The return of Reggie Perrin!

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Perrin cast confirmed

The BBC has confirmed the cast of its Reginald Perrin remake, with actor Martin Clunes in the title role. Cold Feet actress Fay Ripley and Wendy Craig have also been cast in the show, alongside Geoffrey Whitehead, Neil Stuke, Lucy Liemann and Nick Mohammed.

The show’s creator David Nobbs worked with Men Behaving Badly writer Simon Nye on the new series, which will be screened on BBC One later this year. The programme – now called Perrin – updates the lead character, a bored businessman going through a midlife crisis, to modern Britain.

BBC One controller Jay Hunt said she was ’really excited’ about the revival of the comedy, adding: ’It feels as fresh and sharp now as it did all those years ago.’ Lucy Lumsden, the BBC’s controller of comedy commissioning, said the new show would be ‘an inspired update rather than a remake’. She added: ‘To have combined the writing talents of David Nobbs and Simon Nye in a sitcom fronted by Martin Clunes is a dream come true.’

A pervious spin-off show The Legacy of Reginald Perrin, was made in 1996, but without the lead character and original star Leonard Rossiter, who died in 1984. The six new half-hour are being made by Objective Productions.

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This could be brilliant - with that cast and Nobbs on board, it has every reason to be a classic.

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'I didn't get where I am today by missing a sequel'
'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin' was a massive success for writer David Nobbs in the 1970s. He explains why it is back from the dead
18 January 2009
Independent.co.uk

The suggestion of a modern remake of Perrin came from the independent company Objective Productions. Luckily I was sitting down at the time. Before we approached the BBC, I had a long discussion with Ben Farrell, head of comedy at Objective. It didn't take us long to decide that, with stress levels in the work place and on public transport rising like ocean levels, the plight of the stressed commuter was at least as relevant today as in 1976.

We went to see Lucy Lumsden and Simon Wilson at the BBC comedy department and were much encouraged by their enthusiasm. They asked me what involvement I wished to have, and I suddenly found myself answering with great certainty a question that had flummoxed me.

I heard myself say that there are two strands to Reggie's predicament – the timeless theme of a man in the middle of his life who fears that he is wasting the privilege of existence, and the contemporary theme of the many irritations and frustrations that make up the life of a commuting middle manager now.

I felt that I have lived too long in the deep countryside of North Yorkshire to be up to speed with the details of modern office jargon and behaviour. I couldn't let go of the timeless element, but I needed help with the contemporary aspects. I needed to write the series with a brilliant writer who was nearer to Reggie's age.

Who could possibly fill the bill better than Simon Nye, who is probably tired of being referred to as Simon "Men Behaving Badly" Nye? We set to work, together with Ben, to create our "Man Behaving Oddly". Our first challenge was to decide what his job should be. Exotic ices were out. In the age of Heston Blumenthal, what's exotic about mango delight, fig surprise and raspberry and lychee ripple. (Is that correct? I can't remember myself!) Ben suggested the rapidly expanding world of male grooming – and it stuck.

The BBC commissioned a first script, and we all decided that, as I had in a way written our first draft in 1976, Simon should write a draft of this new version first. He produced a draft script which contains, in my opinion, a brilliant modern equivalent of all the characters from 1976. They were, miraculously, essentially the same yet utterly different.

Simon had created the new template and I found myself in the strange position of contributing to a series which felt at the same time to be both mine and someone else's. I didn't find it easy at first, but the method seems to have worked, and that is all that matters.

I'm not going to talk about the differences – you'll see them when you watch it. The series is perhaps more different than I expected and probably more different than you expect. But that has had one great advantage, I believe. It has removed the last of the great worries –the dark shadow cast by the brilliant Leonard Rossiter. He was the man for 1976. How lucky we are to have our first choice for 2009 – it already seems to be the only possible choice – Martin Clunes.

