Rising Damp

In which it is demonstrated that moderately droll TV boarding-house sitcoms ought not to be stretched to 98 minutes. Scriptwriter Eric Chappell (he also wrote the series) seems to have bundled together a few rejected TV scripts while in the grip of some sort of Carry On frenzy. At feature length, the characters - angular spinster, seedy landlord, young painter, smirking black medical student with public school accent - would have been better placed circa 1960. Their sentiments and prejudices (mostly about race and sex) are so overblown, archaic and unlikely that the sour, deft humour of the telly programmes has simply gone.