One Foot in the Grave
Seeking security
‘Where everything is bad, it must be good to know the worst’ (F. H. Bradley, as cited in Adorno, 2005, p. 83)
One Foot in the Grave centres on Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson), an irascible sexagenarian who is made redundant after working as a security guard for over forty years. The sitcom spanned the 90s, culminating in 2000 with Victor’s death in a car accident. Often mistaken to be retired, Victor struggles to find employment and while away the last third of his life in a meaningful manner. In this way, Victor has attributed so much of his worth into the notion of gainful employment. As Vaneigem (1983) observes, ‘The question “How old are you?” inevitably contains a reference to power. Dates themselves serve to pigeonhole and circumscribe us. Is not the passage of time always measured by reference to the establishment of some authority of other?’ (p. 154). Echoes of mannerisms likely influenced by his former occupation as a security guard can be seen in his irritable response to all manner of daily trivial concerns; for example, junk mail, as well as those not so quotidian; for example, returning home to find a cow in his garden!
Like millions of others in the UK in the 90s, my family and I would tune in to watch Victor struggle against relentlessly inexplicable situations. I rewatched all the episodes on DVD in 2019 with my partner, Vikki. She’s a decade younger than me and thus only knew of the legend that is Victor in passing. Halfway into watching our first episode together, she exclaimed: ‘Oh. My. God. You’re just like Victor!’ Fictional or otherwise, I’ve never been so proud to be compared with anyone else! I hadn’t realised how similar I was in temperament to the character. Had Victor entered into my subconscious during all those viewings in the 90s? I’d been exposed to many other characters in other shows too, but none seemed to be so clearly reflected in my demeanour. In the age of rampant identity politics and the importance of representation, if prompted I wouldn’t have chosen a bald, white, Scotsman, sexagenarian to be my temperamental doppelganger (‘if you can’t see it, you can’t be it?!’). Vikki gifted me a Meldrew mask for Christmas that year. Four years on and it’s still proudly placed at our front door, keeping guard.
A champion of the people
The common connotation of ‘Victor Meldrew’ is that of a grumpy old man. When recently attributing the moniker to one of my sexagenarian students, who’d also been made redundant against his desire, he responded in a defensive tone. We then explored the meaning of Victor’s name and the contexts in which he would laudably rally against social ills. My student changed his mind and would now, I hope, like myself, be bouncing with joy at the compliment of being compared to such an eminently admirable character!
Creator and writer David Renwick admitted that Victor was based on himself, turned up a notch for comedic effect (Fincham & Plowman, 2023). Renwick notes that the name is ironic, for Victor finds himself ‘losing’ in the game of life more often than not. The defeats he suffers culminate in his death at the wheels of a tired driver — no motive, just rotten luck. Renwick refutes that charge that Victor is an irrationally grumpy character. Rather, he argues that his frequent exasperation is in proportion, and a fully “reasonable response to the absurdities of the world’ (Mills, 2016, p.275)
‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society’ (adapted from Krishnamurti, 1968)
Victor’s better half is Margaret (Annette Crosbie). Whilst often frustrated by Victor’s temperament, the couple are depicted as having an affectionate relationship. In one episode (‘Warm Champagne’, 1993), she is exploring having an affair, but decides against it. She rejects the advances of a potential lover, remarking about Victor: ‘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’. Indeed, Victor shows compassion for others, especially those less fortunate and/or experiencing grief, throughout the series. This is best exemplified in ‘The Wisdom of the Witch’ (1995), in which he saves the life of a neighbour who despises him, Patrick (Angus Deaton), by diving to intercept a knife attack.
Far from being a grouch, Victor is often characterized by selflessness, compassion and a concern for the common good. The catchphrase that haunted, and continues to haunt, Richard Wilson wherever he goes — ‘I don’t believe it’ — can be read not simply as a mark of exasperation, but also a sense of existential confusion. The phrase pithily depicts Victor’s impotence as the vicissitudes of fate have their merry way with him. As Mills (2016) notes, the phrase ‘is a statement of being, not a call to action’ (p. 267).
