Trigger appears for the first time in this episode, making him the only character apart from Del and Rodney to appear in both the first episode and the last episode Sleepless in Peckham...! (2003).
David Jason was surprised when he first met John Sullivan after reading the script for the pilot. He was very quiet, even morose, and not at all like the script he'd written, which was bright and full of life. As it turns out, Sullivan wasn't morose, but he was worried, since they hadn't found an actor to play Del. Ray Butt felt they had, with Jason, but Sullivan disagreed, which only increased Jason's determination to win the role. He didn't think he'd get the part, like he missed out on playing Corporal Jones on Dad's Army (1968), but Ray Butt asked him to read again with Nicholas Lyndhurst and Lennard Pearce, who were cast already. He remembered the first read-through as "when the three of us began to put our voices to the lines, the magic was in the room. All the component parts just fitted. The whole thing was sounding like it had been written for us. When we reached the end of our read, silence fell on the room." Then Jason was hired.
Ronnie Hazlehurst's original instrumental theme tune for the series appears in the montage of Del trying to sell the briefcases in Peckham's street markets.
Very little on-camera improvisation occurred during the 22 year run of the show. However in this episode, Grandad's chess computer randomly saying "Illegal Move" without even being in use at the time was unscripted and unexpected. David Jason and Lennard Pearce's puzzled reactions in the scene were genuine but they still played the scene out as per the script. The incident drew a surprise laugh from the studio audience. Once the scene was filmed there was a brief conversation between the actors and the director before it was decided not to retake the scene but to leave it in.
Tessa Peake-Jones, who later became a regular in the show as Del's girlfriend and future wife, Raquel, makes a brief appearance in this episode. She plays the woman that Del says hello to as he walks into the Nag's Head.