Richard Wilson has revealed he urged BBC bosses to axe hit sitcom One Foot In The Grave after becoming fed up of fans yelling his character Victor Meldrew’s legendary catchphrase at him in public.
One Foot In The Grave aired for 10 years between 1990 and 2000 with as many as 18 million viewers tuning in each week to follow the exploits of Wilson’s curmudgeonly character’s hapless exploits – until he was finally killed off.
The Scottish actor, 86, has now opened up about his time playing the perpetually miserable Victor in a new Channel 5 documentary about the show due to air later this month.
During the documentary, he explains that he spoke with writer David Renwick about killing Victor off, saying: “I’d been doing it for quite a long while. I was getting a bit wearisome of being angry all the time. David said, ‘I’m thinking of killing Victor. What do you think?’ I said, ‘Kill him. Do it’.”
It was a surprising decision at the time given the character and show’s popularity, with Victor’s oft-repeated catchphrase – “I don’t believe it!” – quickly becoming part of British TV history.
But that was part of the problem.
He recalled: “I got the catchphrase shouted at me everywhere. In foreign countries; I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s got here as well’.”
Victor was finally killed off in the sixth series after being knocked down in a hit-and-run by a close friend of his long-suffering wife Margaret (played by Annette Crosbie).
The news came as a shock to Wilson’s co-stars however, who had no idea of what Wilson and Renwick had discussed.
Angus Deayton, who played Victor’s neighbour Patrick Trench, said the first he knew of it was when he got the script and he was shocked.
“I had no idea that it was going to be the final series until I saw the script for the last show and saw that Victor was going to die,” he recalled.
