YMMV / One Foot in the Grave

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: The Meldrews hate Ronnie and Mildred's guts, but it's hard for them (and the audience) not to feel some sympathy when Mildred is found to have committed suicide in the middle of a card game.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Although Victor is viewed by many as simply a grumpy old man, he also has many defenders - including the shows writer and Richard Wilson - who argue he is a good man who is always justified in the things he complains about.
  • This trope is especially prevalent with many offscreen Noodle Incident conflicts Victor has, with him getting an elaborate prank played on him by an offscreen antagonist for badgering them in the past. Either Victor is getting karma for flying off the handle, or a Jerkass is committing Revenge Myopia after they were rude first and Victor had the audacity to bite back (which tends to be the more common dynamic for onscreen feuds).
  • Margaret is either Victor's Closer to Earth better half or just an even grouchier more hypocritical version of Victor. Furthered in the finale where Victor has passed away and Margaret ends up taking his mantle as the resident grump.
• Broken Base: The Bottle Episodes; their supporters typically consider them the show's best episodes because they only need the bare minimum of set-up before allowing the jokes to flow non-stop for the rest of the runtime, while their detractors tend to complain that the unchanging setting and general lack of guest stars can make them repetitive. A third camp feels that while the first few bottle episodes work well — with "The Beast in the Cage" in particular being seen as a classic — the last two suffer from not changing up the "Victor complains non-stop about a situation for 20+ minutes before using the situation to make some philosophical observations about life" formula.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A lot of people would prefer to disregard the final episode. Not because of what happens to Victor but because Margaret seems to undergo a high-speed Flanderization into the vengeful widow.
• Growing the Beard: Series 1 certainly has its highlights, but Series 2 saw the addition of Patrick and Pippa, along with Nick Swainey as regular cast members. The move to a terraced house instead of the detached house that they had in Series 1 also helped give rise to more comedic scenarios, along with the edgier aspects of the show's humour coming more to the forefront.
• Nausea Fuel: Victor manages to step on a decomposing hedgehog of all things thinking that it was one of his slippers in "Timeless Time". Making matters worse, the hedgehog is actually shown on-screen.
• One-Scene Wonder: The tramp in "Dreamland", who has one scene, no lines, and steals the show. He's played by Enn Reitel, who also had a slightly larger (and speaking) role in the first Christmas special, to similar effect.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The scene in "Hearts of Darkness" in which a nurse kicks a man in her care is all the more shocking for the fact that the nurse is played by the then little-known Arabella Weir, latterly of The Fast Show.
  • The nurse who briefly appears in the final episode is played by Joanna Scanlan who would later gain recognition for her role as Terri Coverly in The Thick of It.
  • Lucy Davis appears in the 1996 Christmas special in a small role as the put-upon housekeeper Mrs. Blanchard.
  • The boxer who gets dumped in a trawler-load of fish and pissed on by a donkey is Eamonn Walker.
  • Mr. Jellinek from "I'll Retire to Bedlam" is played by John Bluthal, who would later be best known for playing Frank Pickle in The Vicar of Dibley.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: In "Who's Listening?", the storyline about the Burridge family is pretty much completely unconnected to the rest of the episode. The Meldrews, and even the Reverend Croker, aren't involved as anything more than observers, and the storyline is resolved by a Deus ex Machina.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Margaret is often conveyed as the Straight Man who has to suffer Victor's antics and grumpy behaviour, however she shares a similar nasty temper, and while many of Victor's grievances are reasonable when viewed from his perspective and he is often humbled whenever it vents onto her, Margaret can be catty or outright abusive to Victor for rather petty or uncontrollable annoyances, and is sparsely ever apologetic without being incredibly backhanded about it. There's also the fact that Victor never shows even an ounce of unfaithfulness to their marriage, but despite being the jealous one, Margret does. This is possibly because (as we learn in the episode Rearranging The Dust) that whilst Margret was always Victor's first choice, she only got with Victor because she thought that she was making out with someone else and didn't have the heart to tell him. There is a good chance that she always loved Victor less than Victor loved her.
  • Its a recurring gag that Patrick and Pippa are basically just a younger version of Victor and Margret and as such a lot of the criticisms above for Margret often apply equally to Pippa. In this case, whilst she has first hand experience as to why Patrick is wary of having anything to do with Victor (including rolling her eyes and sharing aside glances at all of the strange going's on), she will frequently blow her top at this attitude as if he is being unreasonable. Like Margret she has also had an affair and yet often gets very jealous whenever women show interest in Patrick (The Wisdom of the Witch). Unlike Margret however, who when someone was actually trying to poach Victor she went round the woman's house with a boxing glove and smacked her in the face (The Affair of the Hollow Lady), Pippa was more than willing to encourage Patrick's boss sexually harassing him if it meant that he could get a promotion (Starbound), which paints her as an even bigger hypocrite than Margret is. Basically, as much as Patrick can go a bit overboard, it is hard to see her as having the higher ground.
• The Woobie: Mr. Swainey, especially in the penultimate episode, where he is shown a glimpse of a lookalike American TV reporter, after which he realises that he has done little with his life beyond helping old people, and that his "reward" for that is likely to be growing old and dying alone. Granted, he does cheer up at the end of the episode after it turns out that the reporter got blown to shreds by stepping on a landmine, but it's hard to imagine that his depression won't return at some point.

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