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| The fall and rise of Reginald Perrin |
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| TV,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F4
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Sitting through this again is a depressing experience in the best possible sense of the word. Breaking away from your normal sitcom blueprint, which takes an everyday situation and finds something different to do with it on a weekly basis, FARORP (heh-heh) makes an awful lot of comedy mileage out of endless repetition.
Sure, every week there’s a different jam for Reginald to blunder into, but the majority of the show is Reginald having his breakfast, kissing his wife goodbye, murmuring to himself on the train, being bored senseless at work, lusting after his secretary, going home, sitting in bed, lights out ad infinitum. This is all nailed in by highly economical use of the same footage every week, be it Reg walking to work or Reg flitting off into same fantasy footage of his hippo mother-in-law.
I love Leonard Rossiter in this, he’s a god amongst desperate moaning types. It’s those moments when it cuts back from the Walter Mitty scenes to a close up of his tired leering face, and the way he plays out his puny but angry rants – he’s peerless. His kind of character is so par for the course these days in sitcoms, but only Leonard could play this kind of edge-of-sanity stuff with such conviction.
The rest of the cast are the stuff of classic characterisation – all totally one dimensional, all packed with at least one grim catch phrase, be it CJ the boss’s ‘ I didn’t get where I am today
’, or Ad-boys Tony ‘Super !’ and David ‘Great !’. Reggie’s stoic military-man brother-in-law Jimmy runs him closest in the insanity stakes, and it’s no surprise that Geoffrey Palmer who played him went on play every other role in exactly the same manner.
I was surprised to learn that there were only 21 episodes of this classic, I thought it ran for years. I remember finding it funny when they first showed it over twenty years ago (mainly for the farting chair joke) and it still makes me laugh now (that farting chair again).
BBC2 Tuesday 21.00GMT
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