I watched these shows as a child, when television was part of the furniture and the family. There were only three channels. No catch-up, no remote control, no pausing the screen to check what someone had just said. You watched what was on. I was aware of the laughter, the sets, the catchphrases—“You’ve all done very well!”, “I didn’t get where I am today…”, “Shut-up Williams!”—but not what lay beneath them. I knew Are You Being Served?, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, On the Buses, the Carry On films. I watched The Generation Game with Larry Grayson, camp as Christmas, all knowing glances and flustered asides, commanding a primetime slot without ever quite being allowed to say what he was. I knew the rhythms of innuendo, the flash of underwear, the world of saucy postcards from the seaside. But I didn’t know what I was looking at. These weren’t just comedies, I see now, but dispatches from a country working out what it had become and what it could no longer be.
“The ‘permissive society’ doesn’t exist. I know, I’ve looked for it.”
Rupert Rigsby, Rising Damp
No Way Out
Rigsby never found the permissive society, though it haunted the walls of his crumbling boarding house like a damp ghost. Roy Jenkins, architect of so many 1960s reforms, spoke of creating a freer, more civilised country. But Rigsby never saw it. He heard rumours, through the Beatles, the protests of 1968, slogans daubed on Parisian walls and Trafalgar Square placards: freedom, equality, revolution. But by the time Rising Damp (1974–78) and Porridge (1974–77) aired, the moment had passed. What arrived instead was disappointment, disillusionment, and the slow realisation that the Second World War generation, those who had rebuilt Britain in the hope of something better, were being mocked off the stage. If the consensus was over, it ended not with a bang but with Leonard Rossiter ranting about loose morals to a room that had already moved on.
Both Rising Damp and Porridge are fundamentally about containment. Rising Damp is set almost entirely within the decaying walls of a boarding house, while Porridge unfolds behind the iron gates of Slade prison. Their central figures, Rupert Rigsby and Norman Stanley Fletcher, are working-class men in various stages of disillusionment, clinging to rituals of hierarchy in a world that no longer believes in them.
Rigsby is the last redoubt of post-war petty bourgeois chauvinism: racist, sexist, suspicious of youth, and desperate to be mistaken for his betters. He clings to myths of wartime service—Dunkirk, Anzio, North Africa—as though they confer not just status but moral superiority. But the details shift, the stories don’t add up. Somewhere between the medals and the shrapnel, there’s a distinct whiff of embellishment.
[Rigsby and Miss Jones are at a restaurant]
Miss Ruth Jones: I must say, I do like this place. Do you come here often?
Rigsby: Oh yes. It’s one of my old bachelor haunts.
Miss Ruth Jones: I thought you were married?
Rigsby: In name only, Miss Jones. It was a long time ago. At the end of the war – VJ night. She surrendered the same day as Japan. We resumed hostilities a week later.
Miss Ruth Jones: You make your marriage sound like a war!
Rigsby: Oh, it was, Miss Jones. Long periods of boredom followed by short bursts of violence. We should never have got married.
Rising Damp
He is a storyteller, like Fletcher. Narrative is both armour and camouflage. It’s easy to picture him today in a dressing gown, glued to GB News, nodding along to monologues about a country he thinks he once understood. The scaffolding of his imagined self, a soldier-patriot in a decaying boarding house, is held up by myths that no longer convince even him.
The real class conflict in Rising Damp isn’t over rent, but over legitimacy, who gets to narrate the country. Alan (played by Richard Beckinsale1), a medical student, is a figure of upward mobility and reason. Even if he can be a bit daft. Philip, played by Don Warrington, claims to be the son of an African chief, a detail Rigsby swallows whole, reverting to colonial deference cloaked in stereotype. The reversal is neat: the imperial fantasy turned back on the imperialist. Philip wins because he knows Rigsby better than Rigsby knows himself.
In Porridge, Fletcher is cleverer but no less contained. He survives not by rebellion but by gamesmanship. He bends rules, fakes paperwork, forges connections. There is no morality, only cunning. The guards are more imprisoned than the prisoners. Authority is pantomime. Mr Mackay talks of rules while the prisoners laugh behind his back. Fletcher knows the truth: the institution cannot command respect, only obedience, and even that is provisional.
Where The Hill (1965) exposed institutional brutality as sadism, Porridge renders it farcical. The system punishes dignity and rewards compliance. Mackay isn’t a monster, just a man trapped in uniform, enforcing rules that no longer make sense. All that remains is the laugh track.