The phrase thus combines ontology (being) with epistemology (knowing): Victor is incapable of being in a state of wilful comprehension of that which befalls him. Richard Wilson’s genius lies in his ability to so convincingly convey this angst, and render Renwick’s sharp script into comedic drama. Victor is, then, in many ways a tragicomic character. Both a champion of the people, and a socio-political loser.
Tragicomedy
‘The insane are running the asylum’ (adapted from Rowland, 1919)
Renwick consistently combined farce, tragedy, satire and the surreal. I’ve never seen a sitcom so original. Prima facie, One Foot in the Grave is a show about a grumpy old man rallying in disproportionate manner to trivial concerns. Dig a little deeper and one can appreciate the layers and genius of Renwick’s extraordinary scripts (Lewishon, 2003). Rewatching the show with a more critical eye in my 30s, I could see the shadow of Beckett appear throughout the series: the mundane, inert, inexplainable. Some experimental episodes took these Beckettian themes on with gusto. For example:
- ‘Timeless Time’ (1990): shot in one take, entirely in the Meldrews’ bedroom as they struggle with insomnia;
- ‘The Beast in the Cage’ (1992): the Meldrews (alongside long suffering friend Mrs Warboys) are stuck in a traffic jam for the whole episode;
- ‘The Trial’ (1993): Victor commands an entire episode alone, whilst waiting at home to be called for jury service;
- ‘Rearranging the Dust’ (1995): also shot in one take, in which the couple spend the episode waiting in a solicitor’s office;
- ‘Threatening Weather’ (2000): set in the living room for the whole episode, in which the couple attempt to survive the hottest night of the year during a power cut.
Mills (2016) observes that all of the above episodes share a similarity: characters stuck in a particular place (p. 269). The humour emerges through the ennui of such circumstances, and that which the characters do in order to survive: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on’ (Beckett, 1958, p. 103). Renwick ingeniously reworks the hackneyed anglophone sitcom formula of the suburban couple such that the dreariness of existence is not punctured by humorous perspectives, but rather accentuated to such a degree such that absurd comedy is the result. For example, whilst Seinfeld (1989–1998) provided neurotically humourous perspectives on inane situations via an urban sensibility, One Foot in the Grave delivered humour not through witty observations, but rather through highlighting existing contradictions, such that exasperated laughter was the only sane outcome.
The episodes above in particular accentuate the finitude and absurdity of human existence under late capitalism: in automobiles — ‘The private car is the focus of a cluster of right-wing institutions. The high cost of each element is dictated by elaboration of the basic product, and to sell the basic product is to ‘hook’ society on the entire package’ (Illich, 1971, p. 58) — suburban, lower-middle-class homes, and offices of those upholding bureaucratic laws. Whilst the home is often depicted in sitcoms as a sanctuary from the madness of the ‘outside world’, in three of the episodes listed above such distinction is eroded. Rather, the home is seeing as implicated in the insanity ensuing beyond its walls. This is a highly significant move by Renwick, for it suggests that the characters are forever
at the mercy of social structures, suggesting that no one exists outside of society and there is no place to hide from its incompetence. This means that even though society has rejected Victor from its workforce and has defined him as being without value, that society continues to define, control and upset his life, but via his enforced retirement, he is powerless to do anything about this (Mills, 2016, pp. 270–271).
Adorno and Horkheimer (2002) argued in 1944 that the average US viewer would impotently sublimate their feelings of social ineptitude onto cartoon characters in order to survive their social situation:
In so far as cartoons do any more than accustom the sense to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment (p. 138).
