Original subtitles

Stick a bunny in me pocket.

I'll fetch the suitcase from the van.

Cause if you are the best ones but you don't ask questions, then brother,

I'm your man.

Cause where it all comes from is a mystery.

It's like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.

But here's the one that's driving me berserk.

Why do...

Here, I was watching, eh?

Only Fools and Horses is one of Britain's most loved shows on TV.

Lovely jubbly.

64 episodes were made between 1981 and 2003.

And it's still watched and laughed at by millions of us every week.

What are you doing?

I'm trying to get the dinks of acid.

With every line written by just one man.

The success of Fools and Horses can be summed

up with two words and it's John Sullivan.

The story of Derek Trotter's life is the story of John Sullivan's creative genius.

I don't think anybody really touches John for being able to make you laugh.

And being able to make you cry.

It's time next year.

Happy millionaires.

Celebrating the wonderful comedy world of John Sullivan, we'll be getting the inside

story on the Trotters from the horses' mouth.

I was nearly fired because of that scene.

Oi!

I said to John, you can't use this.

Come on, get him off!

We've also recreated some of the sets, reunited cast members

and have talked to some of the show's most famous fans.

One of the incredible things about Fools and

Horses is that you could grow up watching it.

I can't remember a time before I watched only Fools and Horses.

It's really, really, really the best.

Over the next hour, we'll be taking a tour around Peckham.

Right, Dave.

And beyond.

Let's pretend we're Dutch, mate, right?

Ajax!

We'll also find out what happens when some

classic Only Fools moments are remade overseas.

So sit back and enjoy the definitive story of Only Fools and Horses, the show which

has given us some of the most memorable moments in British comedy.

Of course, that's just comedy.

I mean, it doesn't really happen in real life.

But it's not supposed to happen in real life.

Granddad?

Still hasn't got it right.

We live in London, one of the better parts of London.

Yeah, Peckham.

First off, Peckham is a funny word to say, Peckham.

Peckham.

Peckham, it's easy to remember.

Peckham?

I've never been to Peckham in my life.

That's all I really know about Peckham is that it's a great name.

Peckham for this group of people is intrinsic to the whole thing because of

the market stalls, because of the high-rise flats.

You know, Peckham summed up a level of people who are trying to improve their lot.

We live half a mile up in the sky in this Lego set built by the council.

We run a three-wheel van with a bald tyre.

We drink in wine bars that the only thing

that's got a vintage is the governor's wife.

That's why I want to grab this opportunity with both hands, Rodney.

I grew up in Dagenham, which isn't a million miles away from Peckham.

It totally seemed real.

Oi, you little git!

It was exactly what my life and how I'd known life up until that point was like.

The old Kemp Road, the cheapest in the Monopoly ball, divides where I grew up,

Bermondsey and Deptford, from Peckham, over here.

And we used to... We had nothing in South London.

It was as working-class in here as you can imagine.

But we used to make jokes about Peckham then.

No, going out with a girl from Peckham, yeah.

She must be nice.

Cool, look at the state of her, eh?

I think so.

You can see her wrinkles from here.

All right, all right.

She's got a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, hasn't she?

Reverb.

All right, go on.

You're going to have the best one.

That is the best one!

John Sullivan grew up in Ballum, South London, a living

inspiration for the characters and storylines he created.

The street I lived in was one of those streets filled with characters.

I think anywhere you go in the country, when you castle Liverpool, when you get

these kind of ghetto-type streets, you do get these

wonderful characters and incidents that just fill you.

You don't realise quite how colourful they are.

I had a fight with five blokes last night.

What was it, a pillow fight?

I was out in the real pubs, the South London pubs, and the kind of discos and

things that were all around then in, you know, in the 70s, 75s.

I just wanted to try and bring in the real characters that were actually living out

there in the pubs and streets now, at this particular time.

Inevitable, then, that the Nags Head would become the

heart of activity for the Trotters' friends and family.

In every community, the pub, where everybody goes, it's, yeah, it's key,

key, really, I think.

Very nice.

Congratulations, Albert.

It reminded me of the theme track from Noddy the movie.

I don't know how much pubs are still the centre of a community

in the way that the Nags Head is in Only Fools and Horses.

