The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
 This innovative BBC sitcom, The Fall and Rise of Reginald
Perrin, had as its central character a man falling headlong into
the calamity of mid-life-crisis. The series was also an inspired
swipe at middle class England and big business.
The
Fall And Rise was quite unlike most other
sitcoms: it employed a serial storyline and featured adult themes
of disillusionment and loss, and a central character who was on
the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was also fantastically
funny.
David Nobbs adapted his 1975 comic novel The Death Of
Reginald Perrin as the first series of this quintessentially
British sitcom (it was retitled The Fall And Rise Of Reginald
Perrin for paperback) and, originally, the author wanted
Ronnie Barker to play the part of Perrin, a middle-aged sales
executive combating a mid-life crises with flights of
fantasy.
Instead, he was blessed with Leonard Rossiter, who delivered an
outstanding performance in the role.
Reginald Iolanthe Perrin had worked in the same boring job with
Sunshine Desserts for 20 years. Every day he left his boring
Norbitan home, took the same boring train journey, arrived at his
boring office (always eleven minutes late), and was greeted by his
boring secretary Joan who he dreamed of having an affair with.
The business is run by C J, a powerful figure full of
impressive-sounding aphorisms that, on analysis, prove
meaningless, comprising a heap of mixed metaphors and clichés
piled one on top of another.
C J has a quality of elusiveness that makes dealing with him
frustrating, for it is impossible to decipher what he actually
thinks about any given subject. Most of his statements begin with
the all-purpose introduction "'I didn't get where I am today
by . . . " followed by a baffling example of what he did or
didn't do to arrive at his present status. He also has a penchant
for whoopee cushions, so that meetings begin with a definite air
of farce.
Perrin's colleagues, Tony Webster and David Harris-Jones, are
equally superficial and lacking in original thoughts, meeting any
suggestion with a simple one-word platitude, "Great!"
(Tony) or "Super!" (David), so that the only difference
between them is chemical: Tony bluffs that he is one of life's
great kidders, amazingly confident and about to go places, whereas
David is an intensely nervous individual, with zero confidence and
a perpetually sweaty deportment.
The dithering company doctor is no use either: he knows nothing
about medicine and lives in hope that a sick female employee might
be 'feeling chesty' so that he can have an opportunity to examine
the problem area.
Then there is Reggie Perrin's secretary Joan, a middle-aged
bundle of simmering sexuality, fatally attracted to Reggie and
liable at any moment to pounce on him.
At home, Reggie's wife Elizabeth is pleasant and understanding,
but it's her very tolerance and unchanging reliability that grates
on Reggie and adds to his malaise. Then there is Reggie's
exceedingly boring son-in-law Tom, who makes appalling home-made
wine, and his wildly off-centre brother-in-law Jimmy, whose
military background seems to have cast him adrift in civilian life
where he appears hopelessly out of his depth, using militaristic
forms of speech to explain his predicament ("No food. Bit of
a cock-up on the catering front").
From episode one, Perrin's life is brain-numbingly predictable
and repetitive - the train ride into London is always 11 minutes
late, whatever the excuse - but there are already signs that he is
going off the rails with his lapses into surreal reverse logic and
a bizarre habit of visualising a hippopotamus whenever thinking of
his mother-in-law.
In short, Perrin, at the age of 46, is questioning the meaning
of life, and going through a real and quite terrifying mid-life
crisis.
Gradually his brain parts company with normality and madness
becomes the order of the day. In a last-ditch attempt to preserve
his sanity and escape the rat-race, he fakes his own suicide by
leaving a pile of clothes on a beach and walking off into the
sunset. (This plot was echoed in real life when prominent British
politician John Stonehouse faked his own death in identical
circumstances.)
Wondering what it would be like to attend his own funeral,
Reggie then wears a fake beard, calls himself Martin Wellbourne
and falls in love anew with Elizabeth, who recognises his true
identity but, for a while, pretends otherwise.
Nobbs once again wrote a novel, The Return Of Reginald
Perrin (published in 1977), which he then adapted for a second
TV series. In this Reggie soon jettisons his Martin Wellbourne
persona, reveals that he's not dead and reacquaints himself with
his relatives and old work colleagues.
After a brief spell working at a piggery for a Mr Pelham, and
warding off the advances of a dowdy spinster Miss Erith, Perrin
sports a new devil-may-care attitude and launches a shop, Grot,
dedicated to selling useless things, and even he is amazed when it
becomes a massive global success.
 Reggie
remarries Elizabeth, who has become a Grot business executive, and
when Sunshine Desserts collapses he relocates his former
colleagues at the Grot HQ. But still Reggie is numbed by routine
and eerily finds himself taking on the traits and mannerisms of
CJ.
The second series ends with Perrin, his wife and CJ all faking
their suicides.
The third and final book, The Better World Of Reginald
Perrin (1978, once again written in tandem with the TV
scripts), formed the basis of the somewhat inferior final
series.
Here Reggie has his most ambitious project to date: he gathers
the usual crew and launches Perrins, a self-contained commune for
the middle-aged and middle-class, where its members can learn to
live in harmony and then set out to spread the gospel.
The dialogue was still sharp but the Perrin idea seemed to have
run its course and there was a distinct lack of energy about this
third series. In following the first two, however, which contained
some of the sharpest and funniest comedy ever aired on TV, it did
have a hard act to follow.
A poor US adaptation, called simply Reggie was made by
ABC in 1983, and a variation on the Jimmy character appeared in
the C4 series Fairly Secret Army a year later.
Inexplicably, the BBC made the series The Legacy of Reginald
Perrin in 1996, continuing the story after Reggie had been
killed by an advertising hoarding (Leonard Rossiter himself had
passed away in 1984), leaving his former colleagues to perform
absurd tasks in order to inherit several million pounds from his
will.
The group unites to form BROSCOR (the Bloodless Revolution of
Senior Citizens) but their march on London is not deemed wacky
enough to win the prize.
Stripped of its central all-important character the show was
doomed to certain failure.
|
