Profile

Character Name: Roy Slater
Series: Only Fools And Horses
Age: About fifty one.
From When?: About the time where the Trotters make their millions.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate. From a young boy, Roy Slater was a nark, a grass and a suck up. He focused all his attention on the most popular boy at the school, Del Boy and resented strongly his ability to always land on his feet more or less. He also didn’t limit his resentment and jealous feelings to Del Boy on his own, everyone at that school grew to despise him and so, in fact, did his parents. He’s selfish and snide and loves to watch others suffer but especially when it’s because he has power over them. Some people become police officers to help their community become better places, he became one so he could arrest or generally make his ‘friends’ lives miserable.

While he’s not a physically abusive husband, he doesn’t treat his wife, Rachael, very well, stamping on her dreams and destroying her self-confidence to the point that she’s very uncertain of herself. She eventually leaves him so she can pursue her dream, though.

He schemes against his own force so he can procure diamonds to give him a cushy retirement.

Abilities/Powers:The ability to make you feel sorry for him, despite the fact that you know that he’s scum, just before he drops a hammer of mammoth proportions on your head.

He has a good knowledge of police procedure. Otherwise, he’s your basic, average human.

Personality: Slater is just plain mean and selfish. He has a huge issue surrounding his need to be liked and just being so snide, superior or toadying about it that it makes him no real friends. Part of that is also the fact that he’s perfectly willing to betray someone, not just because they might become inconvenient later, but out of spite and sadistic glee.

Arriving at the barge would be a complete shell shock for him. The idea that he’d have to die to be here and the fact that they’re not on Earth, let alone travelling through space, is so completely out of left field that he’d have difficulty contemplating it.

But if there is anything that Slater knows how to do, it’s adapt to life sucking. He’ll pick himself up, be very bitter about it, but he’ll manage. If anything the barge is much more comfortable and easy going than his last time in prison and the wardens wouldn’t be out to get him, let alone the inmates.

As regards to floods, once he’s gotten past the initial shock, he’ll resent the hell out of them, as another setback that he has to deal with, though the fact that everyone else is going to go through them as well, will serve to mitigate that feeling. He’ll troll whoever is worse off than he is to make himself feel better.

Slater rarely goes into a situation unprepared. So his first instinct would be to find all the information he can gather on anybody, hopefully that will hurt them later on. If anything that can be used against that person is revealed, he’ll make friends with that person and, when the time is right, use that information to get what he wants, regardless of the damage done to his ‘friend’. In fact, if it’s particularly damaging, he’s likely to get a big thrill out of it. Of course, on the barge, this is likely to get him killed.

He will likely resent his warden, especially given that they’ll know about him, especially his more embarrassing moments and will want to make their lives a misery and find out as much as he can about them and use it against them.

He’d be willing to get a job just about anywhere though, to keep himself business, though the supervising warden will have to put up with a lot of brown-nosing.

Slater's meanness extends to those who care about him. He has little faith in himself, so that the idea someone might have dreams, hopes beyond that of a safe career is utterly foreign to him and as such, he chooses to destroy that dream rather than simply allow it to continue or be fought for. Not necessarily a cruelty, but he does this by undermining the other person's faith in themselves. 'They're not good enough', rather than 'It's too hard and unstable'. For example, his wife, then Rachel, always wanted to be an actress. But instead of reassuring her, or simply not encouraging her, he actively works to break her down, to the point where, years later, she's completely rattled by seeing him again.

This also comes out in his work. Apart from his superiors who are ego-driven enough to fall for his toadying, he is universally disdained of by both sides of the law for his treatment of his grasses, who are threatened by exposure if they don't cooperate, and his penchant for framing people for crimes, by nailing them on one and linking that to other, likely completely unrelated, crimes, cutting down on unsolved crimes and making the station look good in one fell swoop. He also treats those working with him with disdain, though he does seem to believe Hoskins is capable enough to stay with him when he gets promoted (earning Hoskins a promotion in the process) though that may be because he doesn't feel he's smart enough to foil him. This impression that he can't be trusted is so pervasive that when he is sent to prison, not even 'the fairies' would touch him and the wardens mutter 'nark' when he goes by. He is relieved by the former as he is homophobic, like a lot of the people around him. This means that while he'll likely keep his distance from them, he'll make an extra effort to be mean if they try to converse with him.

While he does put a lot of preparation into what he does, he falls victim to assuming that nothing will go wrong and is often tripped up by this own hubris. He assumed that Del wasn't smart enough to pull the wool over his eyes, or Hoskins wasn't smart enough to realise that the reason they failed to uncover the diamonds was because they went into Slater's pocket. He believes himself to be the smartest guy in the room, so when he's outsmarted, it's always a surprise.

He's only ever 'nice' when he has plan in mind and needs to get close, take you off your guard, in order to have maximum impact. He is very good at this, even fooling Del Boy, who knows full well what Slater's capable of.

To him, inciting people's compassion is the build up to a punchline, a tool nothing more. He despises being truly vulnerable or caught out, so that while what he tells his 'victim' is true, his response is always verbally aggressive, if he's caught by the information unawares. He gets emotional on his own terms, not someone else's.

