When describing the funeral scene, David Jason remarked "What a bleak day that was. The weather matched our moods and it fed into the scene: the drama of the dark glasses at the graveside. It was all very hard to do, with Lennard's memory so fresh. I was very emotional. It was an episode written by John (Sullivan) out of respect for Lennard. So I wanted to get it right for Lennard, and at the same time, I wanted to get it right for John. He just wouldn't let television dismiss Lennard's passing, in the way that television might have done, if television had been left to its own frequently fickle devices. It was a wonderful thing - and something that nobody had done in situation comedy."
John Sullivan had the idea of writing a funeral episode that dealt with Grandad's death. David Jason privately felt that couldn't work in a sitcom, but Sullivan went away to write the script. This got Sullivan thinking about creating a long-lost relative who attends Grandad's funeral; Jason was still unconvinced but went along with it. Jason was nervous when he first read the script, because Sullivan had to get it right; the future of Only Fools and Horses (1981) depended on it. And Jason still didn't see how Sullivan could pull it off, but he needn't have worried. Sullivan nailed the funeral scene in the script with his adeptness at moving from comedy to drama to pathos. It was dark and sad but shot through with bright shafts of humor, like "Always in our Foughts" or dropping the vicar's hat into Grandad's grave, which made Jason collapse when he read it because it was so Trotters.
While in the Nag's Head, Rodney tells Del that uncle Albert went to the seaman's mission but it had been replaced by a marina. Del replies "can't he sleep in the back of that?" This is a reference to a popular car of the time, a Morris Marina. The car was built by British Leyland who sold around 800,000 of them in Britain alone.
This episode, along with "Happy Returns, was added in at the last minute, due to Lennard Pearce's illness and subsequent death. This left the producers with eight episodes instead of the standard six episodes in Series 4. "From Prussia With Love" was moved to Series 5 leaving seven episodes in Series 4.
When uncle Albert is explaining that this isn't the first time that he has been abandoned by relatives, Del boy says "I feel like a turkey whose just seen Bernard Mathews grinning at him". This is a reference to Bernard Mathews, a Norfolk turkey farmer who founded Bernard Mathews Ltd a famous British turkey breeder and producer of turkey meat products. One of the reasons he was so well known was that he used to do his own tv commercials. When describing his turkey roast, he would smile at the camera and say "bootyful'.