The pocket watch that made Del and Rodney millionaires has sold for £35,000 – to two Only Fools and Horses fans dressed as Batman and Robin.
Mike Enright and Jason Baddams sparked their own scenes of laughter when they burst into an auction house in the fancy dress outfits the Trotter brothers wore in one famous episode.
Stood at the back of the room, Mike, 47, entered the bidding on the prop at £18,000 before successfully securing it for a hammer price of £28,000.
With fees added on the Del Boy fan paid a total of £34,720 for the item, the so-called Harrison Lesser Watch.
The timepiece was one of three made for the Only Fools and Horses episode Time on Our Hands which saw Del and Rodney become millionaires.
In the show, the antique dealer dad of Del’s girlfriend Raquel spots the watch on old oven hob in the market trader’s garage.
He correctly identifies it as the missing Harrison watch that goes on to sell at auction for £6.2m, causing both brothers to hilariously faint in shock.
Mike, who runs his own skip hire company, didn’t pass out after snapping up the metal alloy watch but did say: “Lovely jubbly’".
Mike, from Dudley, West Midlsbds added: “I am a huge Only Fools and Horses fan and was determined to buy that watch.
“It is a lot of money but it is such a famous prop. More than 26 million people watched that episode of Only Fools and Horses.
“You are never going to get another chance to buy it again.
“To be honest, I thought it would go for a lot more and I would have been prepared to pay it.
“I was ecstatic afterwards and went straight to the pub to celebrate.”
Mike, who is divorced, said he intended to keep the watch in a safety deposit box.
Auctioneer Chris Aston, of Aston’s Auctioneers of Dudley, said he almost dropped his gavel in shock when he saw Mike and Jason appear in the room.
He said: “I was in the heat of auctioneering when I looked up and saw Batman and Robin enter the room.
“It threw me at first but there was a lot of laughter from everyone.
It was hilarious.”
The watch, that measures 3ins by 4ins, was one of three the BBC commissioned to be made for the 1996 episode.
In 2007 one of the other two watches was stolen from the Only Fools and Horses Museum in Diss, Norfolk.
After filming the watch that sold was acquired by an anonymous collector who kept it ever since.
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