Path to Redemption: Slater has basically been betrayed by and betrayed everyone in his entire life. Even his parents treated him with complete disdain and despise him. What Slater needs is a warden who will go beyond the simple requirements of the job. He needs to be shown someone is in his corner no matter what he does.

They also need to be smarter than he is and be prepared for anything he might try and neither be taken in by his martyrdom nor impressed by his attempts to blackmail.

Giving him a feeling of self-worth should be a priority, he’s smug, but he strikes out because he doesn’t quite believe he’s worth it. So he brings people down before they can do it to him.

A woman might work better than a man, while he’s failed at maintaining relationships with both sexes, he doesn’t hold it against women as much as men, when Del mentioned that he’d seen his mother, he asked if she asked after him, signifying that he’d be happy to find that she did.

History: Roy Slater was born to Harry and Ruby Slater, May fifteenth, 1945 in Peckham, London. He also had a sister, similar in age. When he got to school age, he went to the local school, where he met the most important person in his life, one Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter.

Del was everything Slater wasn’t. Charming, fun-loving and popular, everybody liked the cheeky boy while no one liked him. Slater tried to get in with his group, but he was kept ostracised and was bullied frequently.

Two examples of this is when ‘Fatsy Walker’ sat on his face so Trigger could pour itching powder down his belly button. They were all for having his braces off were it not for Del’s intervention (an act he ‘thanked’ him for by snitching on him for kissing a girl behind the bicycle sheds, though, admittedly, that girl was Slater’s sister). Another was when the boys allowed them to play pirates with them, but adamantly refused to let him play Bluebeard, making him walk the plank into an actual duck pond instead, only relenting the one time when Bluebeard was the one to walk the plank.

It was due to this bullying that led him to join the police force. This seemed the ultimate way to get the ultimate one over on all his ‘friends’ who had become criminals, in some fashion, so his position as police officer allowed him the power to control them and hopefully arrest them.

He was so enamoured of this power that he even arrested his own father for having a broken rear light. Something that could be a show of neutrality, perhaps, were it not for the fact that he was on a bike, that had been borrowed from a neighbour, for a single trip to the shops so he can go to the fish shop. Clearly, Slater had an enmity towards his father back then and this incident caused his father to disown him completely. His mother also stopped speaking with him, likely due to this incident, though Slater feels this more keenly and doesn’t bare his mother ill will.

Slater’s career went apace, with sweet talking his superiors and his cutthroat attitude (especially with regard to his informants) helping him step on others on the way up the ladder. He was transferred away from his old stomping grounds until he reached the rank of detective inspector and returned, determined to make Del Boy’s life miserable.

He convinced Rodney, who hadn’t remembered him, that he was an old school friend, despite Boycie’s and Trigger’s mutual fear and Trigger’s less then subtle (though apparently erring on that side for Rodney) hints warning him off.

Del took no time in correcting Rodney’s misapprehension, but by then, he’d bamboozled Granddad into showing him the hooky microwave: sufficient reason to bring them in for questioning.

During interrogation, Slater pulled out all the stops, threatening to plant drugs on Rodney, a violation of the conditions of his suspended sentence, and send Del into prison, implying that Granddad might suffer trouble, left alone in Mandela House.

Del outwitted him, promising that he’d reveal to him who stole the microwave but only if he got to sign an immunity from prosecution agreement. Slater was briefly disappointed that he couldn’t send him away, but perked up when he realised that he’d join the ranks of his ‘grasses’, so agreed readily.

Del signed the agreement, before revealing he was the one who stole it and waved the immunity in his face.

Though the exact time line on this is unclear, it is likely that Slater was married to Rachel Turner by this time. Rachel did not enjoy this marriage and he consistently destroyed her self-confidence, scoffing at her dream that she might become an actress. She later ran away from him.

He encountered Del again, wrapping both Del and Boycie into a scheme to smuggle diamonds from Amsterdam. He’d been doing it for years, planning his retirement. And this time, his retirement was being forced because he’d managed to get a confession from someone for being a peeping tom, the fly in the ointment being the fact that the boy was blind.

His police partner Terry Hoskins was responsible for bringing him in this time and Slater was sent to prison.

He got out a few years later and arranged (anonymously, of course) to have a ‘Class of ‘69’ Reunion, which included those friends, Trigger, Boycie, Denzil and Del, from school. When he revealed himself they reacted with alarmed, then remembering that he was no longer a policeman, disdain, followed by getting really drunk when he offered to buy them all drinks, which eventually brought them back to Del’s flat.

By the time they went home, they were all cordial with each other and Slater fell asleep on the couch. Del’s pregnant ‘significant other ’, Raquel, returned home and found him there, and freaked out. Turns out that Slater was none other than the husband that she feared would find her, which shocked Del.

Slater revealed that he knew this all along and knowing that Del’s relationship would be mocked because he was with Slater’s ‘knock-off’ wife and he’d lose his reputation and, as a result, his income.

Del stood by her and eventually managed to blackmail Slater into leaving and forcing him to sign the divorce papers or risk losing all the diamonds that he managed to store away, failing to reveal their hiding place to the police.

Slater slunk off, though it is likely he continued to blackmail and live off the proceeds of his diamonds, until he found out that Del Boy finally became a millionaire, he suffered an attack and died.