The BBC is bringing Reggie Perrin back from the dead once again, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.

Two hour-long episodes of The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, starring The Thin Blue Line's David Haig as the frustrated fantasist, were recorded earlier this month for Radio 4 and are set to air on November 13th and 20th.

Co-starring Pip Torrens (Up The Women, The Lenny Henry Show) as CJ, Selina Griffiths (The Larkins, Benidorm) as Elizabeth, Amelia Bullmore (Brass Eye, Big Train) as Joan and Thomas Arnold as Jimmy, the two-parter has been adapted by Jon Canter from David Nobbs's original 1975 novel.

Canter, who has written for Lenny Henry, Richard Wilson, Fry & Laurie and Arabella Weir among others, feels that Nobbs's "melancholic" novel has been unfairly overshadowed by the classic BBC television version starring Leonard Rossiter, calling it "an extraordinary book".

"You don't know what tone is going to come next" he told British Comedy Guide. "Farcical? Bleak? Existential? Political?"

A previous television revival, featuring Martin Clunes in the title role, aired on BBC One for two series in 2009 and 2010. Written by Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye with Nobbs, it co-starred Fay Ripley, Wendy Craig, Geoffrey Whitehead, Neil Stuke and Lucy Liemann and received a lukewarm critical reception, suffering by comparison with the earlier Rossiter adaptation.

"Along with millions I'm sure, I remember the opening credits" says Carter, who deliberately didn't revisit the first television series beforehand. "John Barron as CJ, Geoffrey Palmer as Jimmy, Pauline Yates as Elizabeth, with that very 1970s pretty and long-suffering wife aura. And, of course, Leonard Rossiter with his astonishingly rapid delivery.

"And the catchphrases. Despite there being a bit of a cock-up on the memory front, I didn't get where I am today without recalling those things."

Canter was approached to adapt the novel by producer-director Sally Avens (Little Lifetimes by Jenny Eclair, Subterranean Homesick Blues). The pair had previously collaborated on the Radio 4 sitcom Boswell's Lives, in which Miles Jupp played biographer James Boswell meeting various eminent celebrities throughout history, and the 2019 comedy play I'm Dying To Help, starring Tony Robinson and Haydn Gwynne.

"She knows I love writing about men in crisis" he explains.

Avens asked him to remain "true to the novel, which is melancholic, nostalgic, poetic, farcical and state-of-the-nation. And, this being radio, I felt free to use Reggie's narration as a way to convey the poetry and the melancholy in particular.

"Of course I've included the catchphrases because I knew that listeners would feel cheated if I didn't. And they'd be right, because the catchphrases feature in the novel too. But David Haig is very different from Leonard Rossiter. The yearning and the sadness he brings to it are all his own. And when he's manic, he's manic in his own way. No one could do mania like Rossiter, so he doesn't."

What Canter appreciated most about Nobbs's writing, "more than anything, is his desire to entertain ... it seems he'd never let an opportunity pass to make people laugh". He cites an incident in which Nobbs had a medical emergency in an Indian restaurant. As he was being carried out on a stretcher by paramedics, he told fellow diners: "Whatever you do, don't have the prawn jalfrezi".

Still, he hasn't been slavish in his devotion to Nobbs's story, updating it for the 21st century and excising aspects such as the novel's incestuous relationship between Jimmy and Linda, his niece.

"I thought short and hard about cutting it, then I did" he explains. "It's not just the incestuous nature of the relationship that was problematic. The relationship itself took the focus away from Reggie's mid-life crisis. I felt we could only have one mid-life crisis, so it had to be Reggie's.

He's also "minimised" the mother-in-law hippopotamus jokes.

"In fact, at Sally Avens's suggestion, the mother-in-law has hardly any lines" he notes. "It's astonishing how much you have to cut when adapting a book for the radio - even when you have two one-hour episodes to play with - and she felt that the mother-in-law jokes were predictable and, of course, offensive to women. And not just sexist either. They're hippopotamist. Those wonderful creatures deserve respect."

Despite having written three of his own, The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin is Canter's first novel adaptation.

"A big challenge was making sure that listeners could follow the plot, since Reggie takes on so many different personae after he 'dies' - from an aristocrat, to an Italian, to a gardener, to the Reggie-adjacent Martin Wellbourne" he points out. "So I've used a lot of narration, frequently verbatim, which of course works far better on radio than it does on television or film.

"The biggest challenge was keeping to the through-line of Reggie's Fall and Rise. Making sure that each scene set up the next. Keeping a grip. Because in a novel, you can riff. You can spend a page sounding off about a theme that's close to your heart. But in a radio drama, that just dilutes the tension."

The recordings were "a joy" he recalls. "I loved watching David Haig at work, he's a very physical radio actor, acting out every line, his arms go everywhere."

Canter is hopeful that he'll be asked to adapt Nobbs's three other Perrin novels. "All someone has to do is ask. In return, I'll say that I can't do it immediately, even if I can, in order to make myself seem in demand."

Perrin still resonates as a character, he reckons, because "Reggie is a character going through a mid-life crisis, and there as many mid-life crises today as there were in 1975 and, doubtless, 1875. Who doesn't think, in their forties, that they're living the wrong life?

"Then there's a theme even bigger than the mid-life crisis. Maybe you can call it the 'life crisis'. What if I could live somebody else's life? Wouldn't that be a simple way to obliterate many of my problems? I wouldn't have 'my' problems if I were no longer 'me' ..."