"Like trying to do geometry with blancmange": My Liberator article on Blue Labour

Move over Lord Bonkers: I have an article in the new Liberator (issue 344). You can download the whole issue for free from the magazine's website.

Nor for the first time, I am led to reflect on how hoary my cultural touchstones are growing. The first series of Reggie Perrin was originally screened 50 years ago - it's as though there had been a Liberator contributor when I first joined the editorial collective whose articles relied upon his readers having knowledge of comedy from the early Thirties.

But don't blame me: I've been waiting for a new generation of young Radicals to sweep us to one side since at least 1990, but they have never appeared.

A Better Yesterday

I’ve finally worked out who it is that Blue Labour reminds me of: it’s Doc Morrisey from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. In the classic sitcom written by David Nobbs, Perrin, deep in the throes of a midlife crisis, seeks help from Sunshine Desserts’ company doctor. They have the following conversation.

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can't finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can't stop thinking about sex, can't start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during Play For Today?

Reginald Perrin: That's extraordinary, Doc! That's exactly how I've been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is? Take two aspirins.

Blue Labour, though some MPs claim to owe allegiance to this tendency, is largely Maurice Glasman, and Maurice Glasman is entirely Blue Labour. And the only coherent thread running through the pronouncements of Maurice Glasman (Lord Glasman – he was made a peer by Ed Miliband in 2010) is an ill-focused, Perrinesque nostalgia for the past of his country and party.

Even that is being kind to him when you consider the misshapen catch that comes up when you trawl for his recent media appearances. Among the views he has expressed are that “in order to be truly radical, Labour must recognise its debt to Jesus Christ”; that the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target is a fantasy that should be abandoned in favour of new fossil fuel extraction while the national grid is taken over by the Ministry of Defence; and that Shabana Mahmood is like Elizabeth I – “She’s devoted to her job. She’s unique.” If Glasman were a social media account, you would have muted it long ago.

Visit the Blue Labour website in search of more intellectual substance and you will be disappointed. The featured post there is What Is to Be Done, which dates from October 2025 and is written in a semi-apocalyptic style: “The hour is late.” Nevertheless, there is something in its analysis that Keir Starmer won a “loveless landslide” and came to power without much of a legislative programme or analysis of the country’s problems behind him.

The trouble with What Is to Be Done is that it’s full of grand statements like “We should bring public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel, back into public ownership,” but short of any practical proposals for how such ideas can be put into action. And when it does get close to making such proposals, what we get is an agenda that will be familiar to anyone with a very online Conservative MP: “drastically” reduce immigration, curb the powers of the courts, tell the police to concentrate on repeat offenders. Explore the Blue Labour website and you will find the same high ambitions and shortage of detail in other documents, even its Plan for National Reconstruction. 

All of which makes it a surprise to find Compass publishing a document billed as making “the case for a new Soft Left/Blue Labour politics”. It’s Soft Skills, Hard Labour by Frances Foley, who was until recently the group’s deputy director. A surprise because, though it is affiliated to the Labour Party, Compass’s emphasis on cross-party working and support for proportional representation has meant that Liberals tend to feel quite warm towards it. So sensible is it that it’s chair Neal Lawson has been threatened with expulsion from the Labour Party.

Enter Compass

Lawson, incidentally, shares Glasman’s sense that Keir Starmer lacks direction. In a recent Guardian piece, he suggested that Starmer was promoted as Labour leader by people who decided he was the man to drive Corbynism out of the party. They assumed there was no chance of the Conservatives being defeated in 2024, so didn’t worry about his shortcomings as a future prime minister. He would be gone before Labour got in again. Yet so rapid was the Conservative collapse that Starmer found himself in Number 10. It’s a neat mirror image of the Labour left-winger who said in 2015: “If we’d thought we had a chance of winning the leadership then Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t have been our candidate.”

There is no such clarity to be found in Soft Skills, Hard Labour. Foley’s method is to look at different tendencies within Soft Labour and Blue Labour and then map how they complement each other or conflict across the divide. So we have chapters titled “Postliberal Democrats’ challenge to the Rules-based Majoritarians” and “Democratic Communitarians’ challenge to the Rights-based Liberals”. It’s a brave effort, but her two main concepts are so diffuse to begin with that it’s like trying to do geometry with blancmange.

