Michael Amherst is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His book Go the Way Your Blood Beats, exploring desire and sexuality, won the 2019 Stonewall Israel Fishman award for nonfiction
Our lives in lockdown – shrunken, claustrophobic, with time to ponder life’s meaning – are perfectly represented in One Foot in the Grave.
Released on BritBox, when the service launched in November last year, it is darker, yet more poignant than other recent sitcoms. The show, which ran from 1990-2000, follows the lives of Victor and Margaret Meldrew, played by Richard Wilson and Annette Crosbie. Victor is forced into early retirement, replaced as a security guard by an electronic box, rendering him “a lower form of life than a Duracell battery”.
One Foot in the Grave depicts a disenchanted state. Society is atomised, selfish and individualistic. A Tory government presides over a crumbling public realm. The bourgeois suburbia in which the Meldrews live is homogenous to a degree that is erasing. When they have a housewarming party, Victor takes his guests into the wrong home because all the houses in the street look alike. The promise of technological progress and modern convenience fall into waits for repairmen, and packaging that must be kept for when a product inevitably goes wrong.
How, we are asked, does one find meaning in a world like this? In the face of the money motive and unthinking bureaucracies, is there any hope for a greater value placed on human life, existence and our relations with each other?
Albert Camus’s theory of absurdism argued that, in the face of the meaninglessness of existence, it is up to us to both acknowledge life’s absurdity, yet to hold firm to our own curated meaning and purpose. One Foot in the Grave’s forebear, then, might properly be not earlier sitcoms but the theatre of the absurd. Indeed, the show’s creator, David Renwick, has acknowledged the influence of Samuel Beckett, right down to the visual allusion to Happy Days, when Victor is buried up to his neck in the garden.
Meanwhile, Pinter is echoed in the attention paid to the violence implicit in language. This is a world in which everyone talks but few listen. Coupled with bureaucracies that dehumanise those they purport to serve, we hear afresh the cruelty shrouded in the platitudes of customer care. In one anecdote, a hospital is so overstretched that a woman, waiting to get to the operating theatre, is told they are so short of trolleys does “she mind sharing with a corpse?”.
Yet, while the Meldrews stop and question life’s purpose, it doesn’t get them anywhere. Victor’s attempts to grapple with the meaning of life are repeatedly undercut by bathos as the banality of everyday life intrudes and sweeps him up again – as it does us all.
Told to shield for 12 weeks, I was locked indoors while next door renovated their house. Unable to use the garden, I was trapped with the sound of the pneumatic drill on the other side of the wall, as their builders took up the kitchen floor. I waged a futile war against the foxes digging up the lawn.
One Foot in the Grave perfectly illustrates how, when our world shrinks, these small things try us in ways they never ordinarily would. Victor’s hypochondria gives us pause to consider whether health anxiety might not only be a natural response to a pandemic, but also symptomatic of greater time to reflect on our own mortality. Margaret’s observation that, since he stopped working, Victor soaks up “every hideous disaster and piece of misery in the world like a giant sponge”, suggests that life’s struggles are magnified by the amount of time we have to dwell on them; while Victor’s constant war against littering and fly-tipping speaks to meaning found in the close to home, when we feel alienated from the wider world.
But perhaps life’s petty irritations can be turned on their head: do we focus on the trivial when we have nothing else to hold our attention, or is it only when we have time to pay attention that we discover what matters to us?
On this reading, Victor’s exasperation and many conflicts are born of his refusal to allow the selfishness of others and the inanity of modern living to destroy the things he and Margaret value. His lament at “three Twix wrappers in the honeysuckle today!”, while trivial, also articulates the mindless destruction of the meaningful things of his world. Margaret acknowledges this following Victor’s death, when she bemoans the world today as one in which nobody, with the exception of Victor, “does anything about anything”.
None of us are prepared to risk, to commit to a belief in the meaningful nature of our lives. In that sense, Victor is something of a tragic hero – his trouble at odds with his famous catchphrase. In spite of his myriad misfortunes, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary that either he or his meaning matter, he does – still – believe it.