The aforementioned Lucy and Simon, plus Jay Hunt, controller of BBC 1, grilled the Objective team pretty thoroughly before they gave the project the green light. I didn't mind this at all. I didn't want to do it unless it had a really good chance of success.

Will it succeed?

"Oh yes," says my English half. "A great cast. Fine scripts. A superb production team. Audiences are laughing at the recordings. It can't fail." "Who knows?" says my Welsh half. "Oh the possibilities of unforeseen pitfalls. Oh, the unpredictability of the great British public."

We'll soon know.

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Here's an interview with him - from 2007

http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm?id=18

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Reggie’s still suffering his mid-life crisis but my life’s begun at 40
By EMMA COX
11th April 2009

MARTIN Clunes is bringing mid-life crisis victim Reginald Perrin back to life, but says for him life began at 40 — despite some “Reggie moments”. The star, 47, is bringing the angst-ridden 70s sitcom character played by Leonard Rossiter bang up to date in a remake. But he says his own life could not be more different from the unhappy salesman desperate to escape his dull life.

Martin said: “I do have moments of frustration that I wish I could do something about, and I do have Reggie moments. But I definitely have not had a mid-life crisis. In some ways, you could say my life has actually begun at 40. Playing Reggie is so different to the stuff I have done in the past and a good old shock injection was definitely something I needed.”

The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin was a huge hit for the BBC 30 years ago and Martin hopes the modern-day take on the story will do the same. But Martin explained: “It is going to be different. It has to move with the times. And so my Reggie is living in a different environment. I am not Leonard Rossiter and when he played Reggie, it was so 1970s. It would seem weird if we went back to then — as if we were on the Life on Mars set.”

Gone is Reggie’s Sunshine Desserts office — now he works at a male hair-grooming firm. Martin says: “He heads up the razors section. My Reggie is living in a different environment. And he doesn’t drink sherry any more. But viewers can rest assured — he will still be having a mid-life crisis and he will still have a vivid imagination.”

Martin says he jumped at the role when he was told it was being penned by Simon Nye — responsible for his first hit Men Behaving Badly. He said: “As soon as I saw Simon was in on the thing, I knew it was going to be good. And I really have loved doing it — even though I felt nervous beforehand. I laughed a lot at the scripts. The best bit about playing Reggie was that we all got on so well and it was such a happy ship. And I really like Reggie. He is kind and smart — even though he is unhappy at times.

The cast of the remake also includes Cold Feet’s Fay Ripley as Reggie’s wife — played by Pauline Yates in the original. The role of Reggie’s maddeningly pompous boss — first played by John Barron — is taken by Drop The Dead Donkey’s Neil Stuke.

With filming wrapped up, Martin is now preparing for a new series of ITV1 hit Doc Martin. He spends part of the year filming the comedy drama in Cornwall — and the rest at home on his 135-acre property in Dorset. He shares the idyllic retreat with Philippa Braithwaite, their nine-year-old daughter Emily and assorted dogs, cats and horses.

Martin said: “I am still ambitious and there is part of me that needs to keep working. We have a mortgage and we have to pay for that. But I also love being a dad and fatherhood gets better and better. As Emily gets older, it gets more interesting and we are very close. I have been very lucky. When I look back at everything, I never saw any of this coming and I am incredibly grateful.

The new series — simply titled Reggie Perrin — starts on BBC1 on Friday April 24 at 9.30pm.

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Martin Clunes on playing Reggie Perrin
Martin Clunes talks about why he doesn’t care what critics and ‘pedants’ think of his portrayal of a 21st-century Reggie Perrin.
By Michael Deacon
17 Apr 2009
telegraph.co.uk

Martin Clunes doesn’t live in a miserable suburb (he lives on a farm in Dorset with his wife and daughter), nor has he worked in an office, or indeed had anything like what he calls a “drudge-y, commute-y job”. This has presented him with a challenge when he’s had to play people who do. “I used to do it on Men Behaving Badly,” he says. “I had an office in that and it was like, ‘Ooh, what do I do with this?’ Always quite a novelty.”