Rot and Ritual
These comedies of constraint were shaped by writers whose backgrounds hovered around the edges of the worlds they depicted. Rising Damp was created by Eric Chappell, often described as a working-class writer, who drew on his time as a civil servant in the East Midlands to craft Rigsby’s pinched universe of social pretension and resentment. Porridge was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who came from backgrounds closer to the liberal middle class. Their earlier work—The Likely Lads and its sequel—dramatised working-class masculinity in slow-motion decline. Bob wants to rise above his background; Terry can’t or won’t. Their friendship is a trench to hunker down in while the world changes around them.
There’s a moment in The Likely Lads where Terry lists the groups he can’t stand, Koreans, Russians, the French, even the people next door. It’s played for laughs, but the tone is unmistakable: defensive, narrowing, world-weary. What are we laughing at? The bitterness? The failure to keep up? Or are the BBC’s middle-class writers and audiences laughing at Terry himself? This is the ambiguity that runs through the 1970s sitcom: the affection is real, but so is the sneer.
Laughing into the Void
If Rising Damp and Porridge mapped the slow disintegration of postwar class hierarchies and masculine identity, the sitcoms that followed began to confront the absurdity more directly. If Fletcher is cunning within the institution, Reggie walks out of it entirely, into farce and fantasy. Where Rigsby and Fletcher were trapped by institutions and fading authority, the next generation of sitcom characters, Reggie Perrin, Wolfie Smith, were beginning to see the whole edifice as farce. The mood darkened, the satire turned inwards, and what was once frustration gave way to absurdism and retreat.
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin aired in 1976, a surreal workplace comedy about a middle-aged sales executive at Sunshine Desserts who finds the rituals of corporate life so absurd he fakes his own death to escape them. In a particularly sharp episode, his brother-in-law Jimmy (Maj. James Anderson, ret.) tries to recruit him into a vigilante outfit dedicated to rooting out subversives. It plays as farce, but the satire had real targets: David Stirling, founder of the SAS, was doing something similar in real life.
Reggie: So come on, Jimmy, who are you going to fight when this balloon of yours goes up?
Jimmy: Forces of anarchy: wreckers of law and order. Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos, vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby- pamby probation officers, rapists, papists, papist rapists, foreign surgeons – headshrinkers, who ought to be locked up, Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue-sniffers, Play For Today, squatters, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins, Up Jenkins, up everybody’s, Chinese restaurants – why do you think Windsor Castle is ringed with Chinese restaurants?
Reggie: You realise the sort of people you’re going to attract, don’t you Jimmy? Thugs, bully-boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards, sacked security guards, racialists, Paki-bashers, queer-bashers, Chink-bashers, basher-bashers, anybody-bashers, Rear Admirals, queer Admirals, Vice-Admirals, fascists, neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, loyalists, neo- loyalists, crypto-loyalists.
Jimmy: Do you really think so? I thought support might
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
Wolfie Smith wanted to be a revolutionary but became a joke, Che Guevara in Tooting.
Wolfie:
[Ken has told Shirley that Wolfie will be coming to dinner] That’s it mate. Come the revolution, you’ll be first against the wall bop-bop-bop!Ken:
My God will be with meWolfie:
Citizen Smith
Well he better be wearing a bullet-proof toga!
These shows didn’t cause the stasis of the mid to late 1970s, but they ritualised it. They dramatised a country stuck between myth and market, singing war songs in a deregulated economy.
Gender, when it appears, is usually a source of fear or farce. Rigsby is pathologically repressed. Miss Jones, menopausal and lonely, exists only as the butt of his thwarted desire. In Porridge, women are largely off-screen, mothers, wives, daughters glimpsed during visiting hours or in letters read aloud by Fletcher. They are present only in their absence. Fletcher jokes about women, Page 3 models, imagined conquests, but when his daughter Ingrid visits, wearing a tight jumper and short skirt, the joke turns on him. He is suddenly outraged. The abstract becomes personal. His own daughter can’t be part of the modern world.
Bunny Warren: ‘Ere Fletch!
Fletcher: I’m late.
Bunny Warren: Look, I’ve got a letter from the wife, can you read it to me?
Fletcher: Listen Bunny, if you can’t read, how do you know it’s from your wife?