It may be that Blue Labour has more to it than Glasman’s eccentricities – his other recent contributions to debate include apologising to Nigel Farage live on GB News after Keir Starmer said the Reform leader’s immigration policy was “racist and immoral” and claiming that progressive liberals “don’t want you to enjoy anything, not even sex with your wife!” There is an essay collection edited by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst – Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics – but it was published in the very different world of 2015, where it billed itself as seeking to “move beyond the centrist pragmatism of Blair and Cameron”.

Iconoclasm

Frances Foley is attracted to the appetite she sees in Blue Labour for iconoclasm, which is an attraction I imagine anyone who works in the very on-message world of pro-Labour think-tanks is likely to feel after a while. She may even be demob happy: her brief biography in Soft Skills, Hard Labour reveals she is leaving Compass “to set up a new programme matching young people with jobs in climate, whilst training them in political organising,” which sounds more valuable than what most think-tanks produce.

Whatever the reason, she is right to say:

The word “progressive” strongly implies that change is always for the better, rather than to be questioned or resisted. It also suggests that “progress” is a meaningful – and crucially agreed upon – political concept.

That is why I try to avoid using this concept, though a stronger reason is the argument put forward by Simon Titley, late of this parish: 

"Progressive." What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is "not conservative" or "not reactionary"... negative definitions. The "p" word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean. We need real politics not empty slogans.

Similarly, when Foley writes of what she terms “Rights-based Liberals”:

They tend to assert the primacy of rights as a priori, not as social constructs created by citizens, but as a first order framework that sets the parameters for what is politically viable. In this sense, Rights-based Liberals see rights as trumping pure democratic sovereignty, setting limits on what democratic societies can decide. 

she is right about the attitude of many on the left towards rights: we should never forget they are human inventions and not somehow ordained by nature. 

There is a better, more pragmatic argument for human rights: by inventing them we increase the chances that government will treat us well. A good example of this is the right to petition for a writ of habeus corpus – a right hoary enough, surely, to win the support of even Maurice Glasman. Nor is it clear how the working class will benefit from any abolition of rights: it’s the powerful who benefit in a free-for-all, as we see in news reports from the US every evening.

But then it’s often hard to see how the working class will benefit from any Blue Labour policies. The only mention of education you’re likely to come across in Blue Labour circles is vocational education: you rarely get the sense that they are much interested in the number of working-class university students or entrepreneurs. What they are telling working-class young people is that somewhere there is a lathe with your name on it and I remain unconvinced that is what all of them want.

Nostalgia

It's easy, and it’s largely justifiable, to dismiss Blue Labour as offering nostalgia for a vanished industrial world, but too much comment on social media from people who like to think they are on the left treats the past as something to point at and laugh. Such comment is all about the performative adoption of approved cultural opinions: nowhere will you see it mentioned that the Fifties saw full employment and record levels of trade union membership or that the Seventies saw the greatest income equality Britain has ever enjoyed. 

One thing Blue Labour has got right is that many self-styled “progressives” aren’t much interested in the working class: it’s just that I’m not convinced Blue Labour is much interested in the working class as it exists today either. Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

Treating the past as a reminder that our current economic and social arrangements are not set in stone and things could be and have been different is sensible. But demanding we return to this past, and demanding it without so much as making a gesture towards providing a route map, is ridiculous. I didn’t get where I am today without knowing the difference.

The Joy of Six 1417

"Muscular patriotism of the flag waving variety marries rather well with aggressive nationalism - and we’re seeing quite a bit of that all over the world. Neither impulse allows for complexity instead it demands loyalty of the 'for us or against us' variety." Ritula Shah explains why the aggressive flag flying of recent weeks has bothered her so much.

Carole Cadwalladr investigates the opaque workings of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, its funding from friends of Israel – including billionaire Larry Ellison – and an emerging right-wing media takeover of the global information space.

Timothy Garton Ash talks to Catherine E. De Vries about writing, freedom and the lost art of disagreement.

"If the BBC had kept the Boat Race and paid more for the privilege, the Telegraph’s angle could well have been to talk about a waste of money on an event whose viewing figures have been in decline over the years. The key thing with any story about the BBC in the right-wing press is that the corporation must always be in the wrong." Mic Wright on the way the Boat Race's move to Channel 4 was used to attack the BBC.

