Simon Nye

Reggie Perrin Review

Considering I was born in the mid-80s and have never bought the DVD of the original series, I was able to watch the latest incarnation of Reggie Perrin without prejudice or pre-conceived notions of what it should be. On the basis of this episode I can only conclude that the original was far better or both are equally as disappointing as the other.

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BBC1 eyes more Reggie Perrin

The BBC is understood to be close to commissioning a second series of Reggie Perrin after dusting off the 1970s sitcom earlier this year.

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.

Comparisons are all but unavoidable in the case of Reggie Perrin, a remake of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, with Martin Clunes making the bold attempt to fill Leonard Rossiter's boots. I don't know if I can stress enough what a depressing idea this is on paper. A television channel should always have the ambition to create its own fond memories rather than lazily refurbish those from 30 years ago. And if you do go the recycling route you're likely to find that the fond memories of five years ago will probably get in the way. When David Nobbs's sitcom first went out, its bleak take on the purgatory of office life had very few rivals. The remake has to compete not only with memories of its own source, but also of The Office, a comedy that effectively rewrote the rules about how you could tackle the anomie of the nine-to-five.

It really is a bit surprising, then, that Reggie Perrin should work as well as it does. Martin Clunes helps a lot. He looks funny when he's glum, in a way that's sufficiently different to Leonard Rossiter. And the script - a collaboration between Simon Nye and David Nobbs - has some good lines in it. Reggie doesn't work at Sunshine Desserts anymore (though he walks past the sign on his way to the office), but at a grooming products company. CJ is younger and rather less dependent on his "I didn't get where I am today" catchphrase, and Reggie's toadying subordinates have been replaced by an unconvincing pair of marketing-types. It's not a disaster, by any means, which may be the best you can hope for from such an unimaginative commission.

We tried to pretend this didn't exist before and wasn't a 1970s TV great mixing misery and mundanity in a cynical sitcom. Pretend it's brand new. Come to it fresh. The verdict: this is quite a funny sitcom with a few good characters and a few good lines, possibly even worth watching throughout its run. Without such pretence: this is a horribly weak, unnecessary remake with all the lovely unique touches ironed out by the BBC comedy department's blandness steamroller, no doubt inflicted by Simon Nye, who can churn out humdrum sitcoms in his sleep and has been paired up with Perrin's brilliant creator David Nobbs.

The fall and rise and fall and rise and fall

Individual lines, which may have been Nobbs's, and may have been Simon Nye's, were fine, and Martin Clunes did a fair job as Reggie, also driven to fantasy by his humdrum life. But there was something wrong about the whole thing.

The nation can breathe a collective sigh of relief. The new Reggie Perrin is not an insult to the memory of a much-beloved original, in fact, it's a rather good sitcom in its own right. Simon Nye and David Nobbs' remake cranks up the misanthropy and the joke count, with Martin Clunes bringing his own brand of caustic charm to the role of the executive suffering existential angst.

Martin Clunes is a first-rate comedy actor, but also a very courageous one if he's willing to tackle a character created by comic genius Leonard Rossiter. Yet although Clunes lacks Rossiter's manic edge, nobody does grumpy curmudgeon better and there are other differences in the series that augur well, not least that Perrin creator David Nobbs has co-written this series with Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, who understands Clunes' talent well.

Characters like Wendy Craig's Marion, Reggie's disapproving mum, are refreshingly new and there's promise in the casting of Fay Ripley as Perrin's wife and Geoffrey Whitehead as her father.

Oh dear. This won't be the worst thing you'll see this year. But, with its canned laughter, wobbly sets and dated jokes, it might just make your top five. 'Reimagining' (darh-ling!) a hallowed TV classic is probably never wise, even when you have the original writer, plus Simon Nye, plus a great cast on board. Martin Clunes isn't horrendous as mid-life crisis-struck Reggie, but hey, he's no Leonard Rossiter. And he has to make the best out of ancient gags such as 'Anything that bleeds for five days without dying deserves a bunch of flowers'. Which we're sure was recycled from his Men Behaving Badly days.