The comedy writer who created Rising Damp
Eric Chappell, who has died aged 88, wrote some of the most successful British sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s, including Only When I Laugh, starring James Bolam, Peter Bowles and Christopher Strauli as a socially disparate trio of patients stuck together (for four seasons, between
1979 and 1982) in a hospital ward; and
Home to Roost (1985-1990), which featured Reece Dinsdale as a teenager who goes to live with his contentedly single father
(John Thaw). But Chappell’s “crowning achievement” was Rising Damp, said
The Guardian, which ran for four years from 1974.
Adapted from a play he’d written called The Banana Box, it featured an “outstanding” ensemble cast led by Leonard Rossiter as Rigsby, the cantankerous, cardigan-clad landlord of a seedy boarding house. Rigsby’s tenants are more sophisticated than he is, said The Times, and Chappell’s script “ridiculed his delusions of grandeur with pathos as well as laughter. ‘I’m afraid there’s something of the philistine about you, Mr Rigsby,’ Frances de la Tour’s Miss Jones tells him in one episode. ‘That’s very nice of you, Miss Jones,’ comes the irony-free reply.” The other tenants were the good-natured medical student Alan (Richard Beckinsale) and the suave, highly educated Philip Smith (Don Warrington), who responds to his landlord’s bigotry by telling him that he is the son of an African king. Rising Damp was watched by up to 18 million people, and was turned into a film in 1980.
Eric Chappell was born into a working-class family in Grantham in 1933, and educated at Grantham Boys’ Central School. He had loved writing stories as a child, but he studied accountancy at college before going to work at the East Midlands Electricity Board in 1951. He married Muriel in 1959, with whom he had two children. He was in his 30s when he started to write again. He started with a novel, but it didn’t work. Then he had the idea of writing a play instead. The result was The Banana Box, which transferred to the West End in 1973. At that point, Chappell left his job to focus on writing. It seemed a gamble, but within a few months he’d been commissioned to write Rising Damp. His other TV hits included Duty Free, and he also wrote many more plays. He preferred writing for the stage. “I could do a sitcom watched by 16 million people and not get one phone call, whereas in the theatre I get a buzz from the reaction. It’s immediate. It’s personal.”