Anyone remember Rising Damp with Leonard Rossiter.

[ArseInTheCoOpWindow]

Spent the usual hours finding nothing to watch. Dh put YouTube on and we watched Rising Damp.

Vienna the cat and Miss Jones

augustusglupe
I’m agreeing with you btw! 😊

@DillDanding

I can remember my parents watching it. I can also remember finding it really unpleasant - I think the dingy house scared me.

It’s meant to be unpleasant and uncomfortable to watch! Rigsby’s character personifies everything that is distasteful and repugnant in a person.

and society.

Love Thy Neighbour? No comparison. That was appalling, completely different from RD.

(Blokey type here ) Don Warrington has one of those honeyed voices I could listen to all day. Such beautiful enunciation. See also:Trevor MacDonald, and James Earl Jones (better known as Darth Vader). And of course Orson Welles ....

I enjoyed Rising Damp first time around - I would have been about 10ish I liked the theme tune. DF always had something to say about Richard Beckinsales hair, but he got the joke was always on Rigsbys.

He once said "I work with a lot of Rigsbys". (They used to make the foreign workers sit separately to the English at tea break. And when I say foreign, I mean brown, black and Irish)

Oh I loved it

@augustusglupe

NinaDefoe Yes definitely. I thought everyone knew that.

Ditto Love Thy Neighbour. We all laughed at Eddie. Whereas Bill & Barbie were cool and sophisticated.

You can know that and still feel uncomfortable hearing his racism on TV knowing that some of the audience could repeat his sentiments.

AtlasPine Philip was educated and made Rigsby look like the racist idiot he was.

longwayoff I disagree. The programmes had much in common.

@augustusglupe

AtlasPine Philip was educated and made Rigsby look like the racist idiot he was.

longwayoff I disagree. The programmes had much in common.

Well, quite. But that didn’t stop ignorant viewers from repeated his words in the classroom and thinking they were ok.

I disagree with you. Rising Damp clearly laid out that Rigsby was a sad, end of Empire, mindless fool and Rigsby's racism was part of his seedy character but the whole programme was not completely structured on that. Love thy Neighbour attempted to do similarly but - and I may be recalling incorrectly as I didn't watch more than a couple of episodes whilst in someone else's house - failed to do so, relying on racism as the principal motivator of humour. Philip's character could be played by any actor, it would be a different show, but Rigsby is a standard bigot, it's essentially a class difference between the two. Not so with Love thy Neighbour, written as black v white and structured on racism under the guise of humour.

Not so with Love thy Neighbour, written as black v white and structured on racism under the guise of humour.

My (hazy) recollection was that the two women were friends and sensible reasonable people, but the two men were portrayed as being as bad as each other, e.g. Bill frequently calling Eddie 'honky'. There wasn't really any subversion about it, just tit for tat.

The dynamic in Rising Damp was more complicated - actually, a lot of it was driven by sexual jealousy more than racism : Rigsby's unrequited passion for Miss Jones (iirc some combination of leching and possessiveness), and in turn her fascination with Phillip.

Yes, agree Errol all part of Rigby's unappealing character. It's just a comment not a dissertation.

Also Rigsby was, to some extent pitiable. A man of his age in the 70s would have been involved in one world war, Maybe two. He owned a dilapidated house but with no cash to make it properly habitable. This was not the life he expected to have. That's not an excuse but explains the jealousy and suppressed rage that turns to racism as he needs to blame someone. Johnny Speight touched on this in an interview I heard when he was talking about the creation of Alf Garnett.

Also, the generation gap at that time was massive for the same reasons and explains his attitude to the students. Miss Jones was the epitome of demure womanhood but had her own secret yearnings. All around Rigsby was the idea of 'free love and permissiveness' which he denounced publicly while secretly wanting it for himself. There's a lot going on.

The whole thing was anti racist, Don Warrington was educated and intelligent and all racism was thrown back at Rigsby in a sophisticated way.
Til death us do part was the same, Warren Mitchell, a strong socialist and Jewish, was making fun at the Alf Garnett character, showing what an ill educated person he was.

I think younger audiences watching now just hear the racist and misogynist language and fail to understand the context.

Indeed, you cannot make fun of bigots if you don't show them behaving badly in the first place.

It was a very clever programme with a great cast and it still makes me laugh - and Philip is still as cool AF.

All around Rigsby was the idea of 'free love and permissiveness' which he denounced publicly while secretly wanting it for himself

I think it was in the film ?

(checks. Yes www.quotesoup.com/quotes/movie_tv/rising_damp)

Rigsby: Permissive society? There's no such thing. I should know I've looked for it.

I’ve just watched an episode where Rigsby is being homophobic about one of his other tenants. Alan’s response is very WTF.
It’s so clever.
Only an idiot would think Rigsby is someone to imitate and copy AtlasPine

I remember that, Richard Beckinsale was gorgeous, and died way too soon. Leonard Rossiter in the life of Reggie Perrin,the hippo re MIL was hilarious, loved CJ, dinner party without any food.

'Rising Damp' is way better written and acted, and much much funnier than 'Love thy Neighbour', but what they both had in common was that the racist was ALWAYS the butt of the joke, and portrayed as stupid for being racist, and the audience's sympathy was always with the black characters.

@teaandtoastwithmarmite

I used to watch this with my parents. It was funny but the racism was really bad.

You thought that as a child in the mid 1970s or do you mean looking at it with 21st century eyes? I was a child in the 70s and can't imagine other children thinking that then.

If I remember correctly Warren Mitchell was mortified that a sizeable portion of the public didn't understand the humour of Alf Garnett, they took his 'views' as real opinions not that he was a bigotted idiot and that it was poking fun at bigots. yes, mother and your idiot husband, I'm thinking of you

Not sure if anyone else has posted this

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/25/how-we-made-rising-damp-miss-jones-rigsby

Oh thank you dingledangle, I found that fascinating.

Oh the wonderful Frances de la Tour. In one episode Rigsby has a boxing match with Philip. Cue Miss Jones -
"KILL HIM, Philip!"