I guess they are still, to an extent, but when it

started, I think that was still very much true.

I've had certificates for my beer.

Yeah, I've had a few days off work with it and all.

And they're all very disparate people.

I mean, that's the other great thing about pubs, and

still is, I suppose, they're something of a leveller.

I reckon he can pick up BBC Two on that air.

John wanted as big an ethnic mix as possible.

He said, this is the melting pot.

The South London pubs, you'll get every race, nationality and religion.

He's a nice bloke, you know that, Ranji.

He took me and Rodney over to South Hall last week.

They was holding this Asian song contest.

Is that right?

Yeah, a bloke called Sing won it.

Real London life wasn't really being addressed, not in comedies at all.

It was still kind of an old-fashioned London, and there don't seem to be no kind

of black people in there or anything, as they were.

There's just some in the background.

It was the focal point of the show, the Nags Head, yes, and of course it's the

device that a lot of TV shows use to get all the characters into one place.

Who's we got?

One of the jolliest ones I remember was, after Marlene had got her, the lovely

baby, and she was sitting there with all the

photographs of the baby, showing them off.

Del does this terrible thing that anybody could have been the father.

Oh, look at that, I never noticed that.

Mikey's got your mouth, look.

Jack's got your mouth.

That is Rodney's nose, if ever I've seen that.

That's where the series lived, to me, you know.

Wave goodbye to your daddy.

Creator John Sullivan was insistent that Only Fools was set in a real London

borough, with real London characters talking like real London people.

So you take your overcoat off and you put it up on the rack in a pub and you say,

look after my smother for me, Fred, but it's your overcoat, you know what I mean?

Or you might have your twirls in your pocket.

What's that, a bunch of kids?

I know people that are talking cockney rhyming slang, not ironically, not as a joke.

It's just how they talk.

Well, I thought I might go down and have a couple of light ales down the neck,

Zed, and then go on to the star of Bengal for a Ruby Murray.

The fact that language can sort of connect with

you in such a way I think is just brilliant.

And yeah, you know, John Sullivan was a master of it and I think David Jason's

delivery of it was equally really authentic.

Where do you get this pain?

Well, all over, really.

I mean, this morning I got it in the lift.

No, no.

Where on your body?

Oh, right, get it in the old new deli, don't I?

New deli?

Yeah, the belly.

You're not from round these parts, are you?

There was a lot of rhyming slang which I didn't get.

He had a line, something along the lines of, my April would be going like a moped.

Of course, my old April was going like a moped.

What, what, what?

No.

April, April in Paris.

Aris, Aristotle.

Bottle, bottle and glass.

Your arse.

If a wild lion were to come in here now, my old April

would be pouting like a good 'un, but I'd stand me ground.

It was John Sullivan's genius to put words in that

have since become Only Fools and Horses words.

Lovely jubbly pucker thing, you know, no mucking about.

Oh, kushty.

They were certainly in the language of Southampton and

kushty was certainly a word in my school playground.

Oh, don't worry about it, everyone's going to be kushty.

Never heard it on television.

And the first time I heard that, I thought, hello, this is written by one

of the chaps, this isn't by committee, this fellow knows who you're talking about.

And inventing his own version of Cockney slang meant John Sullivan was able to slip

a few near-the-knuckle phrases under the BBC censorship radar.

Oh, what a plonker!

Some of those expressions seem innocent enough, but they

did have a much deeper meaning for us working-class lads.

You dozy little twonk, Rodney!

When I first saw in the script, Rodney, you are a plonker, I said to John,

you can't use this.

And he said, well, I passed it.

I said, who?

He said, you know, the powers that be upstairs.

I said, but did they say they knew what it meant?

He said, I don't think they did.

And anyway, I'm not going to tell them, are you?

What a 42-carat plonker you really are!

Coming up, we see that worse things actually do happen at sea.

Oh, John.

And how the Portuguese Del Boy Trotter handles

the legendaries falling through the bar scene.

Oh, no!

Del and Rodney Trotter lived in Peckham all their lives.

Genuine Italian sonnets!

But every now and again, writer John Sullivan

allowed them to escape rainy South London.

Sonny!

I've booked our holiday!

Here you are, my boy.

That's it, there it is, all in there.

We're going somewhere different.

