Only Fools and Horses The Musical review: This plonker of a cockney knees-up is as dodgy as a nine bob note

Only Fools and Horses, the revered and endlessly repeated BBC sitcom you resort to watching only once you’ve scrolled past the show about police dogs and the other one about furious Vietnamese women trying to smuggle papayas past New Zealand customs, occupies a very special place in the British psyche.

It’s a treasured relic of a bygone era, a nostalgic comfort whose cheeky geezer comedy and confidently deployed French malapropisms have bravely weathered the decades since it first aired.

While the country has transformed around it, while wars have been fought, despots toppled, and the careers of Spice Girls come and gone, you could always count on Del Boy falling through the bar for a laugh. Society’s unwavering veneration of Only Fools and Horses is a rejection of everything new, frightening and different. It is a time machine, a familiar cocoon into which one can retreat from modern life, if only for a few fleeting minutes, until the show about police dogs comes back on.

What Only Fools and Horses isn’t, is obvious fodder for a new West End musical. But the late John Sullivan had started writing one nonetheless, and now the son of the show’s creator has finished the job, porting the antics of David Jason’s iconic Peckham grifter from the TV to the stage by drawing on the comic talents of Paul Whitehouse and the musical ability of the late Chas Hodges.

The result is something between a dated variety show tribute act and a knees-up at an all-inclusive resort in Marbella. The cast impersonate the original characters brilliantly, but only to produce the on-stage equivalent of a two-hour Only Fools and Horses clip show, with a stretched plot that’s desperate to involve everything from Del Boy entering the dating scene to Rodney’s impending marriage to Cassandra. One of the more misjudged detours is a musical number where Boycie laments his infertility, while fireworks shaped like sperm explode in the background.

Songs range from bad to forgettable, propped up by not only the jauntily delivered theme tune, but also the inexplicable inclusion of Simply Red’s ‘Holding Back The Years’ and Bill Withers’ ‘Lovely Day’, which gives the impression they’d run out of their own tunes.

The gag-heavy script is at least faithful to the original show’s style, and most of the greatest hits are alluded to in some form. The simple mention of Peckham Spring Water is met with chuckles of recognition from the audience. When Del Boy /almost/ falls through the bar, he gets a reaction on par with Lionel Messi missing a penalty. When the Reliant Robin was wheeled on to the stage the crowd descended into a kind of frenzied euphoria, like ancient Romans at the colosseum after seeing a gladiator pull some guy’s head off. Except here it’s yer da, on a day trip into London, applauding a yellow car he knows from the telly.

But then again, what do I know? I’m a flat-white-with-oat-milk drinking, Peckham-gentrifying millennial, bemused at a crusty artifact of British comedy being clumsily dragged into the harsh and unforgiving light of modern day. Am I out of touch? No, it is the baby boomers who are wrong.