© Provided by The TelegraphRichard Wilson as Victor Meldrew
A decade before Larry David turned his everyday gripes into Curb Your Enthusiasm - a skin-crawling comedy about socially (un)acceptable behaviour - us Brits had Victor Meldrew and One Foot in the Grave.
Over six series and multiple specials - before Meldrew was killed off in 2000 - the David Renwick-written series pushed boundaries of taste and taboo-breaking comedy, all within the usually cosy parameters of the domestic British sitcom: suicides and murders; snatched babies; radioactive horse manure; a garden gnome massacre; a cat stuffed in the freezer and tortoise burned alive (incidents of animal cruelty which the cast urged David Renwick to stop writing, because of complaints in the street from outraged viewers).
As the original Larry David, Meldrew policed the sometimes macabre fringes of middle England's suburbia, calling out nonsense wherever he saw it and being endlessly irritated by plummeting moral standards. Now Renwick has announced plans to resurrect him for the 21st century, with a novel - One Foot In the Grave and Counting - that sees him struggling to cope with the modern world.
More than 30 years after One Foot in the Grave broadcast its first episode, the studio sitcom is an outdated comedy format. But One Foot in the Grave remains a deviously clever comedy, packed with irresistible laughs and dark plot twists. And the series' best episode - The Trial, a one-man episode in which Victor is home alone, waiting to be called in for jury service - came from Renwick and director-producer Susan Belbin's desire to play with the creative potential of the sitcom format.
Speaking on BBC Solent in 2014, Belbin recalled how she and Renwick became "more and more challenging with one another" as the show progressed. "I would say to him when we'd finished one series, 'Please can we do an episode in the dark?'" she said. "I also remember saying to David, 'Can we do a one-man episode?' And that's how these things evolved."
David Renwick had originally written the character of Victor Meldrew for Richard Wilson, who he'd worked with on the ITV sitcom Hot Metal. But Wilson - still considered a supporting actor at the time - didn't want the part. "I didn't feel ready to play older men," he told Richard Webber, author of behind-the-scenes book The Complete One Foot in the Grave. "I also didn't take to the idea - the character seemed too angry all the time."
In what seems like a curious idea now, Renwick considered Les Dawson as second choice to play Victor, until Wilson agreed to do the series. The first episode - Alive and Buried, broadcast on January 4, 1990 - laid out the series premise: Victor is forced into early retirement at 61, replaced in his job as a security guard by a high-tech box.
"I've been replaced by a box," says Victor to his wife Margaret (Annette Crosbie). "Standard procedure apparently for a man of my age. The next stage is to stick you inside one."
When The Trial was broadcast on February 28, 1993, as part of the fourth series, the show was a ratings hit and had its formula set in place: Victor, driving himself - and everyone else - mad; Margaret, whose equal measures of patience and impatience with Victor is the key to their marriage; Patrick and Pippa (Angus Deayton and Janine Duvitski) next door, with Patrick all-too-often the victim of Victor's misadventures (including, but not restricted to, a crab clamped to his testicle); Mr Swainey (Owen Brenman) on the other side, who - with his oft-mentioned-but-never-seen mother - is like a jolly Norman Bates; the tragically unfortunate Mrs Warboys (Doreen Mantle) forever popping in to further irritate Victor with her stupidity; and - of course - "I don't believe it!"
© Provided by The TelegraphAnnette Crosbie and Victor Meldrew in One Foot In The Grave - youtube
David Renwick and Susan Belbin had already experimented with the sitcom format in previous episodes: 'Timeless Time' is set entirely in the Meldrews' bedroom, as Victor and Margaret try and, for various reasons, fail to get to sleep; and The Beast in the Cage has Victor, Margaret, and Mrs Warboys stuck in a bank holiday traffic jam.
Though Belbin doesn't remember a specific inspiration behind The Trial - "I think it was just David," she told BBC Solent. "It all came out of David's head" - the episode feels like a callback to the classic one-man episode of Hancock's Half Hour, The Bedsitter. Like Hancock, it's sitcom at its absolute purest: someone stuck in a place with someone they don't get along with. In Victor's case in The Trial, himself.
The opening shot of The Trial alone marks out Susan Belbin's direction as, both creatively and technically, years ahead of other sitcoms in the early Nineties. Ditching the Eric Idle-sung theme tune, it begins with a Hitchcock-inspired shot of a crow - an omen, perhaps - before swinging down through Victor's window. ("I can imagine a lot of writers going, 'Oh for god's sake, let's just get on with it,' Belbin said about that shot. "But David knew what I was trying to do and he kind of incorporated all that. we were a very good team.")
The episode itself is an exercise is exploring what our minds do under extreme boredom. Waiting for his jury service call and trapped indoors by torrential rain, Victor occupies himself by self-diagnosing with a medical encyclopedia ("Colon tumour!" he says. "Often no symptoms in the early stages. that's exactly what I've got"), writing a letter to his brother, a thanks for sending some old baby photos ("Perhaps I'll write to him when I've got more time," he says after managing a single sentence), and attempting - and failing - to crack the impossible clues of a cryptic crossword ("I don't seem to be able to do the crossword today as I appear to be temporarily out of mind-bending drugs").
