The Rise of the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (and its fall)

In November 1974, Labour MP John Stonehouse walked into the sea off Miami Beach and vanished. His neatly folded clothes were found on the shore, and it quickly became clear that this was meant to look like suicide. In Britain, he was presumed dead, which was shocking not just because he was a sitting politician, but because of the apparent despair that must have driven him to such an end. Tributes were paid. Questions were asked. And for a short while, the story seemed to settle into a familiar, tragic shape.

Except Stonehouse wasn’t dead. He had meticulously planned his disappearance, assuming a new identity and travelling to Australia to start again. The truth unravelled when bank staff in Melbourne grew suspicious of a man juggling multiple identities and accounts. He was arrested in December, barely a month after his “death.” What emerged was a bizarre and deeply unflattering story involving financial fraud, espionage allegations, and a man attempting to walk away from his life entirely.

David Nobbs was a busy comedy sketch writer, supplying material to the likes of The Two Ronnies and Dick Emery, and like his contemporaries John Esmonde and Bob Larbey (as well as playwright Alan Ayckbourn among others) he saw great comic potential in the idea of a man of ambition trapped in the grind of 1970s suburban living. The Stonehouse affair was clearly the missing piece of the puzzle, and quickly the bizarre world of Reginald Perrin was born.

It’s often said of past shows with strong identities that “that would never be commissioned today”. The truth is that Perrin couldn’t be commissioned in the mid-1970s. It was turned down flat and so Nobbs licked his wounds and went off to write it as a novel instead. Only when the novel was a bestseller did the television companies start circling. ITV wanted to make it as a two-part drama with Ronnie Barker, but Nobbs’s agent was certain it should be a sitcom and took it to the BBC.

And it’s really pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with four cameras and a bit of 16mm filming. I love Fawlty Towers every bit as much as Reginald Perrin, but Fawlty is clearly the work of a seasoned stage performer, who is creating a thirty-minute Whitehall farce which will play out in front of the studio audience in real time. Perrin, for all its literary origins, is a pure creature of television, with countless laughs delivered in the edit, whether it’s the fantasy sequences, hippopotamus cut-aways or just the endless location shots of Poets Close.

What it definitely needs, though, is a star performer. Who can say what the Ronnie Barker version might have been like, but this is Leonard Rossiter’s show all the way through, and the two attempts to revive it (one with the rest of the cast but not Rossiter and no Perrin and one with the excellent Martin Clunes) both proving that the word definitive ought not to be thrown around lightly.

Far more than just a flurry of catchphrases (but they are marvellous catchphrases), Perrin is uniquely strange, oddly sad, and deserves a far higher place in the public’s estimations. It’s great. And super.