This week Clunes has to play a character whose name is synonymous with the “drudge-y”. He’s playing the title role in BBC One’s new version of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the 1970s sitcom about a despairing, middle-aged commuter – played, in those days, by Leonard Rossiter. Depending on your point of view, making a new version of Perrin is either brave or nigh-on sacrilegious. Critics and audiences loved the original. The idea of redoing a classic that was scarcely in need of improvement sounds curious; it’s hard to imagine a remake of, say, Fawlty Towers with Neil Morrissey (“Don’t mention the war! Wahey!”). But its creator and its star insist that they’ve done it with good reason.

The new, six-part version, Reggie Perrin, came about after the production company Objective approached David Nobbs, who wrote the original series (and the novels on which they were based), to ask if he’d consider updating the programme for the 21st century. “I asked myself two questions,” says Nobbs, who’s 74. “Does it say something to the modern world, and has enough changed for us to have a new shot at it? And my answer was yes to both.”

So on Friday we’ll meet a present-day Perrin who, on his morning train journey to the office, gets irritated by the ubiquity of mp3 players and laptops. A lot of the jokes about the modern world come not from Nobbs but the co-writer the BBC paired him with, Simon Nye, who is 24 years younger – these days Nobbs lives “down a lane in North Yorkshire with not an office in sight,” he says, so he wanted to work with someone who was “up on the jargon, that sort of thing”.

Nye made his name with the Nineties sitcom Men Behaving Badly, like Clunes. When the original Perrin was on, Clunes – now 47 – was still at school. “I remember watching it with excitement because it was considered ‘grown-up’ humour,” he says, “and to watch it was quite an adult thing to do.” He says he isn’t nervous about taking the place of the celebrated Rossiter. “I could only ever do it my way,” he says. “The alternative would be to try to imitate Leonard Rossiter, who was so distinct that people can’t actually separate him from any of the parts he played. People say to me, ‘Oh, Reggie Perrin, I love that – “My God, Miss Jones!”’ But that’s from Rising Damp.”

Clunes’s acting style and looks (“I’m sort of sloppy whereas [Rossiter] was like a whippet”) are not the only things that make the new version different, he says. There’s also the way it portrays women. “In the Seventies, wives were just wives, women were just women – they were either fanciable or annoying,” he says. “That doesn’t wash any more.”

But in the first episode of the new version, the women do all appear to be either fanciable or annoying. “But they have an agenda, they have a life, they have a job,” he persists. “They’re not a secretary or a housewife.” As a matter of fact, Clunes’s Perrin has a female secretary (who is cretinously dim) and his wife is a housewife. Perhaps it’s better not to push Clunes on this point, though, because he doesn’t like pedants (“There are pedants everywhere, but God forbid we should aim for them as an audience”), critics (“Critics will give you a kicking just because you’ve made a programme, in my experience”) or comparisons generally (“Comparisons are always pretty useless, aren’t they?”).

He makes these points with a certain ho-ho-ho breeziness, but he doesn’t sound entirely comfortable, especially when asked what he thinks people will make of the new version. “To be honest, I can’t be a---d with all this,” he says. “It’s been the subject of every interview I’ve done. I’m thrilled to do the job, I enjoyed doing it, I’m very proud of it. I’m just not that bothered.”

Still, as useless as he finds comparisons in general, Clunes is prepared to make one himself, between the old Perrin and his new one. “I think this one’s funnier,” he says. “There are more jokes. It’s quicker paced. If you’re measuring comedy by quantity, instead of anything else… But yes, I don’t think it’s as ponderous and melancholic.”

So at least viewers know what not to expect. “I won’t have black hair, an undershot lip or an athletic build,” says Clunes. “And I won’t be saying, ‘My God, Miss Jones!’”

