The Museum of Broadcast Communications - Encyclopedia of Television - Rising Damp
RISING DAMP
British Situation   Comedy
Rising   Damp, the classic Yorkshire Television situation comedy series   set in a run-down northern boarding house, was originally screened   on ITV between 1974 and 1978 and has continued to be revived on   British television at regular intervals ever since, always attracting   large audiences (many of whom were no doubt lodgers at one time   or another in similarly seedy houses). Created by writer Ernie Chappell,   the series depicted the comic misadventures and machinations of   Rupert Rigsby, the embittered down-at-heel landlord who constantly   spied on the usually very innocent private lives of an assortment   of long-suffering tenants.
The   success of Rising Damp depended largely upon the considerable   comic talent of its star, Leonard Rossiter, who played the snooping   and sneering Rigsby. Rossiter had first demonstrated his impeccable   coming timing in the same role (though under the name Rooksby) in   the one-off stage play Banana Box, from which the television   series was derived. Rossiter rapidly stamped his mark upon the money-grubbing,   lecherous, manneristic landlord, making him at once repulsive, vulnerable,   paranoid, irrepressible, ignorant, cunning, and above all hilarious.   Sharing his inmost fears and suspicions with his cat Vienna, he   skulked about the ill-kempt house, bursting in on tenants when he   thought (almost always mistakenly) that he would catch them in flagrante and impotently plotting how to seduce university administrator   Miss Jones, the frustrated spinster who was the reluctant object   of his desire.
Rigsby's   appalling disrespect for the privacy of his lodgers and his irrepressible   inquisitiveness was the moving force behind the storylines, bringing   together the various supporting characters who otherwise mostly   cut lonely and inadequate, even tragic, figures. The supporting   cast was in fact very strong, with Miss Jones played in highly individualistic   style by the respected stage actress Frances de la Tour, the confused,   naive medical student Alan played by an ingenuous but appealing   Richard Beckinsale, and Philip, the proud but smug son of an African   tribal chief, played by Don Warrington. Only Beckinsale had not   appeared in the original stage play. Other lodgers later in the   series were Brenda (Gay Rose) and Spooner (Derek Newark).
The frustrations and petty humiliations constantly suffered by the   various characters, coupled with their dingy surroundings, could   easily have made the series a melancholy affair, but the deft humour   of the scripts married to the inventiveness and expertise of the   performers kept the tone light, if somewhat hysterical at times,   and enabled the writers to explore Rigsby's various prejudices (concerning   sex, race, students, and anything unfamiliar) without causing offence.   In this respect, the series was reminiscent of the techniques employed   in Steptoe and Son and by Johnny Speight and Warren Mitchell in   the "Alf Garnett" series, though here there was less emphasis on   invective and more on deliberately farcical comedy. One occasion   on which the series did come unstuck was when fun was had at the   expense of an apparently fictional election candidate named Pendry,   who was described as crooked and homosexual--unfortunately there   was a real Labour member of parliament of the same name and Yorkshire   Television was obliged to pay substantial damages for defamation   as a result.
The   success of the television series led to a film version in 1980,   but this met with mixed response, lacking the conciseness and sharpness   of the television series and also lacking the presence of Beckinsale,   who had tragically died of a heart attack at the age of 31 the previous   year. Rossiter himself went on to star in the equally popular series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin before his own premature   death from heart failure in 1984.
-David   Pickering