The 'perfect' girl Trigger talks about in "Strangers on the Shore" was a real girl
He knew and was perhaps romantically interested in. Look how oddly specific he is and and how she really isn't extremely attractive like most people's 'perfect' girls. Freddie the Frog was murdered
During the events of "The Frog's Legacy" we are introduced to the humorous revelation the Freddie 'the Frog' Robdal's life ended in a spectacularly ridiculous way when he sat on his own detonator during a burglary, killing both himself and his accomplice Gerald 'Jelly' Kelly. This sat perfectly well until Rock & Chips, when we saw just how cool and confident this seasoned criminal was - clearly not a man stupid enough to blow himself up. So maybe someone bumped him off?- Perhaps Freddie threatened to take his son (Rodney) or threatened the Trotter family in some way which led to Joan murdering him?
- Maybe Reg finally grew a pair and killed Freddie for sleeping with his wife?
- Or maybe he was the victim of a criminal rival who'd somehow worked out what Freddie did with the gold from the bank heist and wanted to find it for himself?
- Tragically, we will never know.
Don Vincenzo 'Vinny the Chain' Occhetti from "Miami Twice, Part Two: Oh to Be in England" is Del's half brother.
Sometime after leaving Peckham, Reg meets a Sicilian woman and impregnates her, only to walk out on her also.- If that theory were true, it would make Vinny even younger than Rodney, which he clearly isn't. Mind you, that's not to say that Reg couldn't have gotten a Sicilian woman pregnant before he met Joan, or cheated on her in the early days of their marriage.
- Vinny could be Albert's son, which would make him Del's first cousin once removed. The notion of Albert having been rather promiscuous during his time in the Navy is alluded to in "Strangers on the Shore" when a lot of the older men in the French town look a bit like him (and, according to the veteran who talks to Del, the British sailors hiding in the town were betrayed to the Germans by the French Resistance because Albert was sleeping with the local girls). His war medals include the Italy Star so he was there at some point during the war and could have got a Sicilian girl pregnant then. Maybe Del and Vinny both take after Albert's father (Del's great-grandfather) in terms of looks. It sounds far fetched, but this is WMG.
Freddie the Frog had a second son.
Rodney's parentage was hinted at in the "The Frog's Legacy" and confirmed during "Sleepless in Peckham" - Reg Trotter was not his father; instead it was Freddie Robdal, a professional criminal. We know this man to be quite the raunchy type, so it stands to reason that Joan Trotter was not the only woman he romanced. As a result, this troper believes that Freddie had another son prior to his death - a near-spitting image of Rodney who became a small-time criminal in his own right, and whose mother named him David. See where this is going?- What could possibly cause Trigger, a man who otherwise manages to everyone else's name right, to get Rodney's continually wrong despite being corrected hundreds of times over the course of the series? It's simple. Somewhere else in London, Trigger regularly gets in contact with another acquaintance of his; Dave. Every time Trigger meets Dave, he refers to him as Rodney, only to be corrected. Trigger is not intelligent enough to realise that Dave and Rodney are not the same person, and who could blame him? They have the same father, and they both take after him in terms of looks.
- Why stop there? Freddie could have known Norman Stanley Fletcher through his criminal contacts, and being the charmer that he was, he could well have romanced Mrs. Fletcher while Fletch was still inside. Their son, Raymond (who featured in Going Straight), does look a lot like Freddie, after all.
The show is set in the same universe as several other Britcoms.
The list includes...- Porridge; as stated above, Freddie Robdal could also be the actual biological father of Raymond Fletcher as well as Rodney Trotter. By this logic, Blanco is probably related to the Trotters.
- Fawlty Towers; in "Homesick", Renee Roberts and Gilly Flower played a pair of old ladies who seemed very similar to their Fawlty Towers characters. The Radio Times even named them as such in the cast list.
- Desmond's was set in Peckham, and the characters sometimes spoke of going to the Nag's Head (a real-life pub in that part of South London) so it's likely that they'd know the Trotters, socially at least. Del's probably had a few business dealings with Lee over the years, while Cassandra and Michael could work for the same bank. Taking this a step further, Desmond wasn't really a terrible barber — it just looked that way because he bought all of his equipment from Del and it turned out to be defective.
- Citizen Smith and Just Good Friends, what with them being written by the same person — although in the case of the former, the notion of Boycie being related to a police officer note might be stretching things a bit.
- Goodnight Sweetheart — Gary Sparrow is another of Freddie Robdal's illegitimate children.
Damien will grow up to be nowhere near as good a market trader as Del.
If Grandad and Reg are anything to go by, hard work is not something that comes naturally to the Trotters. Del bucked the trend from an early age because he had no choice but to work hard - first in order to bring some money in because Reg was too lazy to do a decent day's work, and later because after Joan died and Reg left, Del was the family's sole breadwinner in addition to being responsible for bringing up Rodney and looking after Grandad. Damien, by contrast, is by the time of "Sleepless in Peckham" a spoilt brat with no apparent motivation to work hard and whose trading/wheeling-and-dealing abilities are likely to be over-estimated by his doting father who believes he can do no wrong.