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Why Reggie Perrin must rise again
By David Nobbs
19th April 2009

When the idea of a Reggie Perrin for the 21st Century was put to me, it didn't take me long to agree: it was a challenge few writers could have refused. The first series of The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin was shown 33 years ago, but it has never really gone away. Barely a year passes without my reading that somebody has 'done a Reggie', leaving his or her clothes on a beach somewhere. Sometimes people ask if I get irritated by still having the catchphrases quoted to me. Not at all. I didn't get where I am today without knowing that when people say, 'I didn't get where I am today...' to me it is a compliment.

The biggest consideration for the new project was whether the central premise of the series was still relevant and valid today. Reggie faced many frustrations in 1976 - the tensions of commuting, the pressure to conform, the repetitive daily grind - but at the heart of his midlife crisis was the fact that he had come to hate his job at Sunshine Desserts, where he worked as a sales executive, and he feared that it was getting too late for pastures new.

It was an article about work that set me off on the creation of Reggie in the Seventies. I read a story about how a food firm created a new flavour for its range of jams. There was a photograph of a group of very serious, dark-suited middle managers in a board room - or should that be bored room? --giving their intellects to this cause. I believe they settled on loganberry. Once a trial run of the flavour had been created in the factory, a team of identically dressed salesmen set off in their identical Cortinas to call on members of the public armed with tiny jars of the new jam. A week later, they went back to them with questions. Was the jam too bland? Was it too fruity? Was it too fruitily bland? Was it too blandly fruity? I knew that a week of this would drive me insane. This was their career. Reggie Perrin was born.

It didn't take me long to realise that what was true in 1976 must be as true today. Other pressures might be different, but a widespread lack of job satisfaction had to be as relevant as ever. And I do believe, from the reaction to the original series, that people found a cathartic release in the dramatisation of Reggie's dilemma. They felt comfort in knowing that they were far from alone. The BBC was excited by the prospect of a new series, and a pilot script was commissioned. By this time I had realised that, living in a small North Yorkshire village, I might not be as up to date with the minutiae of the urban and suburban nightmare as I was when I lived in Barnet, North London. Maybe it would be foolish to do the whole thing on my own this time.

When Simon Nye, of Men Behaving Badly fame, was suggested as a co-writer, I jumped at it, and luckily so did he. One problem was the nature of Reggie's job. Exotic ices just weren't on. In food-mad, celebrity-chef-riddled modern Britain, no food is too exotic, so we settled on male grooming products. Perfect: a modern industry creating a whole range of products that were suddenly necessary even though men had got by perfectly happily without most of them for thousands of years.

It was time to produce a draft script. Since I had, in a sense, done the first draft 33 years ago, it made sense for Simon to have a crack at the new one. He created a range of characters who were quite different from the originals, yet performed similar functions. Is this a remake, or is it a new series loosely based on my original? I'd say it's a cross between the two. Simon must take a great deal of the credit for this new creation. I could never have got as far away from the original as Simon has, and I think it was necessary to do so to breathe life into a 2009 version.

Fans are keen to find out what we've done with Reggie's old boss, C.J. Well, the new boss isn't called C.J., but he is called Chris Jackson, and he's very different: younger, a management figure for the thrusting 21st Century, in which caterers can now run television companies, and underwear magnates can be in charge of railways. Does he still say 'I didn't get . . . '? I'm not telling.

What else had to change? Well, the wife. In 1976, Elizabeth, beautifully played by Pauline Yates, seemed to have no life except for putting Reggie's food on the table. That isn't acceptable in 2009. Nicola, Reggie's new wife, equally well played by Fay Ripley, is a harassed teacher facing her own pressures. And there's no hippo - a visual joke in which there was a shot of one lumbering by whenever Reggie thought of his mother-in-law. It's gone because we have new jokes, new characters and new fantasies for a new series. There isn't even a motherinlaw. Reggie has a mother, delightfully played by Wendy Craig, and a father-in-law (Geoffrey Whitehead). And, of course, we have Martin Clunes as Reggie. In my opinion the performances of Martin and Leonard Rossiter in the role are so good that it would be invidious of me to say one is better than the other.

