THIS series toys frequently with the definition of Icon. Everywhere, the word is loosely applied, often meaning “in the public eye”, which admittedly suits our purposes from time to time.

The problem this week has arisen before with fictional characters: whom to iconise, the creation or the creator or, as in this case, portrayer. We’ve experienced it with Jean Brodie and Muriel Spark, Malcolm Tucker and Peter Capaldi, Rab C Nesbitt and Gregor Fisher, Chief Miekelson and Jack Docherty.

Always, we’ve gone for the fictional character and this week is no exception. It’s Victor Meldrew played by … (at least let’s have a fanfare for the man) … Richard Wilson.

Two points to note immediately. One, though the iconic character of BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave is Scottish, there’s no particular reason why he should be. He lives in a southern English suburb. It’s just that Wilson happens to have a Scottish accent. It’s tempting to think he got the role on account of his hangdog expression.

Or perhaps, heaven forfend, the show’s English creator, David Renwick, wanted a whingeing Jock to play the miserable lead character. But Margaret, Victor’s more upbeat wife in the series, is also Scottish, as is her portrayer … (another fanfare on kazoo, please) … Annette Crosbie.

At any rate, the character was created specifically for Wilson, with whom Renwick had worked on newspaper sitcom Hot Metal. When Wilson dithered (feeling himself at 53 too young to play a 60-year-old), Renwick considered as an alternative – the equally lugubrious-looking Les Dawson, for whom he’d previously written gags.

The second point to note is that Wilson came rather to resent the character, and in particular his catchphrase “I don’t believe it”, which he was frequently pressed to utter by leading intellectuals on the streets. Latterly, he has only done it for charity. He told The Guardian it was “hard to get back to my normal, affable, lovable self after being him [Meldrew], even for half an hour”.

Floral tributes rest at the scene of sit-com star Victor Meldrew's 'death'. The final moments of the BBC's hit series One Foot in the Grave where Victor, alias actor Richard Wilson, is killed by a hit and run driver were filmed in the sleepy village of Shawford, Hampshire. 

Job blow
In the first episode of One Foot, aired in 1990, we get Meldrew’s backstory: he’s been forced into early retirement from his job as a security guard after his workplace installed an automatic security system.

One immediately reassuring note here is the sitcom tradition (US and UK) of having someone on a low wage live in a large suburban house. It’s not as if his wife is earning: she works in a florist’s.

Retirement leaves Victor free, but freedom is a distressing condition demanding choices, decisions, clarity. In return, it offers only time. Fact: when you want time to slow down it speeds up; when you want time to speed up it slows down.

As Victor tries to fill his time with hobbies, pastimes and odd jobs, he finds himself frequently misunderstood and the victim of cosmically sadistic bad luck. The name Victor is ironic, Renwick has explained: he’s a loser.

He’s also a hypochondriac, frequently browsing through his trusty medical dictionary “to see”, as his wife puts it, “what he can die of next”.

Victor does not see himself as retired and is always trying to find another job (becoming at one point a lollipop man, the previous incumbent having been mown down by a juggernaut). But his efforts usually end in failure.

This makes home life difficult, particularly for Margaret, to whom Victor has at least been loyal throughout their 42 years of marriage. We learn from Victor that she was always his “first choice”.

From Margaret, we learn that they first “shared their bodies” in the garden during a power cut at a party. Back inside, with the lights on again, she realises she’d “grabbed hold of the wrong person”.
Slowly, poor Margaret also becomes more cynical, in one episode opining that the world is “all speed and greed” and “nobody does anything about anything”.

Feud neighbours
AMONG other characters, the Meldrews’ inordinately cheerful charity worker neighbour is mocked and dreaded by Victor, while Margaret’s dozy friend Jean Warboyes is always guaranteed to deepen his despair by bringing out her holiday snaps at inopportune moments.

Meldrew’s other expressions of exasperation beyond “I don’t/do not believe it!” include the equally eloquent “Unbe-lieeeve-able!”, “What in the name of bloody hell?!” and “In the name of sanity!” The world, as the BBC website puts it, “conspires against him with its bureaucracy, misunderstandings and surreal coincidences, frequently landing him in all manner of ridiculous situations.”

These include being prosecuted for attacking a vicious pit bull terrier with coconut meringues, being buried alive in his own garden, mistaking a dead hedgehog for a slipper, and finding a toupee in a loaf of bread. Could happen to anyone.

According to the Beeb, the show “challenged the traditional boundaries of cosy, suburban sitcom, dealing with subjects such as death and old age with pathos and a strong overtone of black comedy”.

The British Film Institute (BFI) concurs, noting that, beneath the apparently old-fashioned suburban setting, “the layers of normality are gradually peeled back to expose a dark and disturbing universe spinning out of control”. Victor is funny “because through him we see that the world really is mad”.

The whole point of the series, agrees Dr Phil Wickham of Exeter Yoonie, “is that Meldrew is the only sane voice in a mad world”.

Viewers identified with Victor’s rages at the irritants of modern life: litter, junk mail, voicemail, traffic, rudeness, car mechanics, clingfilm.

His misery finally ended in 2000 when the last episode of the sixth series, Things Aren’t Simple Any More, saw him killed by a hit-and-run driver. Ten million tuned in to see his demise.

Dead funny
WHEREVER he is now – waiting in a queue to complain at Customer Services in Heaven probably – back in the comically bleak reality of our world, passers-by left bouquets of flowers in homage at the filming location of his death, a railway bridge in the Hampshire village of Shawford.

According to the BBC, he had “earned himself a place among the ranks of downtrodden comedy heroes such as Alf Garnett, Basil Fawlty and Edmund Blackadder”.

The BFI, meanwhile, remembers One Foot as “one of the finest, most complex, British sitcoms”, one that “proved the form could ask difficult questions of a mass audience while still providing huge belly laughs”.

It paved the way for other unorthodox comedies such as The Office and The League of Gentlemen, each illustrating that there’s nothing funnier than the weirdness, cruelty and unfairness of the world.

Robert McNeil is The Herald’s nonsense correspondent. He denies being open to bribes with whisky. Unless it’s a single malt.