Eric Chappell obituary | Television

Although he wrote several popular television sitcom series in the 1980s, Eric Chappell, who died aged 88, was best known for his early hit, Rising Damp (1974-78), produced on Yorkshire Television and starring Leonard Rossiter as the over-the-top and lustful landlord Rupert Rigsby and Frances de la Tour as one of his tenants, Ruth Jones, in a northern college town.

Also in the cast are Richard Beckinsale, as the long-haired, borderline, angelic medical student Alan Moore, and Don Warrington, as the cool, composed Philip Smith (son, he says, of an African prince) , have brought added depth to comedic acting.

Its quality was a result not only of Chappell’s excellent scripts, he had a knack for writing dialogue in extended comedic scenes, but also of the show’s theatrical origins. Chappell, who had worked as an auditor for the East Midlands Electricity Board for 22 years, was an unreleased novelist who decided to try his hand at acting because a play meant writing 20,000 words, compared to a minimum of 70,000 for a novel .

On a whim, he sent his play, The Banana Box, to an agent of Curtis Brown because he had read and admired the plays of RC Sherriff (author of the WWI hit Journeys End), who was client of this agency. There was a reading of the play, then a premiere at the Phoenix Theater in Leicester in 1971, with Wilfrid Brambell (the salivating rag-and-bone man from Steptoe and Son) as the landlord, followed by a Oxford Playhouse tour. produced by David Scase.

This version landed at the Hampstead Theater Club in London in May 1973. The text was published in Plays and Players magazine with Rossiter, De la Tour (replacing Rosemary Leach, who had played Miss Jones), Warrington and Paul Jones then in view. as a blues singer with Manfred Mann as a medical student.

He was then transferred to the Apollo Theater for a six-week run as the television pilot was ordered and Beckinsale replaced Jones. The BBC reportedly refused to take up an option because Chappell’s script contained too many jokes.

The owner as played by Brambell was called Rooksby, but an actual owner of that name objected to being portrayed on stage by such a scrupulous rag and the name was changed to Rigsby. It was undoubtedly Rossiter’s turbocharged, manic and physically extraordinary performance that propelled the TV series’ huge success, and indeed its continued popularity. Joe McGrath’s 1980 film, with Christopher Strauli replacing Beckinsale, who died tragically young in 1979, was a serious disappointment, but Rising Damp lives in those endless repetitions.

Chappell became a full-time writer and embarked on a prolific career. He was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the son of a print shop worker, and educated at Grantham Boys’ Central School. Another television sitcom he had written, The Squirrels, aired almost simultaneously with Rising Damp. It was set in the accounting department of a television rental company and featured Bernard Hepton as a boss who, like Rigsby, but less alarmingly, sees himself as a ladies’ man.

Much of Chappell’s writing played on ideas of class distinction, snobbery and delusions of grandeur, estranged partners and adultery, and social and emotional crises. Still working on a trusty Olympia typewriter, he wrote most of his television sitcoms as dramatic plays for the theatre, sometimes adapting a play he wrote two dozen in all and sometimes returning a sitcom to its theatrical origin.

None of these plays achieved a success comparable to that of The Banana Box. Father’s Day (2011), for example, was a poor spin-off of the hit series Home to Roost (1985-90) starring John Thaw as an irascible divorcee who sees his comfortable single existence invaded by a teenage semi-delinquent son (Reece Dinsdale), who turns out to be a chip from the old block.

Wife After Death in which a husband’s double life is revealed at his funeral was last heard on tour with Tom Conti in 2010, although it remains, like many of Chappell’s pieces, a staple of the repertoire amateur. This recognition at least satisfied his thirst for appreciation in live theater, which he loved.

Chappells’ other sitcom series included two collaborations with Peter Bowles (who had played a lascivious comedian in a memorable episode of Rising Damp): Only When I Laugh (1979-82), in which Bowles was one of three class-differentiated patients in a hospital ward (the others played by Strauli and James Bolam), supervised by Richard Wilson grumpy what else? surgeon; and The Bounder (1982-83), in which Bowles embarked on a superb double act with George Cole as, respectively, an ex-con living with his streetwise brother-in-law.

There were also highlights in Duty Free (1984-86), with two British couples mingling adulterous on holiday in Marbella (Keith Barron and Joanna Van Gyseghem crossing a class barrier in illicit lust); and in Singles (1988-91), both co-written with Jean Warr, starring Roger Rees, Judy Loe (widow of Beckinsales) and, replacing Rees in the third series, Simon Cadellin a maelstrom of a singles bar where regulars vie for social and sexual supremacy.

Chappell married Muriel Taylor, who worked for Oxfam, in 1959. They had two children, Richard and Paula, both teachers. All three survive him.

He never strayed from his roots, living in the village of Barrowby, two miles from Grantham, smoking his pipe, playing golf and tennis and quietly contemplating the folly of most human effort and behavior, of which he brocha a good part for the greatest pleasure. of millions of viewers in his popular and insightful writing.