Reggie Perrin: Series 1

The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin was a landmark show of the 1970s. The original novels by David Nobbs dovetailed perfectly with the laconic delivery of Leonard Rossiter, creating a British Walter Mitty, with flights of fancy taking Reggie away from his daily drudgery and creating an anti-hero for the downtrodden. This modern update with Martin Clunes is perhaps a perfect example of what is wrong with British television.

Reggie works for "Groomtech", a manufacturer of shaving products where he is beset by his moronic secretary Vicki (seemingly a refugee from a failed Catherine Tate sketch) and his tittish boss Chris Jackson (Neil Stuke, delivering one of his limited range characters that has been his calling card since Game On). Clunes is serviceable, but the major problem lies in the programme maker's desire to use Men Behaving Badly tactics whilst hanging the central conceit on a known comedy hit.

It would be like making Hancock's Half Hour with Martin Freeman and asking him to "play it like you did that guy in The Office" and giving him modern vernacular to hang himself with. There are wholesale rip-offs at every turn - Mr Garrison’s comment regarding “bleeding for five days” in 1999's South Park: The Movie sticks out like a sore thumb to presumably everyone other than the BBC i-Player middle-agers who remember the original and find nonsense like this "edgy". With Perrin soon finishing its six-episode run on BBC One, haemorrhaging viewers at an alarming rate per episode, and with the pathetic canned laughter ringing in its ears, this Reggie is dead on arrival.



Extras: Reggie Perrin Rises Again, Studio Tour, Outtakes, Audience Warm Up and Audio Commentaries.

Released on DVD on 25th May 2009 by 2Entertain.

Written by Simon Cole.