Rising Damp de la Tour, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington. Rossiter played Rupert Rigsby (originally Rooksby in the stage play), the miserly, seedy, and ludicrously self-regarding landlord of a run-down Victorian townhouse who rents out his shabby bedsits to a variety of tenants. Beckinsale played Alan Moore, a long-haired, naive, good-natured and amiable medical student who occupies the top room. Frances de la Tour played Ruth Jones, a fey, whimsical spinster and college administrator who rents another room, with whom Rigsby is in love and to whom he proposes in the last episode. In the pilot episode, a new tenant arrives. Philip
Rising Damp the failing lives of three of the four main characters. Rigsby is longtime separated from his wife and has since become a seedy, ignorant man who is suspicious of anyone different from himself. Miss Jones is an unhappy spinster who is shown to be desperate for male attention (even willing, in effect, to pay for it). Alan is socially inept and remains a virgin throughout much of the series, despite appearing to be in his mid 20s. Philip, by contrast, is a relatively learned and emotionally intelligent man, who responds to Rigsby's racist ignorance with a kind of ironic complicity,