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.