Video: Martin Clunes Interview

After a break of almost two years, comfy comedy drama Doc Martin makes a welcome return to the ITV schedules this weekend for its fourth series. We sat down with Martin Clunes for a wee chinwag to find out more.

What Buckham Fair means to Martin Clunes

A man as much in the public eye and with as big a heart as Martin Clunes is bound to get swamped with requests to help good causes, but he's a man who hates to say no.

What started in a humble way as a small horse and dog show last year on his 20-acre homestead in Beaminster has grown to a fully-fledged fair and a way of saying a big yes to local charities.

Reggie Perrin isn't dead, worse luck. He's down at the beach, nodding cruelly back to Leonard Rossiter. "Goodbye Old Reggie, hello New Reggie," says Martin Clunes, butt-naked. "Or why not just end it all? Prove once and for all that I'm not a fraud, just walk out to sea ..."

Good idea. Go on, do it. Put yourself out of your misery, and us out of ours. This remake has been a catastrophe, a massive error of judgment. If you go now, maybe the whole thing will be quietly forgotten and the memory of the original can recover.

But he has a packed suitcase with him, ready to come back from the dead, just as Rossiter did. And I fear that can only mean one thing: another series. [Cue lots of canned groaning.]

Reggie's existential crisis comes to a head in this final episode, which sees him go into public meltdown during a speech about male grooming products. As ever, Martin Clunes s on top form as the sarcastic monster/creature of pity, and the dialogue has been sucker-punchingly good fun. Fittingly, it all ends up on a beach.

This remake has done well in the ratings and hopes for a second series must be high. For my money, Martin Clunes has carried the thing more or less single-handed, but tonight's episode is a joke-free zone. Writers Simon Nye and David Nobbs have tried to persuade us that being bored with suburban life is funny; now they want to persuade us it's tragic, too. But it's 2009, not 1974; it's a world (as Reggie observes) where choice is plentiful. So when he goes on about the pointlessness of his life, you want to slap him and tell him to resign, elope with Jasmine and go remake The Good Life instead. Instead he gets more and more frazzled. It's the night of the office party: "I'm going as existential crisis man," he quips. And that's about the best joke in the show.

There has been much to admire in this update of the Seventies sitcom, which comes to the end of its six episode run tonight. Martin Clunes's performance has been terrific; a reminder of his many strengths as a comic actor that were starting to become buried under less-pleasing memories of mawkish turns in undemanding ITV comedy dramas. The writing has been sharp and the laughs have come thick and fast. In fact, the series might have been better served if it hadn't been named after its predecessor, leaving it so open to comparisons. The key themes still resonate, especially in the current climate, and without the name 'Reggie Perrin' hanging over it, the writers may have been able to move it into unchartered territory rather than sticking so rigidly to the original plotting. But it should still be considered a resounding success.

"That's not funny," groans Reggie as he lies in bed watching a boxed set of French comedies bought by his wife. "It's a comedy - come on, somebody fall over!" The trouble is, self-indulgent French comedies start to look like a barrel of laughs next to this reheated sitcom. A sample gag: "How's work going on our chest hair strimmer?" asks boss Chris. "It's all going tits up," replies Reggie. With jokes like these, it's tempting fate to have a pop at the French. Still, Martin Clunes is as watchable as ever, even if his range of options - moaning, fantasising, offering dry observations on the absurdity of everyday life - are starting to feel repetitive. This week he gets so fed up with commuter trains he buys a racing bike, with predictably painful results.

"What a guy!" says Anthony (Jim Howick) of Martin Clunes's curmudgeonly yet likeable character, Reggie Perrin, in tonight's penultimate episode of the series. As Reggie takes up cycling to work, his marriage with his perennially preoccupied wife continues to feel the strain in this improving sitcom remake.

The only problem with the success of this Reggie Perrin remake is that it may end up breathing new life into the old-fashioned sitcom, just when it was ready to disappear for ever after a long and miserable illness. The penultimate episode is funnier and sharper than ever. Reggie (Martin Clunes) lists some of the things that cause him distress, including death, earphones and "a sense that love is the answer coupled with a searing hatred of so many things and people". To ease his misery, he decides to take up cycling to work - an experience he likens to childbirth without a baby at the end. When he returns home, his wife (Fay Ripley) is unusually sympathetic. "At least your face broke the fall," she says.

Reggie Perrin is a series that really wouldn't right without the live audience feel. With Martin Clunes in the lead role as the increasingly disillusioned Reggie, it's bound to be of interest to most but the problem is for every gag that works and actually produces a laugh there are 10 more that don't even warrant a smile and it makes me feel like each little witty comment is being forced upon me. Plus, Reggie is the only believable character in a land of caricatures.