We are away from the tourists.

Yeah?

Where?

Benidorm.

Oh, we thought, great, wonderful, where are

we going to get a free trip to the sunshine?

Viva la spania!

No, we're not, we're going to Stadland Bay, just outside Poole.

In the early days of Poole's, the budgets, because it was early days and they weren't

necessarily the show that it was, if John wrote a scene in Spain,

you didn't go to Spain.

Oi, watch it!

I know exactly when it was, because it was the day before my 21st birthday,

so it was April 19th.

Which is not, you know, barmy by any means.

Here you go, Dope.

Cheers.

This is the life, eh, Rodders?

We spent our day on the beach, trying not to look too goosebumpy.

Whilst everybody's there, you see, all in their great big, you know,

jackets and furry boots and gloves and all of that, and

there's me lying on the beach with nothing on, practically.

Here, Roddy, put someone out all on my back, will you?

Yeah.

Ha!

Ha!

Oh, dear, I'm sorry!

Sorry, I thought it was oil!

Saving the television licence payers money, which,

to me, was more important than going to Benidorm.

Regardless of it being the breezy British coast or a beach bar in Benidorm,

Del was always ready to show off his grasp of exotic languages.

He comes out with these French phrases with such confidence

and he just makes himself look like a complete wally.

The French, uh, the fumei.

Avic, uh, vous... du bonnet?

Oui, merci.

Oui, croissant.

Doss du bonnet pas va bord.

Thank you, Jean.

Je quelle partie de la France et vous.

Ah, oui, oui, je t'aime.

Je t'adore.

Uh, sur les pons... davignon.

Pardon, monsieur.

Yeah.

OK.

Del's use of French was typical of the era where, um, if you didn't...

if you didn't learn a language, you didn't know how to speak the language,

you just pretend.

Del, you speak a bit of French, don't you?

Well, potage bon fait.

He's trying to impress people that they won't know what it

means either, but it sounds really cool to speak French.

Garçon, la petit poi.

Oh, parlez-vous français?

Ya beau.

Yes.

Well, you can't speak French.

You're still struggling with English.

I remember reading the first script.

I think it said, Del gets his French phrases from a Renault manual.

I'll get the money off him and give it to Rodney, and it'll all be res de chassé,

as they say in the doo-dooing.

What a stroke of genius to have someone getting all the French words wrong.

Listen, Trotter, you're not cheating me.

Cru de t'ai a la plait.

It's so funny, and it continually gets funny.

You know, and then he'll introduce, John will bring a different French word in

for the next series, and you think, it's just really clever.

Well, goodbye.

No, no, not goodbye, Margaret.

No, just bonjour.

Potpourri, potpourri!

LAUGHTER

Remarkably, John Sullivan wrote all 64 episodes

of Only Fools and Horses single-handedly.

Me nage à trois.

And his original scripts are precious collector's items.

Chairman of the Only Fools Appreciation Society, Perry Aghajanov, has been

collecting material from the show for nearly 30 years.

And David Jason has joined him to look through some

of the scripts that were used by the cast and crew.

Well, we've got a little collection of scripts here.

Losing Streak script there.

Is this an original script?

Yeah, that's John Sullivan's copy, actually.

Cos I've got here some edits already.

So what they never saw was Social Security.

Don't you go using words like that to me, Trig.

It's cruel, it's like saying Paxo to a turkey.

Yeah, some lovely stuff.

This is lovely.

Look, Ray, John would like this back afterwards.

Yeah, John always kept the original, cos anything that

was cut, he might be able to rebuild into another script.

We're looking at these scripts and the thickness of them, and then one day,

that lands on your doormat.

Oh, come on, Ray.

And the sheer depth of the script.

How did it feel at that time to be taking it from

a 30-minute slot to, what, an hour and a half?

Yeah, it was what John and I had been angling for for some time, because we were

throwing more stuff away than other good comedies had got in their entire episode.

They kept saying, you know, it's 30 minutes, it's 30 minutes.

Every sitcom is 30 minutes.

I had a long discussion with John Sullivan and we decided that we'd go and put a gun

to the head of the light entertainment department, and said that either they give

us more time or basically John would withdraw his writing talents.

