TV Series · 1990 · TV Series · 1990s
One Foot in the Grave
Scored from 30 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: TV Series · 1990s (630 peers).
Summary
David Renwick's BBC sitcom stars Richard Wilson as Victor Meldrew, a man forced into early retirement when his job as a security guard is handed to an electronic box. Marooned at home on a suburban estate with his long-suffering wife Margaret, played by Annette Crosbie, he fills his days with grievances, ill-fated errands and running battles with neighbours, tradesmen and officialdom, erupting into his catchphrase 'I don't believe it!' Episodes typically escalate one small indignity into elaborate farce, engineered so that coincidence leaves Victor blamed for calamities he did not cause. The series pairs that slapstick with a bleak streak, including instalments that end badly for their characters.
Released in 1990, One Foot in the Grave is a comedy and drama television series. Its certificate is TV-PG. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom. Episodes run about 30m.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 1990s television series — 630 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1 of whom clear the calibration test. Only 30 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 31 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where One Foot in the Grave lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against TV Series · 1990s (630 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 30.
Cohort: TV Series · 1990s