In 1873, a choir of formerly enslaved African American students from the newly established Fisk University, Tennessee, embarked on a fundraising tour of the UK during which they sang for both Queen Victoria and Mr Gladstone. The National Archives tells the story of the Jubilee Singers.

Madeleine Brettingham discusses her favourite situation comedy: "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is an early crack in the post-war sitcom’s floral wallpaper. The protagonist, Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, is a restless, self-directed twenty-first century man trying to break out of a claustrophobic twentieth-century show."

What is it that make some names of places or people funny?

 

"He didn't get those in Berlin" just wouldn't be as funny. Partly it's the extra syllable in Heidelberg and partly it's the sound of "Heidel" to English ears.

And Accrington? It's wonderfully specific while being wholly irrelevant. So "My brother lives in Lancashire" wouldn't be as funny either.

Yes. I've been thinking about names and humour. 

In the last Lord Bonkers I had him and the Duke of Rutland falling out over "the ownership of certain Stilton mines outside Cropwell Bishop". Why Cropwell Bishop? Because it was the funniest name available.

You see, there are six commercial Stilton creameries: Long Clawson, Tuxford & Tebbut, Hartington Dairy, Websters, Colston Bassett and Cropwell Bishop. And there's not much comic potential in the first four names.

To me, Colston Bassett is a serious name that's trying to sound funny, and Cropwell Bishop is a funny name that's trying to sound serious. So Cropwell Bishop it was.

Just as a place name can be funny in the right context, so can a surname.

My first job after university was with a chess retailer and magazine publisher. The head of the packing department there was a working class man, without much education but with great intelligence. And he loved Fawlty Towers, and in particular Basil's despair at being unable to make Manuel understand him:

"It's not a proposition from Wittgenstein."

My colleague had no idea who Wittgenstein was, but that didn't matter because the name sounds so much like that of a gnomic Austrian philosopher. If Wittgenstein didn't exist we should have to invent him. 

And to finish, you can change the name of a thing or person to comic or subversive effect.

The owner of the company had written a book he called Easy Guide to Chess, but the packing department had another name for it. If one of them wanted a copy of the book to make up an order, he would call out to his oppo:

"Hardback Mein Kampf."

Rising Damp: Rigsby burning love wood outside Miss Jones's hut

This post was written for Terence Towles Canote's 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon.

“I’ve given Rigsby some love wood. He’s going to burn it outside Ruth’s hut.” 

“Will it work?” 

“I shouldn’t think so. It came off the wardrobe.”

I’ve chosen Charisma because it displays what was unique about Rising Damp. Here is a Seventies situation comedy with something interesting to say about race.

Running to four series and broadcast between 1974 and 1978, Rising Damp dealt with the seedy landlord Rigsby (played by the incomparable Leonard Rossiter) and his tenants. Though other characters came and went, the core cast was only four.

Alongside Rossiter, there was Frances de la Tour as the lovelorn university administrator Miss Jones, Richard Beckinsale as the innocent medical student Alan, and Don Warrington as the black student Philip.

What Rising Damp did that was different is bring out how racism can have envy at its heart. Because Philip is everything Rigsby wants to be: cultured, urbane and successful with women. In particular, while Rigsby ineffectually lusts after Miss Jones, she only has eyes for Philip.

And Philip, with all his talk of being the son of a chief and having ten wives, plays up to every ridiculous belief Rigsby has about Africa, because he has worked out that impresses Rigbsy all the more.

This is in danger of making Rising Damp sound worthier than it was. What it was above all was funny, both in its in-character one-liners and its plotting. It’s one of those shows where you can see what’s going to happen in advance, yet it’s still funny when it does happen.

And the cast was so good that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in those four central roles. By the end of its run, we may have liked Rigsby no more, but we understood him better and wanted his unlikely romance with Miss Jones to have a happy ending.

The Banana Box

Let’s begin with the writer. Eric Chappell was an auditor with the East Midlands Electricity Board in Hinckley with ambitions to be a novelist, yet his manuscripts never interested publishers. Then one day he thought he would try his luck writing a play – they were, after all, shorter – and the result was impressive enough to get him an agent.

He then concentrated on writing 30-minute television plays, until one was accepted and made by Harlech TV. It was a comedy-drama starring Henry McGee, but was broadcast only in Wales.

