Rising Damp his wife. Seedy and furtive, Rigsby has poor interpersonal skills. His professed love of Miss Jones is mostly sexual. She rejects him due to him being married, until his marriage ends and Miss Jones accepts his proposal. As he pries and spies upon his tenants, Rigsby often carries Vienna, his large, fluffy, black-and-white tomcat. Rigsby's amiable pet, and confidant, is so named because - as Rigsby tells it - when he goes to put him out on a cold dark night, if there is another set of eyes out there, then it's Good Night, Vienna. Ruth Jones (Frances de la
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,