One Foot in the Grave
One Foot in the Grave is a British television sitcom written by David Renwick. There were six series and seven Christmas specials over a period of ten years from early 1990 to late 2000. The first five series were broadcast between January 1990 and January 1995. For the next five years, the show appeared only as Christmas specials, followed by the sixth and final series in 2000.
The series features the exploits of Victor Meldrew, played by Richard Wilson, and his long-suffering wife, Margaret, played by Annette Crosbie. Wilson initially turned down the part of Meldrew and David Renwick considered Les Dawson for the role, until Wilson changed his mind. The programmes invariably deal with Meldrew's battle against a long series of problems, some of which he creates for himself.
The location is set in an unnamed town in Southern England, where Victor takes involuntary early retirement. His various efforts to keep himself busy while encountering various misfortunes and misunderstandings are the themes of the sitcom. Indoor scenes were videotaped at BBC Television Centre with most exterior scenes filmed on Tresillian Way in Walkford in Christchurch, Dorset. Despite its traditional production, the series subverts its domestic sitcom setting with elements of black humour and surrealism.
The series was occasionally the subject of controversy for some of its darker story elements, but nevertheless received a number of awards, including the 1992 BAFTA for Best Comedy. The programme came 80th in the British Film Institute's 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. Four episodes were remade for BBC Radio 2. The series inspired a novel, published in 1992, featuring the most memorable moments from the first two series and the first Christmas special.
Plot
The series features the exploits, mishaps and misadventures of irascible early retiree Victor Meldrew, who, after being made redundant from his job as a security guard at the age of 60, finds himself at war with the world and everything in it. Meldrew, cursed with misfortune and always complaining, is married to long-suffering wife Margaret, who is often left exasperated by his many misfortunes.Amongst other witnesses to Victor's wrath are tactless family friend Jean Warboys and next-door neighbours Patrick and Pippa Trench. Patrick often discovers Victor in inexplicably bizarre or compromising situations, leading him to believe he is insane. The Meldrews' neighbour on the other side, overly cheery charity worker Nick Swainey, also adds to Victor's frustration.
Although set in a traditional suburban setting, the show subverts this genre with a strong overtone of black comedy. Series One's "The Valley of Fear" is an episode which caused controversy, when Victor found a frozen cat in his freezer. Writer David Renwick also combined farce with elements of tragedy. For example, and although there is no explicit reference that Victor and Margaret had children, the episode "Timeless Time" contained a reference to someone named Stuart; the strong implication being that they once had a son who had died as a child, and in the final episode, Victor is killed by a hit-and-run driver.
A number of episodes were also experimental in that they took place entirely in one setting. Such episodes include "The Beast in the Cage", "Timeless Time", "The Trial", "Rearranging the Dust", and "Threatening Weather".
Despite Margaret's frequent exasperation with her husband's antics, the series shows the couple have a deep affection for one another.
Episodes
Characters
Main characters
Victor Meldrew – Victor is the main protagonist of the sitcom and finds himself constantly battling against all that life throws at him as he becomes entangled in complicated misfortunes and farcical situations. Renwick once pointed out in an interview that the name "Victor" was ironic, since he almost always ends up a loser. From being buried alive to being prosecuted for attacking a feisty pit bull terrier with a collection of coconut meringues, Victor tries to adjust to life after an automatic security system made him redundant at the office where he worked as a security guard, but to no avail. He believes everything is going wrong for him all the time and he has the right to be upset because it is always someone else's fault. Victor does not see himself as retired and is always trying to find another job, but most of his attempts end in failure.Victor is a tragic comedy character and sympathy is directed towards him as he becomes embroiled in complex misunderstandings, bureaucratic vanity and, at times, sheer bad luck. The audience sees a philosophical ebb and flow to his character, however, along with a degree of optimism. Yet his polite façade collapses when events get the better of him and a full verbal onslaught is forthcoming. "Victor-isms" include "I do not believe it!", "I don't believe it!", "Un-be-lievable!", "What in the name of bloody hell?", "In the name of sanity!" Despite his grumpy demeanour Victor isn't totally devoid of compassion; in "Hearts of Darkness" he liberates elderly nursing home residents who were being mistreated by the staff, and in "Descent into The Maelstrom" he calls an incident room number and gives the location of an emotionally disturbed woman who abducted a baby and stole Margaret's mother's pearl earrings, which resulted in the woman being picked up by the police. However, because the woman was a friend of Margaret, and knowing she meant a lot to her, Victor never said anything.
