THE PERMISSIVE SOCIETY

Rehearsals: 20^th – 22^nd July 1975 at The Sulgrave Boys Club, 287 Goldhawk Road, London, W12

1:30pm – 5:30pm

Walk-Through: 24^th July 1975 at Yorkshire Television Centre, Leeds

Recorded: 25^th July 1975 at Yorkshire Television Centre, Studio 4, Leeds

Broadcast: Friday 7:30pm 7^th November 1975

CAST

Leonard Rossiter – Rigsby

Richard Beckinsale – Alan

Frances de la Tour – Ruth

Don Warrington – Philip

George A. Cooper – Mr Cooper

CREW

Creator/Writer – Eric Chappell

Producer/Director – Ronnie Baxter

Designer – Colin Pigott

Music – Dennis Wilson

Casting – James Ligatt

Floor Manager – Mike Purcell

Stage Manager – Terry Knowles

Production Asst – Mary Byrne

Lighting – Peter Squires

Cameras – Stuart Hinchliffe

Sound – Dave Whiteley

Vision Mixer – Kay Harrington

Tech Supervisor – Gordon Quinn

Wardrobe – Brenda Fox

Make-up – Viv Locklin

Prop Buyer – Mike Killman

Scenes – Eric de Quintano

Call Boy – Tim Dowd

Warm-up – Felix Bowness

Episode Review

ITV’s notorious landlord and his luckless lodgers return in outbreaks of…Rising Damp

Student lodger Alan is all excited at the prospects offered by a blind date, on which fellow student lodger, Philip, is taking him. No wonder, for the girls in question happen to have a self-contained flat. But landlord Rigsby, brimming with old fashioned righteousness and, perhaps, with more than a suggestion of envy in his voice, is highly critical of Alan’s Cassanova like approach to the date. “Just you remember”, he warns him. “The permissive society stops at that front door – and we don’t want any of it in here.”

Alan’s amorous adventure, as it happens, doesn’t work out as smoothly as it might have done – especially when he is later confronted by a highly irate father… However, when Rigsby later discovers Ruth tearful ad depressed, having heard of Philip’s 10 wives back home, he begins to think there might be something in this permissive society business after all….

Alternate review kicking off Series 2, Friday’s from November 7, 1975. Saturdays, from November 8, 1975.:

“Say it with flowers…” (Even if they are pinched from the local park). That’s the way to win a woman’s heart according to landlord Rigsby when he goes a wooing of Ruth, the genteel, fluttering tenant of one of his rooms in his run-down lodging house. And does it work?

The answer lies in a new series of “RISING DAMP”, Yorkshire Television’s highly acclaimed situation comedy about a disreputable landlord of a seedy lodging house and his hapless lodgers which will be networked for the next eight Friday nights from November 7.

“RISING DAMP” is written by ERIC CHAPPELL, a former Electricity Board auditor from Grantham who is now writing professionally, and who has won this year’s Pie Colour Television Award for the Most Promising New Television Writer.

Alternate review from April 1981

Widely regarded as one of ITV’s best-ever situation comedies, the award-winning “RISING DAMP” returns to the nation’s screens with a series of six specially-selected episodes from the earlier series, originally screened in 1974 and 1975….

Intersting to note:

• Production# 2771
• Did Rigsby move since the end of the first series? There’s certainly been a change in the rooms…
• Series 2 commenced during the summer of 1975, an unforeseen circumstance later in the series ‘Moonlight & Roses’ would change the path of the series near the end of its run.
• Though the first episode to be broadcast, “THE PERMISSIVE SOCIETY” was in fact the 2^nd episode to be recorded, after “FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD”.
• ‘The Permissive Society’ – not in Top 20 viewing figures
• Fridays at 7.30pm, opposite US imports The Invisible Man, starring David McCallum

Did you know?

• Rehearsals took place at the Sulgrave Boys Club at 287 Goldhawk Road. This location was also where the band ‘The Who’ would originally form. Roger Daltrey, a member of the Sulgrave Boys Club in the 1950s, initially started a skiffle group known as The Sulgrave Rebels. They then became The High Numbers, then The Detours. The club was later named the Sulgrave Youth Club and still going strong.
• A mew was ‘fed in’ during the scene in which Rigsby aims a kick at Vienna.
• Ruth can be seen clutching her paperback novel of, Barbara Cartland’s “A HEART FORSAKEN”
• End credits were superimposed over the closing scene of this story.

Dressing Rooms:-

Leonard Rossiter #12

Richard Beckinsale #11

Frances de la Tour #6

Don Warrington #8

George A Cooper #7