SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — There may be an unmistakable air of Peckham lately in Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, because the legendary yellow three-wheeled van from the BBC’s long-running sitcom “Only Fools and Horses” cruises town streets.
The little Reliant Regal was the trademark of the celebrities of the collection — the irresistible Trotter brothers from Peckham, a working-class neighborhood in London. In Bosnia, a duplicate belongs to the Fatic brothers, native businessmen who’re loopy in regards to the present.
The Fatics are sellers in house home equipment, operating a profitable firm with dozens of workers and an enormous store on the outskirts of Sarajevo. Constructing the enterprise, nevertheless, has resembled the ups and downs of the Peckham market merchants Del Boy and Rodney Trotter, they are saying.
“We are definitely the local version of the series,” Tarik Fatic, the youthful of the brothers, advised The Related Press. “We had been all the time dealing in one thing, we might purchase no matter we will after which promote it.”
The enormously standard BBC sitcom, which started in 1981, follows the lives of the Trotter brothers and their far-from-straightforward path from rags to riches. Over the course of seven collection and several other Christmas specials, the Trotters tried numerous get-rich-quick schemes, shopping for low-quality or typically black-market items and promoting them on the market.
Many in Bosnia and within the wider Balkans simply determine with the Trotters’ limitless wheeling and dealing. Within the area that went by means of a collection of wars within the Nineteen Nineties, the place the economic system was shattered and stays deeply corrupt, the Trotter methods of survival are easy actuality.
Identical to the Trotter brothers, “we all the time tried to make revenue and no matter what number of instances we failed, we simply moved on,” Tarik Fatic mentioned.
Additionally from a working-class household, and rising up in a rustic that was devastated within the bloody 1992-95 ethnic battle, the brothers tried buying and selling in meals, poultry and garments earlier than selecting house home equipment. They’re conscious there are not any ensures their present success will final.
“The market (in Bosnia) is still disorganized and unstable,” Tarik Fatic, 33, mentioned. “Not a day passes without the two (Del Boy and Rodney) crossing my mind.”
Recognized right here as Mucke, which really means one thing like wheeling and dealing, “Only Fools and Horses” grew to become massively standard all through what was nonetheless Yugoslavia from the Eighties onwards.
Murals with photos of foremost characters have been painted on the partitions; many cafes had been named after the collection, whereas visiting actors had been greeted with frenzy.
The Reliant Regal was made by a British firm, well-known for its eccentric autos, that went out of enterprise in 2002.
In Sarajevo, folks wave, take photos with their telephones, honk their horns after they see the yellow van within the streets. The Fatic brothers imported it from Manchester six months in the past after an extended search. It took some time to register the bizarre car, mentioned Mirnes Fatic, 38.
“It is a very nice feeling. It’s a joy every time I go for a ride in the city,” he mentioned, admitting that it additionally was “a great advertising move.”
And it isn’t simply the van. The Fatic brothers have additionally named their firm after the collection — Solely Fools and Horses Brothers Mucke. There have been some doubts how shoppers and banks would react but it surely turned out rather well, Mirnes added.
“We hope and imagine that this time subsequent 12 months, we will probably be millionaires,” he smiled, utilizing the well-known phrase from the present.