It was Chappell’s second stage play The Banana Box that both launched his writing career and led to Rising Damp. In fact, the early episodes from its first series, like Charisma, are largely taken from the play.

The play was first given a rehearsed reading at Hampstead Theatre Club in November 1970, and then a full staging at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in May 1971. The Phoenix was the scene of many of my teenage experiences of theatre, and I suspect Chappell being a Leicestershire writer encouraged them to put on the play.

None of the four leads we know from Rising Damp were yet in place, but Rigsby (or Rooksby, as he was called in The Banana Box) was played by a name familiar from television: Wilfrid Brambell from Steptoe and Son.

The play was popular with audiences and departed on a regional tour. By the time it arrived back at the Hampstead Theatre Club in May 1973, three of the four central cast members of Rising Damp – Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour and Don Warrington – were in place. Alan was played, not by Richard Beckinsale, but by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann.

The Banana Box’s short run in the West End wasn’t a huge success, but by then the play had been noticed by Yorkshire Television, who sensed that it would make a good sitcom. So Chappell was commissioned to write a pilot episode, which was screened in a series of six comedy pilots in September 1974.

From this came a commission for a series of six episodes, and this was shown in December 1974 and January 1975. Rising Damp was launched.

The cast

Leonard Rossiter was quite arguably the greatest British actor of his generation. The public got to know him through situation comedies – Rising Damp and then the Fall of Rise of Reginald Perrin – but in the theatre world it was his performance in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui that made his name.

He was also a successful screen actor, and still has a talent for turning up in films where you don’t expect him, from Oliver! to King Rat. He was a particular favourite of Stanley Kubrick, which is why you will find him in both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon.

It’s a measure of his standing that last year the Guardian marked the 40th anniversary of his death with a major feature. That death came in his dressing room during a performance of Joe Orton’s Loot. I am so glad that I saw him in the play a few weeks before.

It has to be admitted that Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult to work with: he was a perfectionist and expected high standards from those around him. When I met the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Orton’s death, he said Rossiter was a wonderful man.

I mentioned his reputation, saying that he would turn up at the first rehearsal of a play word perfect and expect other actors to be too. Murray bristled a little and asked: “What’s wrong with that?” If you were a director, you would see things that way too.

Frances de la Tour was to become a major stage actress and has not always appreciated the fame that Rising Damp brought her. If you are playing Hamlet in a matinee, you don’t appreciate a party of children going “Ooh, Miss Jones!” when you walk on. At least I managed to restrain myself when I saw her play the lead in Shaw's Saint Joan.

She has won a Tony Award and three Olivier Awards – there is a good Observer interview with her by Lyn Gardner.

Leonard Rossiter was 57 when he died: Richard Beckinsale was only 31 when he suffered a fatal heart attack in March 1979. 

Two years before he died, Beckinsale was the subject of This is Your Life, and Rossiter paid him this tribute:

“There are plenty of people who can be quite funny other than Richard, but I just want to say two things about him. One is that he has a unique talent and I use the word very specifically – he has a unique comedy talent. He is the most generous person – not in financial terms – do let me finish – not in financial terms, but he is one of the most generous people in spirit I have ever met and I am delighted to have worked with him.”

You can watch that episode of This is Your Life online, and the episode of the radio programme Great Lives about him is worth a listen too.

Don Warrington was not long out of drama college when he appeared in Rising Damp, and he accepted Leonard Rossiter as a mentor – a relationship that Rossiter rather enjoyed. He has been an actor ever since, his career encompassing an acclaimed Lear and a recurring role as the police commissioner in Death in Paradise.

As to the racial politics of Rising Damp, this is what Warrington told the Telegraph in 2022:

“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.”

Was Philip the son of a chief?

One question remains. In The Banana Box and in the film that was made of Rising Damp, it is revealed that Philip has never been to Africa in his life but comes from Croydon.

This revelation was never made in the television version, so if you want him to be, then Philip can be the son of a chief.

But the odds are that the Croydon story is right, in which case Philip based his view of Africa on much the same sources that Rigsby had. Oh the ironies of empire, race and immigration.