So, this was it, and it arrived at last, something this size, and it was a joy to

behold because we knew that now John was writing with much more elbow room.

Bloody hell, am I.

How?

How?!

With a plot to rival any Hollywood heist movie, to how and back saw the Trotters

diversify from market trading to diamond smuggling as they

set sail to Amsterdam for their highest-stakes deal to date.

It's such a funny idea and it's so in character of

Uncle Albert with all his tales, seafaring tales.

He's finally tested.

Right.

Right a bit.

You mean starboard.

I mean right.

Don't start all that Captain Bird's-eye, bloody cobblers.

We had to go out to the gas rigs and after about four hours, there were two actors

and the make-up department left, who weren't seasick.

You're sick now.

Leave it out, you tart.

We've only just started.

You could not believe what was coming off the side of this boat.

Oh, God.

Buster, I'm afraid, played a very good salty sea dog but unfortunately,

in real life, it wasn't the case at all.

Oi!

Oi!

Jump!

Which way to Holland?

Hello.

It's over there!

Cheers, pal!

The day before, we flew out to the rigs to

have a look at the shots and what we could use.

And somebody on the rig said, so what are you doing?

And we told them, we said, the gag is that we go out

to the rig and say, well, you're all right for Holland.

So that's funny, isn't it?

And this guy went, well, that happens quite often, actually.

Well, Rodney, see?

Don't know the way, you just got off someone, ain't you?

Oi!

Coming up, we discover how a shoot across the

pond put the frighteners up the cast and crew.

Stick up its mouth and see what it does.

And why John Challis was left on his own to

entertain the Serbian nation live on television.

That was a moment.

HE LAUGHS

In the 64 episodes of Only Fools and Horses, we get

to see a variety of Peckham's glamorous hot spots.

The waste disposal plant.

It's closed!

You said it was open 24 hours a day!

Yeah, but not at night.

The graveyard.

Oh, it's gone quick, Rodney, get after it!

Even the local supermarket.

John Sullivan would grab every opportunity to get

the trotters out of the flat and into the real world.

Whenever you see them step outside, you know, Nelson Mandela House,

or they're not in the nag's head, are you watching?

You're going, yes!

You're going, this is going to be great!

Off this way, don't, don't!

There's another one for him, it's boosted!

I'm not the safe!

You can imagine the suits at the BBC saying, so sorry,

what, there's a gunman and a hostage and it's a sitcom.

Really?

Ain't I seen you somewhere before?

No, no, no, no, I ain't been anywhere before, have I, Rodney?

No, no, no, he stays at home all the time.

Before I did the show, it was one of my favourite comedy shows and I knew it could

grab like a 17 million audience and I knew I had a job on my hands.

Do you remember the Scarlet Pimpernel?

It weren't you, did it?

But I'm like him.

That was a real onion of an episode, I thought, because the three main

characters, for want of a better expression, are very neatly sidelined just

to be part of a device of an overall plan of someone else's.

They seek him out, they seek him there.

Those policemen seek him everywhere.

Is he in heaven or is he in hell?

That damn, elusive Sha-Ad-Do.

It was Nicholas Lindhurst who said to me, why don't you say Sha-Ad-Do?

Do it like that, Sha-Ad-Do.

So thanks, Nick.

After a stressful night and with the Sha-Ad-Do asleep, it

was time for Rodney to take matters into his own hands.

I call it the Sullivan rug pull.

Just when you think you know exactly what's going to

happen, he just goes, wrong, I'm going to do this instead.

You polonka!

Besides the nag's head, one of Del and Rodney's other regular haunts was Sid's calf.

Though with its deplorable hygiene standards, brisk service and questionable

grub, viewers may have wondered why they even went there in the first place.

Well, cut to, please, Sid.

What are you talking about?

Why is they going to Sid's calf?

Well, it's close.

It's close by and it's run by a mate.

Every workman in the entire country has got a Sid's calf.

There's a hare in this.

It's here.

There's another one.

That's disgusting, that is, Sid.

If the health authorities saw this, they'd close you down.

I've been closed down for a lot worse than that, Denzil.

Don't make these politically correct people.

Yeah.

What do you have, intrigue?

I'll try some of that porridge.

