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.