that_ealing_feeling

The review quote on the DVD box reads: "You'll spend as much time laughing as you do screaming".

And that's no lie: I spent exactly as much time laughing as I did screaming. Nevertheless, the publicist who chose that line as the sales pitch needs to check his or her ambiguity detector.

To be fair, I've seen (I won't say watched) no more than the first half so far, and if I'm hanging in there for the remainder, it's only because I'm nursing faint and fast-dwindling hopes about what might happen to the characters played by Bridget Fonda and Oliver Platt. It would scar my life forever if they should get eaten by a giant crocodile and I missed it.

Despite the fact that many posters seem to think Rising Damp was guilty of racism, the reverse was actually true. Don Warrington's character Philip was often the target of boorish remarks by Leonard Rossiter's landlord Rigsby (not really malicious by the standards of 1970s England, just ignorant: a real 1970s racist wouldn't rent a room in his own house to a black man anyway), but it's Rigsby that we find ridiculous, not Philip. Throughout the series, Philip is consistently portrayed as the most intelligent, charming, attractive, sophisticated and grown-up of all the characters, and he's certainly no deferential Uncle Tom. ... that's not racism, is it?