That was the fun of it, taking every classic greasy spoon that you'd ever had

in your life and putting it all together in Sid's calf.

Thank you, Sid, that was... horrible, as usual.

Cheers, Del.

While only Fools & Horses brought Peckham into the national consciousness,

it was, in fact, filmed primarily in Acton, West London.

I'm going to make you rich, Denzil!

12 miles from Peckham, but on the doorstep of BBC Television Centre.

Sorry, viewers, the Lord's Work calls...

Filming in London, they just took no prisoners.

They were to stop the shoot.

People would come by us and go...

HE YELLS I was actually convinced...

LAUGHTER ..that these people were going home and

going back into the house and say, Hello, more.

Hello, darling.

Do you know what?

I saw Del and Rodney down the market this morning.

Not, I saw David Jason and Nick Lenders filming Fools & Horses.

No, I saw Del and Rodney down the market.

Yeah, we were now so embedded in the psyche of everybody that we were real.

Yeah, exactly.

Away you go, everyone, everyone, before you get your collars felt,

go on, away you go.

We were getting more and more popular as the series went on, and with that

popularity, filming was becoming more and more difficult.

The press were getting more and more interested in what we were doing,

so we were always on the lookout for paparazzi.

So it was decided we should try to get out of London, and I

went around looking for somewhere to go and landed on Bristol.

But such was the popularity of the show.

When production moved to Bristol, so did the press.

And in 1996, when filming the Christmas Day special, the paparazzi were there en

masse to get the scoop on the show's big comedy reveal.

I'm not getting out dressed like this.

And they sent a trainload of press people, and what they

wanted was obviously the shot of you as Batman and Robin.

Yes.

And it was just such a spoiler.

Yeah.

So when they were filming, David and Nick were kept hidden to the very last minute,

and then some of the lights were turned on photographers, because there were

photographers there, and to stop them getting images.

We had this sort of sweet spot when the pubs shut, and before the clubs turfed out

at about four o'clock in the morning, that was the time where we could shoot.

They said, right, David, Nick, out of the camera, run!

Back in the thing, doubles.

So nobody could take the photograph, and they never, ever got the photograph.

You tart, Rodney.

We cut to a foot coming out, and it was either with the blue boots... That's it.

..and we came up...

LAUGHTER

..and then Nick just carried out, like, the finest Robin you've ever seen in your life.

LAUGHTER And the whole place went bonkers.

Will you get back inside the van?

I don't want people seeing you dressed like that.

Look at that, Rodney.

I don't remember it, but every time Nick started to speak, I started to laugh,

and then when I started to speak, Nick would start laughing.

Do you know, we could be there in five minutes if we ran.

We'd be seen!

But when you look at someone dressed like a loonie, trying to be serious,

we kept breaking up, and it took you ages to get in.

I'm sure.

I'm sure.

What's happening?

I have the faintest idea.

LAUGHTER

You're watching two of your friendly, lovable rogues doing

something even more ridiculous than you'd ever imagined.

You may remember me.

I wrote to you some time ago about a... Help!

Let's go!

LAUGHTER Sorry, my staff.

Derek?

Harry died yesterday.

Harry... Harry died.

LAUGHTER Hey, walk out, trotters about!

The only Fools & Horses feature-length episodes had bigger storylines with bigger

budgets to match, often allowing John Sullivan to get

the trotters out of Peckham and into the wider world.

Look out, Margot, and look up your daughters, eh?

LAUGHTER All right, Ellen?

LAUGHTER I always felt when they went away, I was on the end of the telephone.

So was I!

So I'd just be brought in for a day to go,

oh, good, I'm glad you're having a good time.

Put the phone down.

Unfortunately for Gwyneth and Tessa, Cassandra and Raquel were also left at

home when John Sullivan came up with a storyline in one of the most glamorous

locations you'd ever expect to see a BBC comedy.

Miami.

Miami was fantastic because none of us were known in America at all.

So we had a fine time, we could go out to restaurants together and not have the

traffic stopping in the street and all the pictures and all that sort of things.

That was lovely.

This feature-length episode had David Jason playing Del Boy

Trotter and his mafia don doppelganger, Vincento Ochetti.

Somewhere out there lies the answer to my problems.

