Only Fools and Horses: How Coca-Cola accidentally recreated Del Boy’s ‘Peckham Spring’ fiasco
Over Only Fools and Horses’ nine seasons and 22 years on British TV, Del Boy came up with countless half-baked schemes to get rich quick, many of them ending somewhat poorly for him.
One of these is best known by the centrepiece of the scheme ‘Peckham spring water’. This originates from an episode in season seven called ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, in which Del tricks an old school mate of Rodney’s into investing in his Peckham spring water, which he claims comes from a spring on Grandad’s old allotment.
In reality the bottled water that Del is selling is just from the taps at home where he sets up a production line, and the big kicker at the end of the episode is that it’s also contaminated after Del dumped some hazardous waste in the local reservoir earlier in the episode.
The hour long episode is a classic and was the 1992 Christmas Day special, back when there was still only four TV channels, meaning a massive 20.1 million people – or about a third of the population of the time – tuned in.
This is why when Coca-Cola ran into a spot of bother marketing their new Dasani bottled water brand in the UK, Del Boy and Only Fools references were splashed across every headline.
To understand the controversy first you need to understand the difference between what we in the UK see as bottled water and what passes as bottled water in the US.
In the US it tends to be tap water that has been purified or filtered but over here we’d see that as a rip off and expect our bottled water to be proper spring water from a natural source.
The trouble started when one journalist at The Grocer magazine noticed that the Dasani brand, new to the UK in 2004, rather than being spring water was just treated tap water from the Sidcup area in South-East London where the company’s production plant was.
Hilariously this is only nine miles from Peckham where Del Boy bottles his own tap water at his council flat.
The media picked up on this finding and the inevitable Only Fools and Horses jokes piled up with the comparisons to the classic Christmas episode, including ‘Sidcup spring’ and more.
This got even worse when in March of 2004 the Dasani water was caught in its own contamination scandal just as Del Boy’s water was, when excessive levels of the chemical bromide in the bottled filtered tap water lead to a total recall of the product and Coca-Cola withdrawing Dasani water entirely from the UK market.
A planned expansion to continental Europe was also cancelled and Dasani has never been sold in the UK since.
To this day the Dasani fiasco is looked back on as one of the most monumental PR disasters in modern memory – perhaps they could’ve learned a thing or two from watching Only Fools?