Julie Walters' first screen appearance is on YouTube - and Don Warrington is in it too

A thousand thanks to the Classic British Telly YouTube account - like and subscribe - for posting this television play from 1975

Julie Walters, in her very first screen appearance, works behind the bar in a club, while the star is Don Warrington, already famous from Rising Damp. Their exchange about education looks forward to Walters' role in Educating Rita, and once again I am left mourning the disappearance of the single television play.

As Warrington was born in Trinidad and came to England at the age of six, it was a stretch for him to play a young Jamaican man newly arrived in Handsworth. But then, in Rising Damp. Philip knew no more of Africa than Rigsby did.

Club Havana was shot by the BBC at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham and screened as part of its series Second City Firsts. It was written by Barry Reckord, a pioneering Jamaican playwright whose work was widely produced in London.

I've heard of him because on of this blog's heroes, David Hemmings, appeared in his play Skyvers at the Royal Court in the early Sixties.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Leonard Rossiter and at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester

There's no end in sight to the Guardian's commemoration of Leonard Rossiter's career. A 1969 interview with him by Terry Coleman from 1969 has appeared on the newspaper's website.

It was published after Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the play that made Rossiter's reputation arrived in the West End:

In a way he achieves some of his Hitler effects by taking his own nervous tenseness and exaggerating it into farce. The tense posturings of Hitler derive perhaps from the angular way Mr Rossiter holds his own arms, from the stiff clasping of his own hands. Hitler spends the evening on stage in a seething fuss which is mostly Hitler but part Rossiter.

And, says Coleman, the play went on at the Saville Theatre "where it succeeded a long run of Danny La Rue’s female impersonations." That must have been Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty, which I went to see as an eight-year-old.

I saw The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in the spring of 1979. A review in The Stage (19 April 1979) reveals that the Phoenix was threatened with closure and there were fears it might be the last production put on there:

Nigel Bennett, grim-faced throughout, improves with success, as Ui. The gestures, the passionate outbursts, the deep gloom, and the unpredictability of the paranoid dic tator are evident. He misses the chance to ridicule the shabby gangster's early bids for power. ...

The entire open stage war trans formed into a vegetable market by designers. Peter Ling and Patsy Pearce. Slides succinctly outlining the Nazi rise to power intelligently anticipated that the younger generation could be unaware of its odious intricacies. But the extremes of menace and humour were not exploited sufficiently. 

Reviews in The Stage often turn out to have been surprisingly sniffy, but I still remember this production 45 years on.

Morecambe and Wise and Leonard Rossiter

Following on from my post earlier today about Leonard Rossiter, here he is on the 1978 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show.

Stage presence is a strange thing. With Eric and Ernie, it was always Eric you watched. But here, right from the start, you can't take your eyes off Rossiter.

"In a very real sense Leonard Rossiter is with us here today"

Embed from Getty Images

There's something about appearing in a successful situation comedy that makes an actor immortal. Leonard Rossiter is still a living presence to those who remember The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin or Rising Damp, yet it's now 40 years since he died.

But he was far more than a sitcom actor, as the Guardian's superb survey of his career makes clear. He was a peerless stage actor and, because the best directors recognised his worth, he has a habit of turning up in films where you don't expect to see him.

I saw Rossiter in his final stage role as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's Loot, though I've forgotten how long before his death this was.

Rossiter had a reputation for being difficult, but I suspect that, as the Guardian article suggests, this was because he was a perfectionist about his own performance and expected no less from those around him.

When I talked to the late Braham Murray at a Leicester event to mark the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death, he said Rossiter had been a wonderful man. (Murray directed a Manchester production of Loot that created new interest in the play after it had bombed on its first appearance in the West End.)

I mentioned Rossiter's difficult reputation, saying something like: "He turned up for the first rehearsal word perfect and expected everyone else to be too." Murray, ever the director, bristled and asked: "What's wrong with that?"

Oh, and my title here is based on something the vicar said from the pulpit when Reggie Perrin was obliged to attend his own memorial service.

The Joy of Six 1265

"The Labour government appears to think that improving the delivery of public services will be sufficient to resolve the embittered alienation of so many voters from British politics. Do we dare as liberals to argue that democracy requires a much more active engagement with our citizens, at national and at local levels?" William Wallace says the Liberal Democrats should be setting the agenda, not following it.