When the mob realise Del is a perfect look-alike, they try to kill him off in

front of witnesses so that the FBI think

it's the Don who is sleeping with the fishes.

People always seem to like me and I just don't know why.

It's got me bit where we're all dead and old.

When we went to Miami, we had a lot of American actors who didn't know the show.

Oh, my God, somebody got one out of us.

Is he dead?

No, but it was bloody close, Rico.

They watched the show and they could not

understand why the show had not gone to America.

They used to wander around the set going, lovely, jubbly.

Del Boy got himself in and out of a number of scrapes in Miami, including escaping

from a first-story window and a ride on a high-powered jet ski.

But unlike Don Vincento Ochetti, David Jason had no double to do the stunts for him.

This is your start button and this is the throttle.

You said, just keep going and I'll tell you when we cut.

What you didn't realise was when you're sitting on a jet ski with the water and it

going full power, there's an awful lot of noise.

And he's there and he goes, and cut.

And cut.

Hey, cut!

He's shouting.

I couldn't hear him at all, I'm still going.

And the support boat, which we had, to keep up with, couldn't keep up with him.

David was literally halfway to Cuba.

And it wasn't only Del who had to do his own stunts.

Well, when I first read the script, they said Del and Rodney

are sitting on a log and an alligator comes between them.

My first reaction was, well, it won't be real, because the BBC wouldn't do that.

Yeah, yeah, they would.

Down on the ground looking up was John Rhodes with a camera and eventually the

handler took a stick and went straight up the backside of his alligator.

The alligator turns and goes, like that.

John Rhodes ended 100 metres down the road.

God, didn't he?

He left the camera running, thank God.

Some of the stuff that the actors have to put up with,

honestly, real live alligators ready to eat them, you know.

Oh, but you producers and directors will say, stick up its bum, see what it does.

He'll be all right.

We're insured.

And the local wildlife weren't the only predators to watch out for.

A few days into filming, producer Gareth Grendon found himself in a row with local

unions off-screen in a plot similar to what was happening on-screen.

We are in deep, deep shtuck.

This is Mafia country.

We'd never heard of the Teamsters, we were so naive, you know.

And, of course, they came along one day and said, you

can't do this, you've got to have some more of our staff.

And Gareth said, excuse me, we're the BBC.

And Gareth ended up in this Teamsters office with a 20-stone

guy with a cigar and a leopard-skin armchair sitting there.

And Gareth went in and said, you know, normal thing,

excuse me, I don't care what you say, da-da-da.

And this guy just looked at him and said, I tell you what, I don't give a f***.

You can just go home if you don't want to go and do this.

And Gareth decided that the BBC way of doing

things possibly wasn't going to work at this game.

So he came back very sheepish, going, don't worry,

I think I've sorted it, just get a few more staff.

You palonca!

After the break, we'll see how Boise danced for the Serbian

nation and how the trotters were lost in translation.

Only Fools and Horses is the most watched show in British TV history.

But it isn't just British viewers who have

laughed and cried at the exploits of Dale and co.

I am constantly surprised at how far this comedy show has reached.

I've walked into a pub once and this guy said, you Mickey, Mickey Pierce.

He said, we Sarajevo, bombs, mortars come, we in

the basement, looking fools and horses laughing.

I did a show many years ago about chimpanzees and we were hacking through a

jungle somewhere in northern Uganda and we heard pangers and machetes coming the

other way and one of them just hacked past me and didn't even bat an eyelid and went,

all right, Dave, and just hacked on in the opposite direction.

The only Fools stars are known all over the world

and have appeared in the unlikeliest of places.

John Chalice even had this memorable encounter with Serbia's answer to Graham Norton.

My whole life story for 2,500 denials.

That is a very good deal.

What started off as a personal appearance to plug both

of his autobiographies soon took a turn for the surreal.

The presenter suddenly had some sort of heart flutter or something and suddenly

had to go and get some medical treatment, leaving me alone

with this audience in a television studio in Belgrade.

What do you do?

I don't even speak the language, you know.

Unable to speak but a few words of Serbian, John Chalice had no option but to

resort to the universal language of dad dancing.

That was a moment.

HE LAUGHS Only Fools is so popular abroad, some

countries have even made their own versions.

I love things like this.

Roughly translated, Slovenia gave us brother to brother.

