Reggie’s back!
By Barry McIlheney, Radio Times
Martin Clunes is re-creating legendary TV character Reggie Perrin. Great! Super! Why?
We’re going to get slaughtered! There will be calls for me to fall on my sword and I shall have to bow out of TV for ever!” Martin Clunes may well be laughing as he contemplates the critical kicking that might be heading his way, but he has good reason to be a tad concerned. This, after all, is not just any old comedy role that the Men Behaving Badly and Doc Martin star is about to bring to life. This is Reginald Perrin, a legendary character who sits at the very top table in TV Heaven, played by the late, great, much-loved Leonard Rossiter.
“Yes, Leonard’s shoes are simply huge,” agrees Clunes. “But Leonard was Leonard, and I’m me. Though I did call on the spirit of Rossiter on a few occasions, and think to myself, ‘How would old Len do this?’ But the fact that David Nobbs is on board does legitimise the whole thing for me.
It’s his novel, and he can do what he wants with it.” Nobbs, now 74, wrote the novel The Death of Reginald Perrin in the early 70s. It was commissioned by the BBC as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and three series ran between 1976 and 1979. He wrote another series, The Legacy of Reggie Perrin, without Rossiter, in 1996. Now he’s back in the driving seat, along with co-writer Simon Nye, still perhaps best known for creating Clunes’s breakthrough show with Men Behaving Badly.
“The central theme of a man in despair is just as relevant today as it was in the 70s,” insists Nobbs. “But a lot of other things have changed since the time of the original shows. For example, Reggie’s old job was as head of exotic ice cream at Sunshine Desserts, and the range was Fig Surprise, Mango Delight, and Lychee Ripple. There’s nothing remotely exotic about any of those today. Heston Blumenthal wouldn’t even consider them.” In today’s brave new world, Reggie works for a company called Groomtech in the field of male grooming, an area with as much potential for humour as his old stomping ground. There are so many glorious absurdities in modern office life,” says Simon Nye. “The original show happened at a time when a lot of people were spending their entire career doing just one job that they therefore knew really well. Whereas now there seems to be a lot more knowledge about management, but the knowledge of what your company actually makes or sells is a lot thinner on the ground. So Reggie’s boss CJ, or Chris as he’s now known, might know all the management speak and can bark things out like Sir Alan Sugar, but he knows b****r all about male grooming.”
Ah, the legendary CJ. Does his reincarnation, as played by Game On’s Neil Stuke, still trot out his “I didn’t get where I am today” much-imitated mantra?
“He does, and it’s still beautifully written by David,” says Nye. “He’s brilliant at those sort of catchphrases, which is just as well, as I’m frankly useless at them.”
Along with Reggie’s move from ice cream to grooming, another big change sees the disappearance of the famous fantasy hippo that represented Reggie’s mother-in-law.
Now he has his own mother, played by Wendy Craig.
“He didn’t have a mother of his own in the original, so it’s nice to have a clean slate to work from,” says Craig. “It’s only a small role, but it was so lovely just being in a TV studio again. It was like coming home. I could have wept.”
As well as a mum, Reggie now also has a thoroughly modern wife, Nicola, played by ex-Cold Feet alumnus Fay Ripley, who’s all too aware of the Leave Reggie Alone school of thinking.
“My dad was obsessed with the original show,” she recalls. “We lived right next to the railway line Reggie supposedly travelled to work on, so I thought he would be thrilled when I told him I was going to be in the remake. Instead he begged me not to do it. Then he came along to see the filming and absolutely loved it, so thank God I didn’t listen to him.”
It’s in Ripley’s busy working wife that some of the biggest differences between the two versions of Perrin can be found. “The original wife [played by Pauline Yates] was this sweet woman who basically did whatever Reggie told her to,” says Ripley. “Whereas my character is now this multi-tasking teacher with lots of extra-curricular activities and loads of mates. Which is partly why she misses seeing a lot of Reggie’s crisis until it’s far too late.”
It’s the darkness at the heart of the original TV Perrin that gives it such a special place in so many people’s hearts. Which in turn makes the thought of it being played straight down the middle for an easy laugh so abhorrent to these original devotees or, as David Nobbs calls them, the first-timers.
The few first-timers who have already seen it think we’ve pulled it off,” says Nobbs. “They had reservations, but so far they seem to like it. And then there’s a whole generation, or maybe two, who have never seen the original shows. I’d just ask everyone, first-timers and newcomers, to give it a chance.” And bearing in mind that, as Ripley puts it, giggling, “the show’s called Reggie Perrin, not Mrs Perrin, so if anyone’s going to get shot it will be Martin,” we should perhaps give the last word to the man who’ll step into the shoes of one of TV’s true comedy legends.
“It will stand or fall on whether it’s funny or not,” says Clunes. “That’s really all that matters. So as long as people are laughing, I’ll be a very happy man.”