Christian Wolmar claims he has the ideal road plan for Britain: take the 16 major highway schemes worth £15bn and bin them.

"White privately-educated British male cricketers were 34 times more likely to play professionally than state-educated British South Asians." Taha Hashim on the work of the South Asian Cricket Academy.

Red Flag Walks looks back to the feminist protest against the 1970 Miss World contest: "Sarah Wilson was chosen to start the protest. 'When Bob Hope was going on and on with terrible, grotesque stuff, I got up and swung my football rattle. It seemed ages before anybody responded – people were lighting their cigarettes to ignite the smoke bombs – but then I saw stuff beginning to cascade down.'"

"He was fiercely loyal to the series. Although he consumed my words at an alarming rate, he had an armoury of looks, leers, shrugs and incredulous expressions that earned me laughs I never had to write. Len was the driving force behind Rising Damp." The late Eric Chappell, creator of the series, tells the story of Leonard Rossiter and Rising Damp, the show he created and wrote 50 years ago.

A London Inheritance goes in search of the power station on what is now St Pancras Way: "The first phase of the power station faced the Regents Canal and the large area of railway coal depots, and this was one of the reasons why the power station was located here – the easy access to supplies of coal, whether delivered to the power station via train to the depot opposite, or along the canal from Regents Canal Dock (now Limehouse Dock), brought in from the north east of the country using colliers."

Redcap (1964-6): John Thaw's first starring role

What would Inspector Morse really have been like in his twenties? For the answer, don't watch Endeavour, watch Redcap. Because this drama about a detective in the Royal Military Police gave John Thaw his first starring role.  

It ran for two series and 26 episodes between 1964 and 1966. All but three of the episodes still exist and many of them have been posted on YouTube.

I've been binge watching these over the past few days with some interest.

Thaw is very good, and must have been to be cast in this part aged only 22. Sometimes, in his exasperation with authority, he sounds almost comically like the middle-aged Morse. but there are few hints of The Sweeney's Jack Regan.

The series as a whole is a reminder of how many overseas commitments Britain still had in the mid-Sixties: Germany, Cyprus, Aden, Malaysia.

But the real joy of Redcap is the supporting cast in each episode: you never know who will turn up next. In an episode about bullying in a cadet establishment, for instance, the cadets include Richard O'Sullivan, Barry Evans and a young actor called John Mitchell who was about to reinvent himself as Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

And here are Thaw and Leonard Rossiter. Rossiter's platoon also includes Ian McShane and John Noakes, sporting a dodgy Welsh accent, which is a reminder that he was a promising actor before Blue Peter came calling.

Yes, there's much to enjoy in Redcap.

In which I scoop Channel 5's documentary on Leonard Rossiter

Channel 5 recently screened a superior documentary on the career of Leonard Rossiter - you can watch it on its catch-up service My5.

If features a few clips from what it bills as a "never seen before interview" with Rossiter. Except that readers of this blog may well have seen the interview before, because I linked to it last year. Maybe that's how the documentary's researchers found it?

In that post I suggested Rossiter had a talent for turning up in films where you don't expect to find him, and the video above - from a 1967 Michael Caine thriller - is another example. There's even a little bit of Eric Portman in the middle as a bonus.

The documentary does not shy away from Rossiter's reputation for being a perfectionist and thus difficult to work with. But I suppose that depends on who you were.

I got talking with the theatre director Braham Murray at a Leicester event marking the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's death. Murray had rescued the reputation of Orton's play Loot with a production in Manchester after it had flopped in the West End.

He mentioned Rossiter for some reason and said what a wonderful man he was. I referred to his reputation, saying something like: "They say he turned up word perfect on the first day and expected everyone else to be too."

At which Murray, always the director, bristled slightly and demanded: "And what's wrong with that?"

Eric Chappell, Rising Damp and race

The comedy writer Eric Chappell has died. He was best known for writing Rising Damp, which is a strong candidate for being the best situation comedy ever shown on ITV.

Though as the British Comedy Guide points out:

Whilst Rising Damp - which starred Leonard Rossiter - propelled Chappell to both stardom and writing as a full-time career, he penned a further string of sitcom hits for ITV broadcasters, including the beloved holiday comedy Duty Free; father-son domestic sitcom Home To Roost; office comedy The Squirrels; and The Bounder, a sitcom of brotherly rivalry starring George Cole and Peter Bowles.