It's rather good, isn't it?

Who knew?

Spent more on the credits than we did.

The Dutch churned out what's it worth.

We've got a dog.

Oh, we've got a dog in it now.

And the Portuguese produced furo vidas, a local

expression for someone living outside the law.

That's Del Boy.

That's Del Boy looking like Voiti.

No.

Granddad appears to be universal.

At least they get four wheels on that, man.

Various countries all adapted the original scripts.

You know what's coming here, don't you?

Which made for some instantly recognisable, yet strikingly different moments.

Where's the remote?

I don't understand the language.

Even Del's faux French was given an interesting

linguistic spin by his Slovenian counterpart.

Hello.

Hello, Grille.

Are you from here today?

I've never seen this.

Where are you from?

From, from, yeah, from.

No girl, girl.

From, who from?

See you later.

Thank you.

The ultimate test for the foreign remakes are

in recreating the show's more iconic scenes.

Which one's meant to be Del Boy?

One more turn, Rodney.

There you are, there's your brace yourself.

Yeah.

That's pretty close, isn't it?

That is hilarious.

It works.

They copied that shot well, didn't they?

Yeah.

Yeah, well done.

Well done.

Tick, VG.

It's universal, isn't it?

A physical comedy.

That is very, very funny in any language in

the world, because the wrong chandelier falls.

So it's fantastic.

Yeah, and that lovely build-up shot for shot.

And also, well, they had to shoot that exactly the same, so that works.

They just have to do it the way we did it, otherwise it's not very funny.

Yeah.

But it's not always quite such a flattering imitation.

Interesting they're doing it drunk.

I wonder why.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN Oh, no!

Nearly.

Nearly worked.

Yeah, it's not quite the trigger turn, is it?

He's doing funny walks now, isn't he?

Yeah.

He's putting a joke on a joke, that is.

Yeah.

It's almost a different scene.

It's about something else.

It's not about the falling through the bar.

It's about being very drunk, isn't it?

Yeah, it's about sort of the chaos is there, where, in the other one,

they're very organised, they're very still, and then that happens.

So, yeah, it's interesting to see.

A different interpretation.

It shows you how fragile and how brilliant the actual concept is.

And that's a parallel universe that shows you...

It's not the actual joke itself, it's the performance and it's the care.

Cos just somebody falling through the bar, particularly if they're saying,

oh, no, I'm in a comedy!

Ooh!

With few revealers providing an interpretation that was anything but

lovely jubbly, let's see how one of the greatest moments in British comedy could

be done in a Peckham wine bar, with dill boy and trigger out to impress the ladies.

LAUGHTER I think we're on a winery edge three, all right?

Play it nice and cool, son.

Nice and cool, you know what I mean?

LAUGHTER Falling through the bar?

Yeah.

No, I mean, when David did it, obviously, it

became an instant classic, and rightly so.

LAUGHTER David Jason's fall is worthy of Buster Keaton, you know?

I mean, it is... I can't... I can't offer higher praise than that.

But it very, very nearly wasn't going to be in the show at all.

It was purely because Roger Lloyd-Pack...

At the time, he was doing pretty much every show on the BBC, it seemed,

and he couldn't be in an episode, and then he was given some time off,

and so he came in just to say hello, and John went, oh, can you do a bit?

Cos we're missing you in this episode, you're not in it.

And he went, yeah, I can do a scene.

Drink up, Trig.

Drink up, we're leaving.

So John wrote a scene pretty much there and then that involved the trap.

Aren't you going to try for them birds?

No, no, you're cramping my style, mate.

LAUGHTER That, again, is a classic example of the brilliance of John Sullivan.

This is Derek.

Shh.

Au revoir.

How amazing that, you know, to be involved in a programme that's been so popular and

is still so popular is nothing but a privilege.

Lovely jubbly.

Help!

It has really captured the world's imagination, and it still is.

You know, there are still countries just getting to know it.

Oh, shut up, you tarts!

The stories that I've heard in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, in the middle of

Africa, is a little tiny shack of a shop going, Del Boys.

And they are told that if you want to earn a bit and ingratiate yourself to the

Brits, you just say, lovely jubbly, and it

said, you know, the world will be your oyster.

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