Ricky Hatton's love for Manchester City is well documented. So is the rounded light-welterweight's extra-curricular interest in darts. (He plays regularly at his local pub and numbers among his personal friends Phil “The Power” Taylor.) What tends to come up less frequently is the Hitman's intense passion for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, Only Fools and Horses.

In this area, Hatton's proficiency extends to detailed recall of characters and plotlines and, beyond that, to ownership of a bottle of Peckham Spring Water (the dubiously sourced refreshment featured in the 1992 episode Mother Nature's Son) and, moreover, a yellow, three-wheeled Reliant Regal Supervan driven frequently in the series. It's a brave man who stands between the Hitman and the wall-mounted plasma when Fools is on is what we're saying.

Asked once to devise the guests at his ideal dinner party, Hatton chose Roberto “Hands of Stone” Durán, the Panamanian boxing legend, Colin Bell, the former Manchester City hero and fabled “King of the Kippax”, Demi Moore, the expensively hewn American film actress, and “Del Boy” Trotter. What a swell party that would be - as long as you could stop Moore monopolising Bell with questions about life under Joe Mercer, obviously.

“Sad,” Hatton called his interest in Fools - although we put that down to the default, defensive attitude of people in our times with regard to anything that looks suspiciously like an area of expertise. Heaven forbid, in 2008, that anyone should know a lot about something and not be embarrassed about it. Knowledge? How sad is that? E.J. Hobsbawm? Saddo. Richard Dawkins? King of the Saddos.

Apparently, Hatton's Reliant cost him £20,000. You won't be the first to point out that he could have got a new one for that. In fact, this former prop came with no MOT. Hence, Hatton sought help from Fifth Gear, the driving programme on Five, in which various interchangeable blokes with beards sit around for an hour and wish they were on Top Gear, which is more successful.

A lack of interior door handles seemed to be merely one of several hundred mechanical failings standing between the Reliant and a legal place on the road. One of Fifth Gear's bearded people took the car to a Reliant reconditioning expert. Why didn't Hatton think of that? Too busy boxing, I guess. Anyway, fully three months later, the car emerged roadworthy - but not repainted, mercifully, which would have been an act of archaeological vandalism akin to spray-painting the Terracotta Army to make it look fresher.

It was a sensitive job all round, in fact. The Reliant still appeared historically accurate (ie, like it would explode at some point in the next 300 feet of travel), yet it was mechanically sound. Well, almost. It retained a troublesome gearbox. On his first drive, Hatton sat for a long time in a yellow box, trying to select first.

You learn something about a person's character at such moments, and what a pleasure it was to observe from the Hitman, during this ordeal, the consummate calm and lack of fluster that can be schooled only in the ring. If you had been able to monitor his blood pressure throughout all this, I don't suppose the needle would have budged. Very impressive.

I don't think we were meant to infer that, from now, Hatton will be using the Reliant to get about the place as much as he uses his BMW X5, a modern 4x4 that has, among many other advantages over the flagship of Trotters Independent Trading Co, four wheels. But the road is no place for this historic item, really. It's a museum piece. It belongs in a boxer's sitting-room.

Evidence of a hinterland, one eventually concluded, is why Hatton reliably strikes us as such a grounded individual and why, by contrast, Mike Tyson went so wildly off the rails. All that buying of pet lions, reading of philosophy and getting of tattoos of Chairman Mao that Tyson went in for was all well and good, but he needed a proper interest.

Next week, Lennox Lewis discusses his passion for Are You Being Served? and shows us around the full-sized, authentically detailed floor of Grace Brothers that he has had built in his Florida home. Or maybe not.

Over two nights of Carling Cup action, Swansea City v Cardiff City on Sky Sports 2 was like a return to some nearly forgotten golden age. Two full-strength teams! A full house! Local acrimony on a rolling boil! Five hundred policemen on duty in and around the stadium!

As Alan Parry, the commentator, said, in a line that he may have pre-prepared: “When the Swans take on the Bluebirds, you can guarantee feathers will fly.” I'm no ornithologist, but, were it ever to take place in nature, I would routinely fancy the swan to bury the bluebird in that particular encounter. And so it proved, 1-0. Terrifying.

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