were the chosen ones. Certainly, I hadn’t been the first choice for Del Boy — it’s no secret that a couple of other actors were ahead of me in the queue.

One of them was Jim Broadbent, who’d turned the job down because he had a project on in the West End. As it happened, Jim would later show up in Only Fools, playing the wheedling detective Roy Slater, and we got along famously.

If he had any regrets, Jim recovered in time to become one of the most respected actors of his generation, landing an Oscar in 2002 for his role in the film Iris.

All in all, I think we can fairly resoundingly conclude that not being Del Boy didn’t exactly hold Jim Broadbent back.

Anyway, by the end of that initial read-through, the cast was set. Ray Butt, the director, turned to John Sullivan and said: ‘That’ll do for me,’ and John nodded. And so I became Del Boy Trotter, the nation’s favourite wide boy.

Creating a whole new character is a fantastic chance to leave yourself behind and become someone else for a while — to me, it’s the best reason to be an actor in the first place. Who this person is, how they’re going to sound (as a working-class Londoner myself I had a head start on the accent), how they would behave and react in different circumstances.

One of the first things we needed to establish about Del Boy was what he was going to wear — the costume designer Phoebe De Gaye and I spent a happy morning trawling Oxford Street for cheap and nasty suits til we found a grey one perfect in both respects.

We paired it with some Gabicci shirts — brightly coloured, slightly shiny, just a little bit showy, but not too much.

Gabicci, an Italian company with a warehouse in North London, was to end up being the predominant label in Del’s wardrobe — a situation that did not go unremarked by the firm’s directors as the show took off. You can see how they might have had mixed feelings about the publicity, but they took it in great spirit and even invited me over for a show round. Nice people.

We turned our attention to accessories. John Sullivan wanted me to wear a fistful of jewellery, sovereign rings on every finger and a chunky gold necklace — a bit of a medallion man, as we used to say.

But I felt there was a danger of tipping Del into parody, so we settled for a smaller number of rings and a necklace with a gold letter D from Chapel Street market in Islington, which I felt was naff to just the right degree.

There was a similar debate about Del’s hairstyle. John raised the possibility of giving Del thick and welltended sideburns in a passing tribute to Elvis Presley, whom geezers do generally adore.

Phoebe, meanwhile, saw Del with permed hair in the ‘bubble’ style popular with late Seventies footballers. Again, though, my instinct was to rein back a bit.

We used my own hair backcombed into an understated quiff — the look of a man who has clearly spent some time in front of the mirror, but without heading for parody territory.

With hindsight, I can see how lucky we got with the styles and clothing. The years have gone by and what the characters are wearing is not substantially different from what you might plausibly see people wearing today, making the show accessible for generations of new viewers.

It all fell together very swiftly and naturally — indeed, I quickly got to the point with Del where it was as though I had a switch and could flick him on and off. You can only do that when you’re absolutely sure you know who that person is, when they’re coming from inside you. With Del, I knew.

Amid no great fanfare, the first episode of Only Fools And Horses went out on BBC1 on Tuesday September 8, 1981, wedged between The Rockford Files and The Nine O’Clock News.

It would be nice to report that thereafter it surfed smoothly onwards, rising to its rightful place in the comedy firmament.

ALAS, nothing in television is ever that simple — apart, possibly, from Trigger, another fabulous character from the series played by the great Roger Lloyd-Pack. Who can ever forget Trig’s immortal verdict on Mahatma Gandhi: ‘He made one great film, then you never saw him again.’