One foot in the very grave...

Something that has interested me for a long time is the presence of allusions to the works of Edgar Allan Poe in the popular BBC situation comedy series One Foot in the Grave. Not only are there episodes with the titles 'Descent into the Maelstrom' and 'The Pit and the Pendulum' - the titles, also, of two Poe stories - but other titles include 'We Have Put Her Living in the Tomb', a direct quotation from 'The Fall of the House of Usher' as well as a knowing nod to another of Poe's celebrated tales, 'The Premature Burial'. What Freud identified as the unheimlich, or 'uncanny', is seen frequently in David Renwick's dark suburban sitcom, and the potential for uncanny goings-on is made all the more piquant by the everyday, anytown, just-outside-of-London setting of the show.


Renwick, it goes without saying, must be a fan. In the episode titled 'Tales of Terror' - another case of allusive gesturing towards the American grandmaster of horror fiction, since the 1962 film adaptation of four of Poe's stories, Tales of Terror, is undoubtedly what the title adverts to - Nick Swainey, perennially cheery neighbour of the Meldrews (from the second series onwards), even announces (when Victor notices the Latex model of a severed head drying on the washing line) that his amateur dramatic society are putting on a stage production of 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', Poe's Dupin story (largely credited with being the true genesis of the detective story).

Sorry, that was far too many brackets. Pathetically parenthetical, one might say. But perhaps the matter of Poe in One Foot in the Grave is just a side-issue, a topic worthy of a brief comment and one explanation for the dark material that often turns up in the sitcom. Perhaps it's more than that. It has been said that Poe pares down the essential apparatus of the Gothic horror novel - the subterranean space, the old castle, the cast of stock characters such as the heroine, brave hero, old bastard, etc. - to just a few homely items in, for instance, his short masterpiece 'The Tell-Tale Heart' (which, even if you haven't read it, some people are no doubt familiar with thanks to The Simpsons: another series, by the by, that has drawn on Poe's writing on more than one occasion). In that story, the subterranean chamber is just the space under the floorboards, the cast of characters is reduced to just two, and the Gothic castle has become just one room in which the 'action' takes place. In a way, Renwick's gestural allusions towards Poe form a natural progression from the Gothic novel to Poe's tales to this modern incarnation of the 'Gothic'. One Foot in the Grave is homely, suburban, familiar; and yet these strange, dark turns which the plot frequently takes (such as finding a dead cat in the freezer, which might remind Poe fans of his short, gruesome tale 'The Black Cat', in which a mutilated cat returns to haunt the man who brutally attacked it) might remind us, in a sort of third-hand way to be sure, but remind us nonetheless, of the Gothic tradition that lies somewhere behind it all. Perhaps not. Perhaps I'm talking absolute donkey droppings.

Take the two titles of episodes of the sitcom which (at least to my knowledge, but there may be more) share their titles with Poe stories. 'Descent into the Maelstrom' is not set somewhere on the Baltic sea, but instead refers to a waste disposal unit in a kitchen sink: you couldn't really get much more homely and modern and everyday. And 'The Pit and the Pendulum' alludes to a hole dug in the Meldrews' back garden (in which Victor ends up buried by an evolutionary throwback of a builder) and an old grandfather clock which comes into the Meldrews' possession after Margaret's mother dies. See my point? No? Then I probably AM talking donkey droppings. Sorry about that.

Be that as it may, one of the reasons I - and undoubtedly countless others - continue to find such joy in One Foot in the Grave (as well as Victor's stands against the injustices he encounters, o' course) is that this dark, sometimes positively black (I was going to write positively negative there, but thought better of it, thank God) streak that keeps cropping up makes it unlike any other suburban sitcom I can think of, at least pre-League of Gentlemen and Psychoville and what have you (and even then, The League of Gentlemen is hardly suburban, and its setting inside a small village is central to explaining the characters and activities found therein). Consider the denouement to 'Tales of Terror', that episode already alluded to, where Victor and Margaret discover that Mildred, one of their friends who is (like Mr Swainey) always cheerful, has hanged herself, and it turns out that she had been suffering from depression for many years. What is more grim and unexpected to find in a sitcom than that, and yet more natural and everyday? Isn't depression the commonest illness in Britain, or at least the most oft-treated by the medical profession? And, like all great entertainment, all great fiction, these dark moments lend a greater gravitas to the comedy (I mean 'comedy' in the sense of both 'humour' and 'comedy series').

Right, I think I've bored you for long enough. Thanks for reading. I could have mentioned Renwick's evident fondness for another great master of the short story, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as evinced by the title of the last episode of the first series, 'The Return of the Speckled Band' (anyone who knows their Sherlock Holmes will know that the 'speckled band' turns out to be a snake, as it does in One Foot). But I will leave it there...