One Foot in the Grave/Tear Jerker

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One Foot in the Grave regularly employed Black Comedy to make us laugh at things that might usually be horrifying, but it didn't stop a few tear jerking moments from getting through.

  • The episode "Who Will Buy" has Margaret delivering flowers to an elderly blind man, who asks her to read letters he assumes are from his children. In the end they are just brochures, but Margaret tells some white lies and pretends that the letters are about how much his family misses him. In the end the old man is murdered in his home, people mentioning that he was intending to get extra security but apparently spent the money for it on something else. The episode ends panning on a box of toy dinosaurs that he had bought for his grandchildren. It gets worse: the toys are overpriced mail-order junk being sold by a pushy door-to-door salesman (he comes to the Meldrews' house earlier in the episode).
  • The final episode "Things Aren't Simple Anymore" actually begins with main character Victor Meldrew dead, his wife Margaret trying to cope with it. It is shown in flashback that he was knocked down by a car after attending a works reunion (where no-one turned up and he left before meeting the one person who HAD attended) by a widow that Margaret befriends during the episode. In a surprisingly dark move even for One Foot in the Grave, after Margaret finds out that her new friend is the killer it is left ambiguous if she happened to give her an overdose of paracetamol as an act of revenge.
    • There was a charity short which featured a scene with Victor and Margaret. Victor is looking over some films and talking and Margaret seems to be ignoring him. At first the viewer assumes this scene takes place before the final episode and Margaret is just ignoring Victor out of annoyance as she had previously during his rants. But then he happens upon the DVD of Sixth Sense and says how they "saw the twist coming at the start". It's at that point Margaret leaves Victor alone and he fades away and the viewer realises that (as in the aforementioned film) he was dead all along. Either dark comedy or tear jerker depending on the viewer.


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