Special Disco Mention #15: Trigger

If it’s a girl they’re gonna name it Sigourney, after the actress. And if it’s a boy they’re gonna name him Rodney, after Dave.

The actor Roger Lloyd-Pack who played Trigger – the best character in the best ever British sitcom Only Fools & Horses, passed away this week. Growing up he was my favourite thing on telly and when, in my early teens, I was forced down to the orthodontist in Kings Cross to have my train tracks adjusted, the only silver-lining in the whole gruesome affair was that a son of Lloyd-Pack was also having his braces adjusted and, miraculously, our appointments seemed synced for the best part of the two years I was forced down to that miserable hell-hole. 

Roger was always dutifully in attendance, and it brought a metallic smile to my moody teenage face every time I saw him in the waiting room – seemingly every bit as gormless in real life as his most famous on-screen persona – I remember him once losing a fight with a swinging door. Maybe it wasnt his son he was with at all, maybe the NHS had paid him to hang around the waiting rooms of various orthodontic hospitals just to alleviate a bit of the misery: a comic rouse to stop a hormonal teenage uprising. Quite wise, really. In real life, Lloyd-Pack was also a solid left wing, anti war campaigner – involved with the Stop The War Coalition – but you didn’t need to know that to be sure the man’s a good egg, it’s unmistakably there, written all over his lovely face.

?Anyway, special disco mention to Trig – giving the gormless a good name somewhere in the afterlife. 

Here he is at his deadpan, wooden best: