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.

"A handbag?" Edward Fox hears about Michael Medwin's childhood

Embed from Getty Images

I've found it!

When I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the childhood of the British film actor and producer Michael Medwin in August, I came across an account of him talking about it at some event where he shared the platform with Edward Fox. But I couldn't find it again after I emerged into the fresh air.

Now I have. I was thinking of an interview with Andrew Young of The Herald - Medwin was about to play Colonel Pickering to Fox's Professor Higgins in a touring production of My Fair Lady that was coming to Glasgow.

Young writes:

It was my innocent question about what I supposed to be his own Cockney roots that brought about the most remarkable revelation concerning his background. Home truths about which even Edward Fox (who was sitting in on the chat) had been completely unaware.

''I was one of life's social indiscretions,'' he said. ''Adopted and brought up by two maiden ladies in Dorset. In other words, I'm a bastard.'' This bold, freely-offered information provoked paroxysms of mirth in Fox.

A lucky bastard, as it happened. ''It was a most felicitious adoption. I had a halcyon upbringing and was not prepared for the world at all. Things were very quiet and lovely. The maiden ladies were a Dr Mary Jeremy, OBE, and a Miss Clockton Roberts. The former was an OBE because there were not many lady doctors around at the time and she had done much good work in India before the 1914-18 war.''

The ladies then ''put me through the local public school and then sent me off to what you might call a finishing school in Switzerland. Being maiden ladies, presumably they had it in their heads that that was the natural progression.

''I was with them until they died, Dr Jeremy when I was 12, and Miss Roberts when I was in my twenties. So I have no-one in the world. I have no relations that I know about.''

In tracing his ancestry back to his mother and father, all he had ever learned was that his mother came from Dublin and his father was Dutch.

''For a long time I kept hoping that I would be traced by someone who would tell me that I was a Guinness heir and that all this was mine.''

Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.

Honestly, what is Edward Fox like? I can't understand someone who finds orphans funny.

Why I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf: Eugenics and modernist literature

Embed from Getty Images

Stephen Unwin in Byline Times quotes Virginia Woolf's for Sunday 9 January 1915. She and her husband Leonard had been out for a "very good walk" along the Thames towpath from Richmond to Kingston, when they encountered "a long line of imbeciles":

"The first was a very tall man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, and looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature with no forehead, or no chin, and an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

This is appalling, but not such a shock if you know how widespread support for eugenicist ideas was in the early 20th century.

I have blogged before about Keynes and Beveridge's support for this cause, and John Carey once published a book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, that looked at the repugnant political views of a host of renowned literary figures, including George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats.

Some of these were Fabian socialists - the Guardian obituary for Paul Johnson reveals that Leonard Woolf was a member of the New Statesman board as late as 1965.

But most were modernist literary figures and we should have learnt by now that there is no necessary connection between an innovative approach to literary forms and liberal politics.

As Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W.H. Auden: Selected Poems,

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. 

In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular.

So it should not be such a surprise that the literary figure of this era who was most securely opposed to eugenicist ideas, and saw most clearly where they might lead, was the wacky Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton.

The old Hippodrome in Brighton

After my flirtation with restoration at Embassy Court, let's return to derelict Brighton.

The old Hippodrome is tucked in, rather unexpectedly, just behind the seafront.

It was built in 1897 and Wikipedia tells its colourful history:

Shows of all types were staged there, and top-name entertainers such as Sarah Bernhardt, Sammy Davis, Jr., Gracie Fields, Harry Houdini, Buster Keaton, Lillie Langtry and Laurel and Hardy appeared. 

Laurence Olivier played the venue early in his stage career—but fell over on his first entrance on his début. 

One of Charlie Chaplin's first roles was a bit-part in theatre impresario Fred Karno's comedy Saturday to Monday, staged in May 1907; and Vivien Leigh gave an acclaimed performance in George Bernard Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma. 

Local stars also featured: Max Miller, the Brighton-born music hall entertainer and comedian, appeared on many occasions during the mid-20th century; and conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, whose vaudeville career began in their home town in 1911 at the age of three, topped the bill with their variety show.

The article goes on to say that 4000 people attended concerts by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1964, but that could not help the Hippodrome closing the following year.

It was bought by the Rank Organisation and turned into a Mecca Bingo hall and remained open in that guise until 2007.

Hopes of restoring it remain, those this whole quarter of the city seem run down at present. Our Brighton Hippodrome has the latest news.

The building's glory is its interior, as you will see from the video below.

Aylan Kurdi and Saint Joan

Why does it take a photograph of a drowned child to make people care about Syrian refugees?

I have seen more than one person asking that on Twitter today. Their implication was that the rest of us should be ashamed of ourselves for being insufficiently logical.

The truth is that people do not live by words and logic alone. Images matter too.

I have been thinking today of George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan.

In it John de Stogumber, chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, is a boneheaded Englishman. In another age he would have been a hardline Protestant if not a Ukip candidate.

He is a great enthusiast for the prosecution and execution of Joan of Arc, until he encounters the reality...

I let them do it. If I had known, I would have torn her from their hands. You don't know: you haven't seen: it is so easy to talk when you don't know. You madden yourself with words: you damn yourself because it feels grand to throw oil on the flaming hell of your own temper. 

But when it is brought home to you; when you see the thing you have done; when it is blinding your eyes, stifling your nostrils, tearing your heart, then--then--[Falling on his knees] O God, take away this sight from me!

Or as David Hume put it:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

2 Savoy Place - where the BBC began

Back to 2 Savoy Place, the venue for the Candidates chess tournament in London.

It was opened in 1889 as an examination hall for the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons. It was taken over by the Institution of Electrical Engineers and is still occupied by its successor, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

More than that, the building was the first home of the BBC when radio broadcasts began in 1923. A page on the BBC's own site records:

Early radio contributors in Savoy Hill included HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, who were offered whisky and soda as they relaxed in the atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club. Here, radio drama flourished, weather forecasts and Big Ben chimes were introduced, and listeners could even follow cricket coverage. 

However, broadcasting developed exponentially – two studios quickly became nine, and the cramped but cosy environment of Savoy Hill was abandoned when the BBC moved to its first purpose-built centre, Broadcasting House in Regent St. The BBC left the site in May 1932.

And the IET site records adds:

In 1922 a meeting of 200 companies held in our Lecture Theatre resulted in the formation of the British Broadcasting Company.

That lecture theatre is where the Candidates tournament was played.

Later. @langrabbie suggests that the BBC was housed in Savoy Hill House, which stands behind Savoy Place and is also owned by the IET.