Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

“Great!”  “Super!”

I know I’ve mentioned on many occasions here at Rancho Yesteryear how I came to be inducted into the world of British television comedy by watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus as an adolescent.  In fact, had it not been for my exposure to Python—and for that matter, The Twilight Zone, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and Rocky and Bullwinkle—I might have turned out to be a well-adjusted adult with a multitude of financial prospects instead of a TV tube-staring slacker with a most decidedly unglamorous night job.  (There’s got to be an after school special in there somewhere.)

From Python it was but a short stop to other imports from across the pond: The Goodies, Fawlty Towers, The Good Life (a.k.a. Good Neighbors), etc.  There was also an offbeat sitcom entitled The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which I’ve recently had a chance to revisit (I bought the Region 2 box set at the same time as Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em: The Complete Collection).  In fact, the opening credits were in itself Pythonesque: a speeded-up bit of film footage showing series star Leonard Rossiter taking off all his clothes and plunging into the sea, frantically swimming off towards the horizon.

Author David Nobbs adapted his 1975 comic novel The Death of Reginald Perrin into a comedy series the following year about a middle-aged sales executive suffering from a mid-life crisis.  The show was decidedly different: its storyline was serialized (much in the same fashion as the later Soap) and featured as its main character a man clearly headed in the direction of a nervous breakdown.  Though Ronnie Barker was approached for the part of Reggie, the role went instead to character actor Leonard Rossiter, who at that time was a familiar face to British television audiences as the star of ITV’s Rising Damp.  Rossiter played Rupert Rigsby; the landlord of a decrepit, rundown boarding house situated in a northern university town, and was described by the Radio Times’ Mark Lewisohn as “a nosey, bigoted, racist, lecherous but sexually frustrated, miserly, interfering wretch.”  The talents of Rossiter were such that in his capable hands, the loathsome Rigsby came across as an almost likable creature, and Damp is considered to this day one of ITV’s best sitcoms.  (Damp was featured prominently in the lineup of cable channel A&E’s pre-Growing Up Gotti days, and its first series was released in January on Region 1 DVD by Acorn Media, with the second to follow June 6th.)

But I think Perrin is Rossiter’s real comic legacy; I’m not as enthusiastic about Damp as is Lewisohn (though the show occasionally had its moments).  Rossiter literally became Reggie Perrin, a desperate man plagued with boredom and malaise and seemingly at the end of his rope.  Rossiter introduced a variety of tics and mannerisms that made Reggie a living, breathing human being, particularly in the way he would escape into flights of fancy to maintain his tentative hold on his sanity.  (A hilarious running gag on Perrin had the character staring off into space, picturing a hippopotamus lumbering around a watering hole whenever the subject of his wife’s mother would come up.)

But he wasn’t the only one on the show who made an indelible impression on me; Reggie’s tyrannical boss at Sunshine Desserts, C.J. (which stands for Charles Jefferson), still makes me laugh out loud.  A man prone to mixing clichés and metaphors in the form of supposedly sage aphorisms that, when examined more closely, make absolutely no sense whatsoever had the show’s most memorable catchphrase: “I didn’t get where I am today by…”  This would be followed by an example of what he did do to arrive at the crux of his career.  John Barron played the part of C.J., and he was a familiar face to British audiences as one of the stars of the ecclesiastical comedy hit All Gas and Gaiters and for guest appearances on To the Manor Born and Yes, Minister.

The other unforgettable personage on the show was Reggie’s brother-in-law Jimmy Anderson, a delightful eccentric played by Geoffrey Palmer many, many years before As Time Goes By.  (I pointed him out to my father while I was watching the second episode, and Dad did a nifty double-take, surprised to see how young and rail-thin he was.)  Jimmy, who’s retired from the service, has a bit of difficulty dealing with civilian life and often describes his problems in a dense, militaristic jargon: “No food.  Bit of a cock-up on the catering front.”  The Jimmy character proved so popular with Perrin fans that Nobbs revamped him as Harry Kitchener Wellington Truscott for a separate sitcom titled Fairly Secret Army (1984-86), which also starred Palmer as well.

The first series of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin ended with our depressed hero faking his own suicide and returning in various guises before settling on the persona of Martin Wellbourne, a mourner at Reggie’s “funeral” who then ends up wooing and wedding widow Elizabeth Perrin (Pauline Yates).  (Elizabeth knows it’s Reggie, but agrees to play along with his charade because he truly seems to be happy.)  The success of the show prompted the BBC to commission a second series from Nobbs, who had in the interim written a follow-up to his first Perrin novel, The Return of Reginald Perrin (1977).  Return provided the storyline for Series Two: Reggie reveals to all that he’s not really dead, and after a series of misadventures and menial jobs decides to throw caution to the wind and open up a novelty store called Grot, which specializes in selling completely useless items to its customers.  With the demise of Sunshine Desserts, Reggie hires his former colleagues to join him at Grot—but the unlikely success of the business takes its toll on him (he begins to adopt the mannerisms of C.J.) and he and Elizabeth decide to fake their deaths again…joined by C.J. and other CEO’s in the business world.

The Better World of Reginald Perrin (1978) was Nobbs’ last in the Perrin trilogy; the scribe wrote it while contributing the scripts to the comedy’s second series and—as the case with the previous two—used its contents for Perrin’s third and final series in 1978-79.  Reggie, Elizabeth and their family and friends start a commune for the middle-aged and middle class in this final outing, and while it certainly had its moments it was a bit of a letdown from the brilliance of the first two series.  Shortly thereafter, U.S. audiences were introduced to Perrin and Company via public television, and in 1983 ABC attempted an American version of the sitcom with Reggie, an abysmal flop starring former Soap actor Richard Mulligan.  I watched the first episode out of curiosity, and was so flummoxed at how the network and show’s producers botched such a promising idea that I didn’t have to stomach to tune in again.

In the 1990s, the BBC embarked on a curious project to revive some of British television’s sitcom hits from the past with new versions of Agony (Agony Again), Doctor in the House (Doctor at the Top) and The Liver Birds.  Reginald Perrin received this treatment in 1996 with Nobbs’ The Legacy of Reggie Perrin, a game attempt that reunited the earliest cast save for two: Trevor Adams (who played C.J.’s young protégé Tony Webster), because he wasn’t interested, and star Rossiter, because he was…well, deceased.  With his star having passed away in 1984, Nobbs fashioned a plot that finds Reggie’s family and friends competing for a stipend of one million pounds that’s been left in his will…with the proviso that the beneficiary must earn it by doing something completely ludicrous.  Rossiter’s presence was sorely missed; there was a small novelty in seeing the old familiar faces with their old familiar catchphrases back in action, but both the critics and audiences agreed that on the whole, Legacy was a complete flop.  I didn’t get where I am today by not recognizing a complete flop when I see one.

- Posted by Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. - 11:15:25 PM - comment []