Cultural Impact
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Despite gaining initially low audience ratings, by the third series, One Foot in the Grave was making the Top 20 ratings, with some episodes seen by more than 16 million viewers. In particular, the Christmas 1993 edition topped 20 million viewers.
Due to the series' popularity, people who constantly complain and are irritated by minor things are often compared to Victor Meldrew by the British media. Renwick disputes this usage however, claiming that Victor's reactions are entirely in proportion to the things that happen to him.
Renwick integrated some of the plots and dialogue from the series into a novel, which was first published by BBC Books in 1992. Renwick also adapted four episodes for BBC Radio 2, which first aired between 21 January 1995 and 11 February 1995. The episodes are "Alive and Buried", "In Luton Airport, No One Can Hear You Scream", "Timeless Time" and "The Beast in the Cage". They are regularly repeated on the digital speech station BBC Radio 4 Extra and are available on audio CD.
A loose American remake of the show starred Bill Cosby and was simply titled Cosby; it ran from 1996 to 2000. David Renwick was listed as a consultant on the series. In 2001, Swedish commercial television channel TV4 produced a version of the show, entitled "En fot i graven", starring Gösta Ekman as Victor Meldrew and Lena Söderblom as his wife. A total of 12 episodes were broadcast.
Wilson dislikes saying his character's catchphrase ("I don't believe it!") and only performs the line for charity events for a small fee. This became a joke in the actor's guest appearance as himself in the Father Ted episode "The Mainland", where Ted and Dougal annoy him by constantly repeating his catchphrase. The situation was conceived when Father Ted writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews sat behind Wilson at a performance of Le Cirque du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall. They considered how "tasteless and wrong" it would be to lean forward to him every time that an acrobat did a stunt and yell the catchphrase, and then they realised that that's exactly what their fictional priests would do. This was also played upon when Wilson made a guest appearance on the comedy TV quiz show Shooting Stars, in which Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer purposefully misquoted his catchphrase by referring to him as "Richard 'I don't believe you' Wilson".
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