His only company is Mrs Warboys, who calls up to tell Victor about her holiday. He stuffs the phone under a pillow, leaving Mrs Warboys to unknowingly converse with herself for 10 minutes.
Richard Wilson remembers that the crossword scene - which is doubly funny as Victor smears ink over his forehead and mouth with a leaky pen - brought the house down. "It was brilliant," he told the Daily Mail in 2016. "We had to stop recording because the audience wouldn't stop laughing."
Arguably, One Foot in the Grave is best remembered for its more farcical japes: Victor buried up to his neck in the garden or mistaking a sausage dog for a cordless phone (truly Victor's "Del Boy falling through the bar" moment). The Trial has one of those big laughs too, when Victor discovers a garden centre delivery boy has planted his yucca directly into the toilet bowl. "I didn't catch his name," complains Victor down the phone about the delivery boy. "It may have been Frank Spencer!"
© Provided by The TelegraphRichard Wilson, Doreen Mantle (Mrs Warboys) and Annette Crosby in One Foot In the Grave - imdb
In another series staple, there's an act of revenge from someone whose path Victor has crossed in some unseen prior confrontation. In this case, a Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlet pushed through the letterbox: "The Lord is thy judge, he is all seeing and all knowing, he knows when thou sinneth. and he knows you called us a pair of persistent bastards last week." (See also: graffiti on Victor's bedroom walls, mechanics recording a song about him, and doctored Christmas cracker jokes in which he's the punchline.)
But it's also just Victor Meldrew at his finest, thinking out loud with that unique Richard Wilson delivery, snatching and spitting Renwick's ever-sharp dialogue. Victor is actually a very different type of British sitcom character. Though usually buffoons with unreachable aspirations - Tony Hancock, Basil Fawlty, Del Boy, Alan Partridge or David Brent, all reflections of some national sense of self-defeat and deprecation - Victor's only aspiration is to have some purpose beyond traipsing the house and driving himself loopy.
Playing out in what feels like real time (save one crafty cut). The Trial is the best example of the realistic rhythm in One Foot in the Grave, thanks to the series' technically groundbreaking three-dimensional set, which Susan Belbin had built in the round rather than the traditional divided-down-the-middle studio set-up. Any fans of the show will know the layout of the house, which feels completely real.
"I wanted to bring as much realism into the show, given that it was a situation comedy," said Belbin in Garry Berman's book, Best of the Britcoms. "I myself was tiring slightly of three walls and people came in one door and sat down and talked to one another. Husbands and wives don't sit down and talk to one another - somebody's doing the washing up, somebody's reading the paper in the living room, and they shout to one another. I wanted to create that truthfulness."
© Provided by The TelegraphVictor finds his wig
The set allowed the characters to move freely through the house, and helped keep the rhythm and pace of the comedy, without having to take a break during filming to move sets and equipment whenever a character left the room.
"You'd have a break in the middle of a comedy with an audience there," said Susan Belbin about traditional sitcom production. "I thought, 'This isn't right, you've got to be able to keep it as fluid as possible so the timing is there and the audience don't get bored and start picking their nose'.
"It was a huge challenge for lighting and sound because of course it had to have microphones hidden everywhere and they had to have lights where they'd never had lights before. But I think it made a huge difference both to the actors' performance - because it meant it could flow, it didn't stop when it got to a peak and then have to pick it up again after a break and likewise for the audience."
It's a technique that leads to the most innovative moment of The Trial, as Victor climbs the stairs and stands on the landing, framed as if he's in the dock and on trial himself - for killing a woodlouse just minutes earlier, or so he starts to believe, under the watchful, all-knowing eye of the Lord. "For no apparent reason I just callously murdered it in cold blood," he confesses.
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Minutes later, Victor finds a new mole on his stomach. "I've been tried, convicted, and sentenced all in the space of 10 minutes!" But another look at his brother's baby photos reveals that Victor has, in fact, had the mole his entire life. In the episode's final gag, a simple attempt at making beans on toast turns to disaster as Victor slices the bread and finds that the baker - who Victor previously recalled had gone suddenly bald - has baked his wig into the middle of the bread. It's an incredible feat of writing from Renwick, that even without a real story, he ties multiple threads together in the style of his trademark densely-plotted scripts.
The Trial had 18 million viewers when it first broadcast in 1993. And while the studio sitcom might feel like an outdated TV comedy format, it's really the only format in which an episode like this could work - essentially a piece of television theatre. Richard Wilson even planned to perform The Trial as a live show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016. Unfortunately, Wilson suffered a heart attack and the performance was cancelled.
The irony of The Trial is that the character's real crime and punishment is simply being Victor Meldrew. It's the episode that best captures what One Foot in the Grave is essentially about: a man at a loose end, desperately in need of something to do, and irritated by outside, mostly trivial forces.
Not "a moaner" as he's been erroneously labelled over the years, but a well-meaning, even good natured person in a world that - from the perspective of someone who's been made redundant within it - has indeed gone mad. An outdated sitcom and grumpy old man? Don't believe it.
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