Bunny Warren: It’s got Elaine’s scent.
Fletcher: Cor, where’s Elaine work?
Bunny Warren: A tarpaulin factory
Porridge
Men Alone
Masculinity in these shows only recognises itself in the absence of women, and what it finds there is fear. The emotional life is almost entirely sublimated. These are comedies of sexual and social impotence: a Britain without libido, flailing its way toward Thatcherism.
That is what makes these sitcoms so revealing. They are not radical texts. But they are haunted ones. They show us a society already aware of its contradictions. Authority is mocked, hierarchy parodied, and the old certainties laughed off-stage. The postwar consensus wasn’t overturned in the protests of 1968 or the marches against Vietnam. It was chipped away by characters like Rigsby and Fletcher, men who had survived the war or grown up in its shadow, now reduced to rule-breaking or bluster.
Today, these shows come prefaced with trigger warnings. They may offend, we’re told. But the point of Rising Damp was never to endorse Rigsby’s racism, it was to render it absurd. Porridge never presented the prison system as legitimate, only as inescapable. The warnings misread the texts. They assume these scripts were once hegemonic, rather than already riddled with contradiction. What they really tell us is how far our institutions have come from trusting the audience’s capacity for critique. We no longer know how to laugh at the people in charge.
What’s often missed in the contemporary response to these shows, especially by those who claim to be defending them against “wokeness” is that the sitcoms were never uncritical celebrations of the world they depicted. Rigsby is not a forgotten hero of straight-talking common sense; he is the butt of the joke. Fletcher isn’t a model prisoner, but a man who sees through the absurdity of the institution that holds him. The laughter was already laced with loss, mockery, and irony. To mistake these shows for a straightforward record of national character is to flatten their contradictions, to ignore that they were already performing post-consensus mourning.
Today’s reactionary culture feeds on a kind of historical ventriloquism. The past is reanimated not to be understood, but to be weaponised. Sitcoms like Rising Damp and Porridge are no longer watched for their tensions but misremembered as stable ground, as if Britain were once united in laughter before the “woke” mob arrived. But these shows were already registering fracture. They didn’t unify; they revealed the fractures already running through the postwar consensus. In that sense, the contemporary right doesn’t just misuse them, it misreads them. The tragedy isn’t that Rising Damp is offensive. The tragedy is that some of these characters are now taken seriously.
If Rising Damp and Porridge depict a Britain on the brink of Thatcherism, then it’s no surprise that they feel newly relevant. Reform UK is Rigsbyism with a Facebook page: defensive, conspiratorial, terrified of foreigners, resentful of progress it doesn’t understand. But while Rigsby was mocked, Reform UK wears its bitterness as a badge of authenticity.
Starmer’s Labour, meanwhile, is Porridge without the jokes: a project of compliance dressed as competence, without even Fletcher’s wit to soften the blow. If anyone, he is Barrowclough, the liberal functionary who thinks the system can be fixed from within, and who ends every episode with the same bruised smile. Fletcher survives. Barrowclough believes. Only one of them knows the truth.
Women would only become central to British sitcom when women started writing them. Carla Lane’s The Liver Birds centred working-class women with desires and agency. Butterflies gave us a rare portrait of female dissatisfaction without mockery. Connie Booth’s Polly in Fawlty Towers was competent, clever, and unflappable. It wasn’t just that women wrote women better—they let women be the centre of the scene. But the broader absences remain striking. Where were the migrants, beyond parody? Where were the queer characters, beyond innuendo? These sitcoms reflected a Britain that was already diverse and complicated, but too often rendered those complexities invisible or laughable. The emotional focus was narrow—white, male, straight—and everything else lived at the margins, as punchlines or phantoms.
In the end, Rising Damp and Porridge offer a snapshot of Britain’s longue durée crisis: post-imperial, pre-neoliberal, clinging to rituals of class while the substance slips away. Their laughter comes from pressure. Their warmth from solidarity. Their melancholy comes from the sense that the world they portray is ending, and the one replacing it has no jokes at all.
I didn’t understand it then, of course. I was a child, laughing along without knowing why, surrounded by a family who never explained the joke. But the laughter stayed with me. And now, watching again, I see that it was never just laughter, it was warning, elegy, retreat. A country losing faith in itself, learning how to smile through the cracks.
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Footnotes
- Beckinsale also played Lennie Godber in Porridge ↩︎
