We tend to think of seventies’ comedy as having failed the test of time and something perhaps best forgotten, due to our modern-day sensitivities regarding outdated cultural norms such as those around gender roles and race relations. Our minds conjure up such stark examples as Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, and cringe at their naivety, whilst the sight of white actors “blacking up” in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum would cause notable discomfort these days. But to disregard all seventies sitcoms on such a premise is to throw baby out with the bathwater, because in amongst the comedy TV shows from that decade are some absolute gems, and the best of them in my view was Rising Damp.
Rising Damp was written by Eric Chappell on the back of his 1973 stage play The Banana Box and ran between 1974 and 1978, starring Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington. Rossiter plays Rigsby, the miserly landlord of a run-down Victorian townhouse who rents out his shabby bedsits to a variety of tenants: Beckinsale plays Alan, a long-haired and good-natured medical student; Frances de la Tour plays Ruth (Miss Jones), the whimsical spinster with whom Rigsby is in love; and Warrington plays the recent arrival Philip Smith, also a student and apparently the son of an African chief. As a black man, Philip initially brings out the knee-jerk suspicions of Rigsby; however, the landlord quickly accepts his new tenant and henceforth regards him with a wary respect borne of Philip’s intelligence and sophisticated manners (something not lost on Miss Jones either).
The characters were fully-formed from day one due to the fact that three of the principal actors had already honed their characters in the stage play (only Beckinsale was new to the role). The dialogue is brilliantly conceived and delivered by the actors with aplomb: their timing is superb, and in Rigsby, of course, we have one of the greatest comedy characters of all time. Watch him here as Alan and Philip tease him about women and the “erogenous zones”, that newly popularised term made possible by the rise of the “permissive society”. Priceless.