In One Foot in the Grave, something unfortunately similar occurs. We sublimate our feelings onto Victor, but, hopefully more optimistically than in the example above, recognise, empathise, and perhaps become kinder for it. A gift of the figure of Victor, then, is the way in which it accentuates individual hope on a tightrope amidst the ‘complicated, uncaring and incomprehensible’ (Mills, 2016, p. 266).
‘Pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will’ (Rolland, attributed to Gramsci, 1920)
As Lewishon (2003) observes, again contrary to the crude reduction of Victor to a misanthrope, he suffers because of his kindness, and, optimism. He is no nihilist; he ‘maintains an air of optimism — feeling, despite all evidence to the contrary, that things will turn out all right. He is invariably wrong about this’ (Lewishon, 2003). True to the mores of a tragicomedy, the baffling situations in which Victor finds himself ‘are rarely of his own making but are instigated by wild coincidences, complex misunderstandings, bureaucratic inefficiencies and sheer, awesome bad luck’ (Lewishon, 2003).
The pain of laughter
Rewatching the series in its entirety in 2019, I recalled a scene from my childhood viewings that had me suffering stomach and facial pains owing laughing so uncontrollably. I couldn’t remember the episode or exact context, but I remember the feeling of it hitting me like a Mike Tyson uppercut. Rewatching the scene in my late 30s, and again in preparation for this article, I can confirm that I still respond in an irrational manner. I have tears of laughter in my eyes as I feebly try to type this right now! The scene in question appears in ‘Beware the Trickster on the Roof’ (1992). It involves Victor answering the phone to an unknown caller. Here is the dialogue in full:
Victor: 4291.
Burglar (voiced by John Challis, a.k.a Boycie in Only Fools and Horses): Mr Meldrew?
Victor: Speaking.
Burglar: Oh, good evening. You don’t know me. My name’s Jack. I’m one of the people that burgled your house a few weeks ago.
Victor: I beg your pardon?!
Burglar: I was wondering if you could just help us on a couple of points. You remember we pinched the video of yours, one of them Hitachi long-play models? It’s very good, don’t get me wrong — records great, smashing picture — only we’re having a bit of trouble working out the 14-day timer. I wondered if you’d still got the manual to hand at all?
Victor: Still got the manual?!
Burglar: We can’t make head nor tail of it this end. As I’m sure you can appreciate, we’re out most nights breaking and entering and we don’t like to miss Home and Away.
Victor: Don’t like to miss Home and Away?! Who the hell do you think I am?! How’re you getting on with our three-piece suite?! Send the cushions over and we’ll put them through the wash for you!
Burglar: There’s no need to take that attitude.
Victor: I’ll take whatever bloody attitude I like and you can just SOD OFF!!
A somewhat hidden gem that doesn’t make the YouTube highlights reels (otherwise I would’ve linked it!), I think this scene pithily captures all that is so side-splittingly humorous about the show: absurdity, Victor’s justifiable exasperation and powerlessness, the tragicomic individual against a social ill.
Re-watching the show with my partner in 2019, I plan to re-watch it in its entirety again when our son is older. I can think of no better role model than Victor to prepare him for the insanity, ineptitude and tragicomedy that will undoubtedly befall him as he enters puberty and beyond!
References
Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford University Press.
Adorno, T. W. (2005). Minima Moralia: reflections from damaged life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. Verso.
Beckett, S. (1958). The unnameable. Grove Press.
Fincham, P. & Plowman, J. (Host). (2023). What’s funny about… [Audio podcast]. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qfmq
Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. Penguin.
Krishnamurti, J. (1968). Commentaries on living. Penguin.
Lewisohn, M. (2003). Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy. 2nd edn. BBC Worldwide.
Mills, B. (2016). Old Jokes: One Foot in the Grave, Comedy and the Elderly. In J. Kamm, J. & B. Neumann (Eds.), British TV Comedies: Cultural Concepts, Contexts and Controversies (pp. 265–277). Palgrave Macmillan.
Vaneigem, R. (1983). The revolution of everyday life, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Rebel Press.