This clip from Rising Damp shows that, perhaps uniquely for a Seventies comedy that dealt with race, it can be watched today without embarrassment.

The relationship between Philip and Rigsby brings out the way that envy is a component of racism. And it is Rigsby's snobbery that makes him such a sucker for Philip's totally spurious stories about being the son of an African chief. (In the spin-off Rising Damp film it is revealed that he comes from Croydon.)

Eric Chappell discussed the genesis of Rising Damp in an interview with Penny Black Music:

I was reading a newspaper, and I read about a black student going to a hotel and pretending to be a prince and getting very well treated by a bigoted landlord. It didn’t say bigoted but that’s the feeling you got. He got well treated. I thought, "What a great idea for a farce!" but I wrote a verbal comedy instead. I was still discovering my style, and I changed the whole concept.

The idea was still the same but the landlord became somebody I knew. I based him on a landlord who was a lovely guy but he was prejudiced as hell. How can you be prejudiced and still be a lovely guy? But he was. And I thought, "He’s a great character," and so I used him. 

With Philip the black guy's character, I didn’t know any black people, so it had to be something out of books and I got a book on African folklore which I found riveting. I enjoyed it, and I thought, "I can put this stuff in from the book. I can make this boy as innocent about his blackness as me."

In the same interviewed he revealed that he was living in Hinckley in Leicestershire when all this took place.

A fascinating 1980 interview with Leonard Rossiter

Leonard Rossiter is best remembered as the creator of Rigsby and Reggie Perrin, but before he was a sitcom star he was a celebrated actor on stage and screen. He has a habit of turning up in films (King Rat, 2001, Barry Lyndon) where you do not expect to find him. 

Click on the image of Rossiter as King John above to watch an interview, recorded in 1980, in which he talks about his career. 

Rossiter died in 1984, during a performance of Joe Orton's Loot. He was playing Inspector Truscott and I had seen him in the role only a few weeks before.

Richard Beckinsale: This is Your Life

Richard Beckinsale died in 1979 at the age of only 31.

Two years before that he was the subject of This is Your Life. It featured the two great comic actors he had starred with - Leonard Rossiter and Ronnie Barker - and a very young Kate Beckinsale.

Because it is the 1970s he smokes all the way through the show and there is even a glimpse of the long-gone Stanton and Staveley Ironworks.

h/t Lee Thompson.

John Thaw and Leonard Rossiter in Redcap

Redcap was a television series about Sergeant John Mann, a member of the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police. It was broadcast on ITV between 1964 and 1966.

It is significant because the lead role was played by a young John Thaw. It is interesting to compare him here with Shaun Evans' rendering of the youthful Morse in Endeavour.

But Redcap is interesting beyong the presence of Thaw, because so many good actors of the period appeared in it.

This clip features the great Leonard Rossiter and Mike Pratt, but in just this episode you could also have seen Ian McShane, Bill Treacher (you know, Arthur Fowler off of EastEnders) and John Noakes.

According to Wikipedia, 23 of the 26 Redcap episodes made still exist, and they are available on DVD.

Leicester celebrates Joe Orton and Loot

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To mark the 50th anniversary of the London premiere of Joe Orton's play Loot, a number of events are taking place in Leicester.

On Saturday 24 September there is an evening with Kenneth Cranham at the Curve Theatre, who appeared in the original production. The event will also feature Orton's sister Leonie Orton Barnett.

On Sunday 25 September sees a free celebration at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery involving another member of the original cast, Michael Elwyn, and other speakers including the novelist Jake Arnott.

And between 24 September and 30 October there will be a display at New Walk of material from the University of Leicester's Orton Archive.

Full details of these events and other resources, including an interview with Dudley Sutton, can be found on the university website.

I got my ticket for the Sunday event today.

Joe Orton came from Leicester - like Richard Attenborough his first involvement with the stage was at the city's Little Theatre.

But I am also going because I remember seeing Leonard Rossiter in Loot a few weeks before he died.

Listening to Dapper Laughs

I arrived at the Battle of Ideas at lunchtime on Saturday and found there was a debate on comedy and offence starting shortly in one of the Barbican's cinemas.

It sounded my sort of thing, so I went along.

