They have been blowing out candles for Fawlty Towers , and it is meet and right so to do. Fifty years old this month, John Cleese’s portrait of a Torquay hotelier at war with the world remains a masterpiece of British comedy. But there’s another Seventies romp we should not ignore, which was just as funny, and featured a central performance every bit as convincing. Leonard Rossiter may be better known as Reggie Perrin in David Nobbs’s series about a dreamer who longs to escape suburbia, but his greatest role was Rigsby, the seedy landlord, in Rising Damp .

Eric Chappell adapted the show, which ran for four years from 1974, from his stage play, The Banana Box . It wasn’t a hit, spending a month in the West End in the summer of 1973, but Yorkshire Television thought there was somethin

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