Rising Damp Smith (Don Warrington) is a planning student who claims to be the son of an African Chief. As a black man, he brings out the ill-informed fears and knee-jerk suspicions of Rigsby. However, the landlord quickly accepts his new tenant and henceforth regards him with a wary respect... wary because of Philip's intelligence and smooth manners, and especially because Miss Jones finds herself attracted to the handsome sophisticate. Of these four principal actors, only Beckinsale was a new recruit - the others had all played their roles in the original stage play. In the first series, there was another tenant
Rising Damp not include the feature film version. In his introduction, Eric Chappell writes: "When I decided to publish the scripts of "Rising Damp" my first thought was, did I have them all? What followed was a desperate search in the loft amongst piles of mildewed papers until I found them.… The scripts were written in feverish haste by someone who didn’t really know what he was doing, and who was finding things out as he went along. I didn’t admit this at the time, even to myself. I took the view that sitcom writers fell into two categories: the quick and