As the old adage goes: you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family - although there have more than a few times when for Del and Rodney Trotter they really wished that it was the other way round.

Born twelve years apart, that age gap has proved to be a wide chasm more than once as the brothers attempted to carve out their own lives, but really knowing that they needed each other more than they'd like to admit.

To the 16-year-old Del Boy, the task of looking after a four-year-old brother following the death of their mother Joan and the desertion by the father Reg, must have seemed daunting to say the least.

They still had Grandad but even though he was only in his fifties, he was hardly the dynamic type. Del became the family breadwinner and his fledging entrepreneurial skills began to develop.

But making money wasn't Del's only raison d'etre. He soon discovered women and, soon after, learned that having a kid brother around didn't always play well with his dates.

But family meant everything to Del Boy and he sacrificed a great deal, not least his chance of getting married as a young man, to bring up Rodney rather than let him go into care.

"Del wasn't prepared to leave his family," says David Jason. "So if the girl didn't love him enough to take on the rest of the family then as far as Del was concerned she wasn't good enough for Del Boy and he'd elbow her."

Clearly though Del is no angel. The price Rodney has had to pay for Del providing for him and Grandad, and later Uncle Albert, is his overarching controlling influence - and Del's done it so long he just can't help it.

Read on to part two of The Brothers Trotter... » »