When I got there I found Dapper Laughs was one of the speakers.

If it had been any other event there would have pickets or I would have been called "Tory Scum" or spat on by Guardian columnists. Because it was the Battle of Ideas I just wandered in and found him there.

I got the memo. I have written for the Guardian and the New Statesman. I know I am meant to hate Dapper Laughs.

It's just that I have never heard him perform.

I did not rush back to listen to him either. I have reached an age where I don't like many comedians.

When you are younger, comedy matters immensely. It helps form your own sense of humour and even your view of the world. When I was in the sixth form (that's years 12 and 13 by my calculation) we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.

Today I will admit to liking Alexei Sayle and Stewart Lee, and that is about it.

So I shall review the Dapper Laughs I saw on Saturday.

The first thing to say is that he was intensely irritating. When you look at local papers from the 1950s, you see that if a well-known comedian was in town he felt compelled to pull a face when he was photographed to prove how funny he was.

That approach has crept back in (think Mel and Sue saying "Bake!" in a range of achingly funny voices) and Dapper Laughs has certainly bought in to it. He spent the whole debate mugging to the audience and punched the air if someone agreed with him.

And for those who worry about manspreading - personally, I grew up in an era when radical politics involved something more than telling people to sit up straight - he contrived to take up three chairs.

But his arguments were better,

Because, he told us, he is not Dapper Laughs, His name is Daniel O'Reilly. Dapper Laughs is a character he plays. He is making fun of men's sexism, not celebrating it.

And before you dismiss that, remember how annoyed you get if some right-wing commentator fails to appreciate all the layers of irony in Stewart Lee's act - Will Self wrote well about him the other day - and assumes that something he says in his act is his real view.

As the other panelist, Tom Slater, pointed out, we middle-class liberals celebrate our ability to navigate Lee's shifting meanings but assume that a working-class man who hears a joke about rape will assume rape is just fine.

Well, maybe. But I find arguments that rely on affecting outrage on behalf of some other group inherently unconvincing. Too much education debate today takes place between people pretending to be outraged on behalf of teachers and people pretending to be outraged on behalf of parents. The real issues never get discussed.

So that was Dapper Laughs. Or "Dapper Laughs".

I did not rush to watch his videos when I got home. I expect I would hate him. But then I hate most comedians these days.

Schubert: Trio in E Flat

As the Proms - at the least the televised Proms - no longer provide much 19th-century Romanticism, I thought I would step in with a bit of Schubert.

This second movement is more associated with The Hunger these days, but here the stills come from Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975). Look closely and you will see Leonard Rossiter fighting a duel with Ryan O'Neal.

The film was an adaptation of Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon. It is a minor work, but it has something of the wit and life of Vanity Fair in a way that his better regarded novels (Pendennis, Henry Esmond) do not.

You can hear the whole Schubert Trio on Youtube.

Six of the Best 531

Jenni Hollis explains why she is standing for the Liberal Democrats in a Haringey byelection.

"Voting for Corbyn is gesture politics. It makes many on the left feel good about themselves and avoids the painful task of re-thinking policies and reconnecting beyond the base to the rest of the electorate", argues John Van Reenen.

Janet Biehl says Murray Bookchin warned about many of the environmental threats we now face back in 1962.

Nicholas Boys Smith on the gulf between the buildings that win architecture awards and those that  the public prefers.

"In its fantasy of escaping the rat race, it shared a theme with an equally successful comedy of the age, The Good Life. In this, [Reggie] Perrin was a relative of Tom and Barbara Good, only without their optimistic faith in a better alternative." Jonathan Feedland pays tribute to David Nobbs and the cultural importance of situation comedy.

Andrew Younger looks back at the 1970s British sci-fi fantasy series Sapphire and Steel.

There is a sense in which David Nobbs is not dead

I am very sorry to hear of the death of the comedy writer David Nobbs. It has been widely reported on Twitter this evening, but not yet in the mainstream media.

When I was in the sixth form we practically conversed in lines from Fawlty Towers and Reggie Perrin.

I don't know how the latter holds up today, but it meant a great deal to me at the time.

Nobbs' comic novels are very good too.

Very sad today to hear of the death of David Nobbs.First worked with him on the Frost Report in 1966 ; then on many films for Video Arts

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) August 9, 2015