This Reggie is a slightly different character, a bit warmer I would suggest, fighting harder against the onset of his eccentricity. And Martin is physically much more like the character I described in the original book from which the series sprang. Incidentally, The Complete Reginald Perrin is still available in all good bookshops, not to mention bad ones.

There's a very revealing story I tell about the great Leonard. I once suggested to him that he was saying a line wrongly. He disagreed, but said he would do it my way. It got a huge laugh. Afterwards, in the bar, I said: 'Well, Len, I was right, wasn't I?' He replied: 'No, you were wrong, and so were the audience.' Martin is much more easy-going, so it is a lot easier to make suggestions to him. But actually he is not much more likely to adopt them. Like Len, he knows how he wants to do it: he isn't just acting, he's inhabiting the character, as great actors do.

Right at the end of the series, Reggie makes a big speech, one of the few set-pieces both series share, and we had written it for him to be drunk, as Len played it. Just before we recorded it, Martin said: 'I don't want to do it drunk. I want to do it desperate.' He did, and it was wonderful.

I am so lucky to be able to do all this again. In the words of one of our characters, which might or might not become a much-loved catchphrase, I'm so excited it hurts.

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Its great to hear that he's so excited about it - though he's not exactly going to play it down is he?

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Leave old Reggie dead & Perri-ed
By Ian Hyland,
25/04/2009

EARLY thoughts on BBC1's Friday night remake of a 1970s classic, REGGIE PERRIN? Well, I didn't get where I am today without knowing you would be expecting me to build a review around CJ's legendary, "I didn't get where I am today . . . " catchphrase. So I won't. What I will I say is fair play to Martin Clunes. He promised this revival would be "entirely different" to the original 1970s masterpiece, and he was right. It's not funny.

Perhaps not disastrous enough to have us all leaving our clothes behind on the beach or even paddling off to oblivion in a canoe just yet. But you have to wonder whether there's been a bit of a cock-up in the commissioning department.

This show was surely doomed to mediocrity the minute they decided to revive most of the characters from the original, yet write brand-new scripts. I mean, surely they could have just written a brand-new sitcom about a mentally wobbling middle-aged bloke in a dead-end job without having to sully the name of the great Reginald Perrin. Make no mistake, dear old Doc Martin has put on a great big pair of Dr Martens and stamped all over Leonard Rossiter's grave.

Fact is, they'd even have been better off revisiting Clunes' own comedy legend Gary from Men Behaving Badly. The brief scenes in Gary's office were a hundred times funnier and more promising than anything in this Perrin revival's first episode. The cold fact is, nothing here is any better than the original. And most of it is a lot worse.

Clunes will no doubt be renamed Leonard Tossiter for his crimes while Neil Stuke's take on Reggie's boss CJ can best be described as "more CJD." But the person I feel most sorry for is Lucy Liemann, who has gone from being the best thing about one lame Friday night comedy (Moving Wallpaper) to being the only good thing about another. An undoubted talent is Miss Liemann. She could even go on to become the next Emma Thompson. If she sacks her agent now.

Of course, Clunes and his pals with probably argue that not many people will remember the original, so comparisons don't matter. Even if we ignore that fairly patronising attitude, the fact remains this show still failed to hit the comedy mark. Even with the "aid" of a strategic laugh track. And as a central character this Reggie is so unlikeable and unreachable you'd happily shove him in front of the next 8.16 to Waterloo.

Accuse me of getting lost in nostalgia if you like Martin, but let's not forget Reggie's initials were R.I.P. You and the BBC should have taken note of that. And respected the sentiments.

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I started watching the first episode on Friday, but it made absolutely no impact on me at all. After 10 minutes I was left cold, and that was that... what a let down!

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well, I gave the first episode another shot and laughed out loud a good few times. Then watched the second episode tonight and enjoyed almost every part of it except for this daft visual gag about a car park that just went on too long.

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