Delbert was my good luck charm for a long time. He was hip, funny, sharp and had street cred. I’d never had that, but Delbert Wilkins, with his slicked-back or pointy hair, sharp moustache, wicked suit and cheeky Charlie chatter, was definitely one of the cool guys. British comedy tends to favour the underdog who gets everything wrong and, in his own way, triumphs in the end. The British comic tends to not get the girl, or the million pounds, or the big promotion. Winning isn’t seen as a particularly classy goal; participation, playing the game, that’s the ticket.

But my favourite comedians – Richard Pryor, Steve Martin – and my favourite films – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 48 Hrs, E.T., even Jaws – all involved protagonists who overcame ridiculous odds to triumph. They were cool when the time came to be cool; they didn’t lean over and fall through an open bar like Del Boy or get dragged away while on roller skates like Frank Spencer. Comedy protagonists were more like Bugs Bunny or Anansi, the trickster spider from African mythology: they were heroes who invented a clever way to outwit their opponents. In Silver Streak Richard Pryor flips the whole situation when he enters a railway car with the bad guy and pulls a gun on him: ‘You ain’t sayin’ shit now, Mister.’ Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop disses the bad guy to his face and blags a hotel room by throwing a massive wobbly, pretending to be a gay journalist from Rolling Stone. I somehow can’t see Norman Wisdom doing those things …

Creating a cool comedy character was dangerous – there was a high probability that he wouldn’t be liked by the general public. If he got the girl, the house, the car, the money, the promotion … what were we rooting for?

So the idea of making Delbert into a situation comedy was fraught with worry. I asked for Kim to perform punch-up duties on Stan and Andrew’s scripts, because he wrote the best jokes for Delbert and got me into a position where I could go on-stage and do that character anywhere with confidence, knowing I could throw down with anyone.

The character of Delbert came out of the Brixton riots in the early eighties. The whole place was aflame, with furious residents protesting about mistreatment from the police; everybody was mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it any more. There were lots of issues – deaths in police custody, stop and search, overt racism – and it was all kicking off. I saw a black Labour politician on TV one night, so angry he was practically foaming at the mouth. He was rendered almost inarticulate. I really felt for him and also wondered what it might be like if there was a young dude from the street up there on Newsnight or Question Time dealing with all the interviewer’s prying questions with skill, panache and flair.

I’d met a wonderful choreographer and dancer called Kelvin, who had an amazing speaking voice. He was south London to his core, black and beautiful. He had this laid-back, funky, almost sing-songy Brixton tone – every sentence ended with ‘Ya knaa mean?’ Or ‘Y’ get me?’ He also had this ridiculous Woody Woodpecker-style laugh. I loved everything about this guy. Maybe he could be the model for this new dude I was thinking about?

There were several attempts at Delbert. The first one was during OTT. He was a young dude who came on TV to tell it like it was about what was going on in the streets of Brixton and why – only I didn’t know what he looked like. My brother Paul and his mates were always hanging out at my mum’s house. I’d been to the street market in Birmingham, up the road from the TV studios, and had bought some clothes – berets, one-piece overalls, dungarees, Doc Martens – all bright colours and as camp and street as could be. The guys put me straight on my garms – in broad Dudley accents:

In the end, when I did Delbert on OTT he was the Brixton milkman selling dodgy gear off the back of a milk float. It kinda worked.

Alexei’s the one who said he should be ‘half-a-teef’. I wasn’t sure. What he actually said was, ‘Shouldn’t he be the kind of geezer who’d nick the gold teeth out his gran’s gob?’ It certainly gave him an edge, to not just be fast talking and a hustler, but also giving the cops a good reason to stop him on the street – he had done something wrong; his car boot probably did have black-market drink, clothes, fags, drugs and puppies in there …

We played with that for a while. But, in the end, I wasn’t feeling it. The whole idea of a cockney loudmouth lowlife was nothing new – there was David Jason as Del Boy in Fools and Horses, George Cole as Arthur Daley in Minder and Flash Harry in the St Trinian’s films, James Beck as Private Walker in Dad’s Army. We were used to this trope, brilliantly executed by these wonderfully dextrous, articulate, hip, slick actors. But making Delbert just a straight-up roadman, a teefin’ clart, was not the way to go. One of the problems with the police activity in Brixton was profiling: stopping and searching black people when they were out and about minding their own business, just because they looked like someone from a dodgy photograph they’d half looked at on their way out of the station. Much better to have Delbert be the mouthpiece of the innocents, the guy who, while being arrested, does a running commentary as the police make mistake after mistake:

I loved it; any variation like that made me laugh. The po-po were trying to pull over a geezer who had more rabbit, chutzpah and game than they could possibly imagine. Delbert had an answer for everything; he knew the law and wasn’t going to let you get away with anything. Plus, he was a dude in his twenties. He was interested in girls, raving, music. He was a DJ; this was at the time of Jazzie B at the Africa Centre and Norman Jay and all them DJs and MCs running illegal raves all over London. The whole pirate radio lifestyle was wicked but fraught with danger. You’d play a fifteen-minute twelve-inch tune by Brass Construction, and halfway through you’d have to climb out the window because someone had grassed up your location.

By the time we were talking about Delbert as a sitcom character, he’d done several little sets, or monologues, on Three of a Kind, OTT and The Lenny Henry Show. Looking back, I don’t know why we didn’t just do all our favourite characters in every episode. Like The Fast Show, where they rinsed out all their catchphrase characters every week until we were looking forward to them saying their special thing: ‘Suits you, sir.’ ‘Me? Here?’ ‘You ent seen me, right?’ ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ ‘You know, a tin of Farrow and Ball paint is … very much like a woman.’ Brilliant! The characters returned week after week, having their adventures and making the same mistakes over and over again. Back in the day, we thought doing Delbert and Deakus and Theo every week was somehow cheating. If we did the same characters week after week, wouldn’t the viewers get bored?

The upshot of all this was that I felt there was more mileage in Delbert. In the monologues we set up he had a friend called Big Winston, a girlfriend called Claudette and mates called Freaky Deaky and Double Bump. They all lived the lifestyle of the midnight groover, the funkateer, the raver – driving around the streets late at night playing pirate radio very loud and yelling, ‘TUNE!!’

I remember talking to the TV producer John...