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.