User Reviews

Margaret is unwell, and needs some time in bed to recover, there's someone to look after her, Victor Meldrew.

Incredibly funny, the combo of funny and serious once again. There are definitely elements of the surreal once again, the video man being one.

Lots of funny scenes again, Victor trampling around the bedroom tormenting poor Margaret once again, Victor's gorilla suit is a classic scene. The scene that gets me is where Victor tries to spare Margaret's feelings over the earrings.

This was a classic series, every single episode here is a classic, this one certainly is.

'we all make mistakes from time to time.'

It's a common sign of old age to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. A quarter of a century or so on from Victor Meldrew slumping in front of his television acerbically watching at the end of a hard-days' retirement, as we watch him, all I can say is he - and it - have aged well.

Technological advances and social networking did not interrupt his bitter-sweet days, in the Descent into Maelstrom episode, it was merely a dodgy waste disposer and confusion about his disposal of video recorders - an entirely obsolete technology, now - to the dispossessed.

This episode neatly encapsulates the dark elements of the series, which give it such a quirky but meaningful quality. Margaret collapsing from nervous exhaustion is hardly a laughing matter, yet Victor's clumsy efforts to help still amuse us. But at the core of this - and many other episodes - we are treated by David Renwick to a tour de force of farce and confusion - ranging from living impersonations of garden gnomes to unlikely mistakes at the dry cleaners leaving Victor at one point, sitting bemused on his chintz sofa surrounded by two gorilla outfits. Surrealism meets suburbia - you couldn't invent it - but David Renwick did.

The denouement, with its laugh out loud wit, was only exceeded by the farcical scene in which a woman seeking a buckshee video recorder is mistaken for an osteopath. These things happen - in One Foot In the Grave. The failure of British television to repeat the joys of this, the belly-laughs of Fawlty Towers or the cerebral charm of prison life in Porridge or - constrained by similar boundaries, Steptoe and Son, is something we have to put up with. Maybe the British sense of humour got lost in a traffic jam in the Blackwall Tunnel. Or perhaps, just perhaps, the darkness at the end of Victor's tunnel provides us with sufficient amusement even now.