They have been blowing out candles for Fawlty Towers, and it is meet and right so to do. Fifty years old this month, John Cleese’s portrait of a Torquay hotelier at war with the world remains a masterpiece of British comedy. But there’s another Seventies romp we should not ignore, which was just as funny, and featured a central performance every bit as convincing. Leonard Rossiter may be better known as Reggie Perrin in David Nobbs’s series about a dreamer who longs to escape suburbia, but his greatest role was Rigsby, the seedy landlord, in Rising Damp.
Eric Chappell adapted the show, which ran for four years from 1974, from his stage play, The Banana Box. It wasn’t a hit, spending a month in the West End in the summer of 1973, but Yorkshire Television thought there was something there worth mining, and they struck oil.
If anything it seems funnier now, so heavily have we been lent upon by the apostles of look-at-me liberalism. Every time the shows go out now, there is a clucking warning about ‘the standards, language and attitudes of the time’. Of all time, that really means, because even prudes laugh at dirty jokes about sex and race when they think nobody is looking.
In the play, Rossiter was Rooksby, a less suggestive name than Rigsby, which carries the sour odour of rising damp. Set in a terraced house in an unnamed city, thought to be Leeds, the cast of lodgers made a team. Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington played Alan and Philip, students at the university where Frances de la Tour was a secretary.
In time-honoured fashion there is a web of lust and longing. Rigsby admires Miss Jones, who is in love with Philip, while Alan, endearing and thoroughly wet between the ears, casts a mournful eye over anybody in a skirt. Philip’s blackness – he humours Rigsby by pretending to be an African chief – supplies another layer. It’s not Uncle Vanya, but Chappell wasn’t reaching for the stars.
By then Rossiter was a match-fit character actor. His film appearances in A Kind of Loving, This Sporting Life and Billy Liar led to roles in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon, and he was also an accomplished stage performer. Warrington and de la Tour had been in The Banana Box, and Beckinsale was a punt that paid off. While rehearsing Rising Damp he was cast alongside Ronnie Barker in Porridge.
Rigsby is not, as is commonly supposed, a racist. He’s small-minded, certainly, suspicious of those shaped from different clay. He’s a fantasist, who tells his lodgers about the war wounds he picked up on the beaches of Dunkirk and Anzio. He’s a fibber, a coward, and a boastful know-all, for whom the erogenous zones ‘are near the equator’. But a true racist wouldn’t have a black man in the house.
And there’s the rub, for Philip is the real pivot. Everybody laughs at Rigsby, because he is preposterous. When Alan tells him ‘I went to see Doctor Zhivago’, Rigsby replies ‘How is he?’ It’s a straightforward joke, and it works partly because we want it to work. That’s what Rigsby is there for.
We don’t laugh at Philip. We laugh with him. Whereas the tender-hearted Alan and the vulnerable Miss Jones elicit sympathy, Philip commands our respect. He is the only mature character in the show, whose rounded personality is a gift the others envy. He is the still point of their turning world; the pole of stability in an unstable house.
We don’t laugh at Philip. We laugh with him
Warington has said that the ‘show’s intentions were good’. In 2022, he told the Telegraph, ‘A lot of black people still say to me that their parents would call them down from their bedrooms whenever it was on, because of the way it showed a black man on TV who was not being put down or abused’. By making Philip the sensible one, the person the others go to for advice, Chappell was turning the tables and, in an understated way, mocking racial bigotry. He deserves more credit than he has received.
To be fair there’s a bit too much of the African chief stuff. But there are compensations, usually when Rigsby is in pursuit of Miss Jones. The best scene? Possibly when the hapless landlord, hypnotised by a lodger with strange powers, strips down to his underclothes only for Miss Jones, entering the room right on cue, to declare: ‘Mr Rigsby, has it come to this?’
There are excellent turns by an ever-changing cast of lodgers. Peter Bowles is a camp actor, Henry McGee a posh conman, Derek Newark a grumpy wrestler. It’s pretty broad, but then so was Fawlty Towers. There were never many Spanish waiters in Torquay.
Rossiter died with his boots on, in October 1984, starring in Joe Orton’s Loot. He was 57. Beckinsale died five years earlier, at 31, a talent snuffed out in his prime. De la Tour has been a regular presence on stage, notably as Dot, the female teacher in the all-male world of The History Boys. Don Warrington has lately won fame on our screens in Death in Paradise. Together, for four hilarious years, they were comic champions. Light a candle for Rising Damp.
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