Like much of the very best of classic British comedy, the likes of Steptoe and Son (remade for the US as Sanford and Son) and `Till Death Us Do Part (remade as All In The Family), The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was a zeitgeist television program that effectively captured the idiosyncrasies of a cultural and political climate on the verge of a major shift in values.
Adapted by writer David Hobbs from his own darkly comic series of novels, the short, sharp shock of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin comprised three seasons, and effectively a beginning, middle and end that encompassed one ordinary man’s complete mental breakdown brought about by the suffocating monotony of the everyday.
A comedy of manners that slighted both the middle class and the rise of consumerism in English society, each episode began with the now iconic title sequence that showed our hero shedding his clothes on the beach before swimming naked out to sea towards the vast, expansive horizon.
Brilliantly acted by Leonard Rossiter, Reggie Perrin was a quiet and inoffensive city gent teetering on the edge of mania whose nervous laughter carried with it the air of a nation dissatisfied with its collective lot. The series very cleverly illustrated the crushing tedium of the 2.4 child nuclear family with the recycling of stock scenes to great comedic effect. Each morning Perrin kisses his wife Elizabeth (played as beautifully oblivious by Pauline Yates) and journeys up Coleridge Close, along Tennyson Avenue, and down Wordsworth Drive to the train station where he rides to work opposite the same smug bastard everyday who always finishes the crossword before he does.
Staff meetings at Sunshine Desserts where he works are endlessly reenacted with only thing different each time being the topic of discussion. The fact that the highlights of his day are some hysterically dull sexual fantasies about his secretary, Joan (Sue Nicholls) who is the definition of frumpy further adds to the portrait of desperation. Even the unexpected is painted as maddeningly dull with the series maintaining a running gag about every train he ever takes being precisely eleven minutes late.
Finally, unable to handle the relentless boredom, Perrin fakes his own death, and after enjoying a brief stint as a buck-toothed farmer he reinvents himself as Martin Welbourne and attempts to reenter his former life. The second season, cleverly titled The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin then turned things on its head having him remarry Elizabeth (it’s implied she knows it’s him but never stated) and launching his own company called Grot which sells intentionally useless products and which he hopes will provide an interesting distraction.
To his horror Grot is a runaway success and grows into the same faceless company he fled from to begin with, except now he is tasked with the devilish duty of running it, leading him to recruit the entire staff from Sunshine Desserts including his old boss, the magnificently pompous C.J. (John Barron). Having pressed the self-destruct button on Grot and orchestrated another faux suicide, season three finds Perrin and Elizabeth running a rural commune for disaffected middle aged folk attempting to navigate their way through mid-life crisis, the responsibilities of which seemingly only serve to deepen Perrins’s own.
Much in the way Mad Men depicts the dark underbelly of the US at the turn of the sixties, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was a funhouse mirror that reflected the unimagined horror lurking beyond the picket fence (in this case the pebbled driveway). The series carefully sketched out the cracks in the seemingly idyllic yet achingly hollow suburbanite lifestyle before such things as punk, the New Wave comedy movement, and anti-Thatcher sentiment blew them wide open.
DVD Bonus Features
This box set finally reunites the series with a long-lost stand alone sketch from 1982 which featured the entire ensemble cast crowding around Reggie’s house one Christmas at the very height of his despair. Also included is a marvelous fifty-minute biographical documentary on actor and comedian Leonard Rossiter, comprising archival footage with interviews from friends, colleagues and the man himself, who handily detail what an amazing gift to comedy he truly was.
"The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin: The Complete Series" is on sale May 5, 2009 and is rated NR. Television. Directed by Gareth Gwenlan, John Howard Davies. Written by David Nobbs. Starring John Barron, Leonard Rossiter, Pauline Yates, Sue Nicholls.
