Richard Wilson plays anger as something that has been building for years, then lets the hurt show after the shouting stops. It made Victor Meldrew a comic character we could feel for, and it has followed him into every exasperated authority figure since.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Richard Wilson take a piece of bad news as Victor Meldrew. The head goes back, the eyes open a fraction too wide, and the voice, nasal and Scottish and biting every consonant off clean, climbs into a complaint that sounds as if it has been drafted since breakfast. The joke is the disproportion. What keeps it from being a party trick is what happens afterwards: the anger runs out and the hurt does not, and Wilson leaves it on his face while the scene moves on.
He came to it late. He switched to acting at 27 after working as a hospital laboratory technician, left RADA in 1965 and did repertory in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester before television found him in the 1970s, in Crown Court and Only When I Laugh. He is Mr Turton, the Collector, in David Lean's A Passage to India (1984), a film we admired for its first hour and a half and found slow after. Tutti Frutti (1987) gave him Eddie Clockerty alongside Robbie Coltrane. Then David Renwick offered him Victor, and he was 53, and he turned it down; he did not want to play older men or lean on the accent. He relented, and One Foot in the Grave ran from 1990 to 2000.
It is the performance we would send anyone to. Renwick's scripts occasionally have to manufacture a fresh grievance for Victor to walk into, and the strain shows. Wilson never strains. He plays every complaint as the latest in a long series, which is why even an unreasonable one is understandable, and why Annette Crosbie's Margaret, standing beside him, seems married to a man rather than to a running gag. We laughed at his fury and then, more than once, felt sorry for him, because he refuses to make Victor pleasant in order to earn the sympathy.
The cost was predictable. Since Victor the offers have run to curmudgeons and exasperated mentors, and Gaius, the court physician in Merlin (2008–2012), is the longest-running example: the same precision, put to gentler use. The other half of the career, largely invisible to television viewers, is directing, at the Royal Court and Sheffield Theatres and as far back as Play for Today in 1982, where he favours physical games, improvisation and new writing over tricks. It fits. His acting has always served the words rather than decorated them.
He once said of that voice, "I never thought of it as distinctive; I just thought it was nasal." The rest of us heard Victor Meldrew, and we still do.
Biography
Richard Wilson OBE is a Scottish actor, theatre director and broadcaster. Born Iain Carmichael Wilson on 9 July 1936 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, he trained at RADA after working as a laboratory technician and appeared in repertory theatre in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester.
He is best known for playing Victor Meldrew in the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990–2000). Other television roles include Eddie Clockerty in Tutti Frutti (1987), a guest appearance in Father Ted (1995) and Gaius in Merlin (2008–2012). He has also directed for stage and television, including work on Play for Today (1970). Wilson was appointed OBE in 1994 for services to drama.
