Dated and unfunny, this is one remake of a classic Seventies sitcom too far

I suspected it would be bad, and I was right. It is. Reggie Perrin, a remake of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, is pointless and unfunny, and it captures the zeitgeist – if you believe in a thing like the zeitgeist – not at all. It’s as if The Office had never been made.

Quite why David Nobbs, who wrote the original series, agreed to co-write this update (I use the word very loosely because it’s about as up-to-date as roll-on underwear and looped sanitary towels), I have no idea. But attentive viewers will recall that he has form on this score: in 1996, he wrote another traumatically unfunny sitcom, The Legacy of Reginald Perrin, which picked up the story after the central character’s death, and which starred Geoffrey Palmer rather than Leonard Rossiter, who died in 1984. But whatever his reason – maybe Simon Nye, his new writing partner, is just very generous with the custard creams – someone should tell him. The horse is dead, Dave. You may now put down your crop.

The moment I knew it was irrevocably bad, as opposed to mildly stinky, was when Reggie (Martin Clunes), having conceived a crush on his new colleague, Jasmine (Lucy Liemann), rested his foot on her wastepaper basket in manly pose. Where was his foot headed next? I knew it. Straight inside the wastepaper basket. But to be honest, I was already pretty close to checking out.

Earlier, the 2009 Perrin, who works in shaving products at a company called Groomtech (its offices are just along from those of Sunshine Desserts, where the original Perrin so miserably toiled), had received spam offering him a penis extension. Now, my husband receives, on average, at least three of these emails a day and, on average, he makes a joke about his obvious lack of need in this department at least once a week. Actually, that’s not true. He used to, but then even he realised that the line was getting a bit threadbare. I think the throbbing vein on the side of my face might have been the giveaway. Don’t Nobbs and Nye have wives, or girlfriends? Failing that, why didn’t some long-suffering female in the BBC comedy department say something? Because, with some men, a throbbing vein on the side of one’s head is simply not enough.

The first Reginald Perrin was broadcast when men still worked in the same job for 40 years, and women stayed at home and polished their Knorr stock cubes. Transporting the character to 2009 is not going to work if its writers think that all they need to do is throw in the odd joke about email. There is something utterly unconvincing about Groomtech, and I don’t just mean the set, which is so plastic and low-rent that I’m almost certain they’ve borrowed it from Neighbours. Old-fashioned, slightly silly companies like this just don’t exist any more; we are in the age of conglomerates and open-plan.

Then there’s the new Reggie’s wife, Nicola (Fay Ripley). We have not yet been told if she has a job, but we have seen her in her suburban living room with the other members of the Women’s Social Action Committee. Eh? For a whiff of truthfulness – and this is the only way comedy can ever work nowadays: by sticking to reality as closely as possible – she should surely be in a reading group, not hanging with bolshie feminists, the likes of whom you have not seen on television since the days long, long before Germaine Greer wrote her book about the menopause.

And what of Clunes, who steps so outrageously into Leonard Rossiter’s dapper shoes? I never thought the old Reginald Perrin was that hilarious in the first place. But its secret, if it had one, was its darkness. Reggie was, after all, having a nervous breakdown: powerless at work, powerless in the bedroom. Rossiter, a fine actor as well as a uniquely gifted comedian, could deliver impotence, in all its forms. Clunes, though, is only able to offer up a sort of half-hearted laddishness; this Reggie feels like his old Men Behaving Badly character (Nye wrote that, too), with fewer fart jokes. Somewhere along the way, he and Nye have confused ennui, which is really rather subtle, with sheer bloody boredom, which most certainly is not.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website