Victor has also shown a vast amount of loyalty to Margaret as, throughout their entire 42 years of lifelong marriage together, not once has the thought of infidelity ever occurred to him. In "Rearranging the Dust", Victor and Margaret recollect the days of their courtship at a party after which Victor says "You were always my first choice", which leaves Margaret stunned. In another episode, Margaret recounts the time Victor took her to the funfair and they ended up getting stuck in the hall of mirrors for over an hour. Victor had said he did not mind as he was happy to stay there and look at all the reflections of her. Victor's very best act of compassion comes in the episode "The Wisdom of the Witch" in which he ends up saving Patrick's life from his new secretary's psychopathic boyfriend by forcing Patrick's would-be murderer, along with himself as well, out of the window of the house in which they are trapped during a snowstorm.
Margaret Meldrew – Victor's long-suffering, tolerant and kind-hearted wife. Margaret tries to maintain a degree of calmness and to rise above her husband's antics. However, she is often engulfed in these follies, mishaps and confusion and often vents her anger at Victor. In early episodes, her character acts more as a comic foil to Victor's misfortunes. Examples include fearfully asking if a cat found frozen in their freezer is definitely dead and mentioning a friend who died of a terminal illness. When Victor reminds her that the woman actually fell from a cliff, Margaret retorts she only did so because "she went to the seaside to convalesce".
In later episodes, Margaret develops into a more complex character. She is shown to be fiercely protective of her marriage to Victor by becoming easily suspicious and jealous—for example, of a Dutch marionette that Victor becomes occupied with repairing in the episode "Hole in the Sky", eventually leading her to destroy it. In "The Affair of the Hollow Lady", a greengrocer develops a soft spot for Victor and tries to convince Margaret that he has been unfaithful to her. In revenge, Margaret assaults her with a pair of boxing gloves. However, Margaret herself is shown to have contemplated infidelity with a man called Ben whom she met on holiday in the episode "Warm Champagne". She decides against cheating on Victor. In this episode, she sums up her relationship with Victor by telling Ben, "He's the most sensitive person I've ever met and that's why I love him and why I constantly want to ram his head through a television screen." She also begins to develop a sense of cynicism, slowly coming to see the world the way Victor sees it. This is especially evident in "Things Aren't Simple Anymore" in which she remarks that the world is "all speed and greed" and that "nobody does anything about anything". In "Rearranging the Dust", Margaret recounts the time she first chose Victor at a party and, during a power cut, "shared their bodies" in the garden. After this moment of passion, they went back inside and when the lights came back on, Margaret realised that she had "grabbed hold of the wrong person". Margaret's demeanour seemed to stem from an incident at school when she was a child. When she was five, she had two budgies; one day when she opened the door of their cage, one flew straight out and hit the window, killing itself, while the other stayed in the cage despite her best efforts to get it to come out. The next day at school her teacher asked the class to write a story about something that had happened to them so Margaret wrote her story about the budgies. Her teacher made Margaret read it out loud in front of the whole class which resulted in everyone laughing at her. She then realised that the teacher had done it deliberately just to be cruel to her—whereupon she understood why the other budgie never wanted to leave its cage.
Margaret could be said to have a catchphrase, typically a long, exasperated use of the word "God", usually when coming to a realisation about the reason behind one of Victor's mishaps. These mishaps are occasionally inadvertently aided by herself in some way, such as leaving the phone off the hook or giving permission to someone to enter the Meldrews' house when she is not there. Margaret works at a florist's until series five, when the shop closes. In a later series she has found a new job as a caregiver for the elderly, where she inadvertently discovers on a TV documentary that she has actually been unwittingly used as a sex worker by a man who did not need personal care but just enjoyed being bathed and dressed anyway. It is presumed that she left the job after making this discovery, as it is never mentioned again.