Chariddy Shop Cinema #4 - Rising Damp "The Movie"

Chariddy Shop Cinema #4 - Rising Damp “The Movie” Good Lord. I did actually see this one at t’cinema. Roundly dissed by so-called fans as a lazy re-cycling of TV scripts, sans the late Richard Beckinsale, leaving a no-win Christopher Strauli to be called in off the subs bench via writer Eric Chappell’s other sit-com Only When I Laugh, dodgily unpolitically correct and limping in at the fag-end of the initial British Sit-com big screen fad, Rising Damp wouldn’t seem to have a great deal going for it. Don’t you believe it. Like the Carry Ons, James Bond and Hammer Horror, like every other Sit-Com film (which with the likes of The Inbetweeners and Mrs Brown is still ongoing despite occasional lulls) this is a quintessential look into the lives of the British. Class obsessed, sex obsessed, race obsessed, constantly bemoaning their lot, given to jumping to conclusions, it’s all here. Leonard Rossiter (who I was fortunate enough to see on stage as Inspector Truscott in a production of Joe Orton’s Loot) and Frances De La Tour carry the thing with ease, and (especially if you’re not over familiar with the set bound TV series) the opening out of the claustrophobic seediness is like a breath of (almost) fresh air. There are laughs. The great tragedy is the direction of Joe McGrath, who excelled at lunatic surrealism, and only gets a couple of very brief dream sequences, one with Rossiter Noel Cowarding with Miss Jones in a 1920s ballroom, and another a flash of Grease. Nostalgia supreme, if you’re in the right mood.