The first two series of "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin", based upon comic novels by David Nobbs, were two of the greatest comedy series in the history of British television. (Nobbs himself wrote the scripts). The first traces the downfall of Perrin, a stressed, depressive middle-aged executive working for a dreadful firm called Sunshine Desserts where he is bullied and patronised by his pompous, overbearing boss CJ. In the second Nobbs brilliantly inverts the premise of the first. Reggie starts a shop called Grot selling nothing but useless, worthless products. He intends this as a despairing two-finger gesture aimed at society, but the business proves a surprising success and Reggie ends up as a business tycoon himself, with CJ and others of his former colleagues working for him.
So where did Nobbs go from there? The answer was that he didn't really know, but the first two series had proved such a success that he came under pressure from the BBC to produce another novel which could be dramatised as a third. Nobbs therefore concocted a storyline in which Reggie starts a suburban commune for the middle-aged middle class, designed to help them become "better, happier people", but compared to the first two series it was a failure, and there were no immediate moves to follow it up with a Series 4. And that should have been the end of the matter, especially after Leonard Rossiter, the star of the show, died in 1984.
Only it wasn't. Fast forward to 1996. The Beeb must have been desperately short of ideas for new comedy as someone came up for the idea of a new Reggie Perrin series. A new Reggie Perrin series, that is, without Reggie Perrin. Rossiter had been one of the finest comic actors of his generation and Reggie was his most inspired creation, so that someone, whoever he or she was, seems to have realised that asking another actor to step into his shoes would have been pointless. So the decision was taken that Reggie must die too and the new series begins at his funeral.
The next major event is the reading of the will. Reggie, it turns out, died a wealthy man, and left a million pounds to each of his various friends and relatives, on one condition. They must do something totally absurd, and Reggie's solicitor Geraldine Hackstraw has the task of deciding whether their actions are absurd enough to merit a million-pound payout. What they decide to do is to stage a revolution on behalf of the elderly and "occupationally rejected". (Euphemism for "unemployed"). And, yes, that is as daft as it sounds.
Most of the original cast (apart, of course, from Rossiter) return, but there are a couple of omissions. Tony Webster has disappeared to New Zealand. (Apparently Trevor Adams had given up acting). Reggie's son Mark, who appeared in the first series, is also conspicuous by his absence. No reason is given to explain why he is not mentioned in the will- in fact, he is never mentioned in the script at all.
So why is "The Legacy of Reginald Perrin" so poor? Part of the answer is the main reason why Series 3 failed. Series 1 and 2 were essentially satires on seventies consumerism, but the third removed this element of satire and so ended up looking rather pointless. Series 4 also removes this element, but there is another reason why it ends up as being even worse than Series 3, and that of course is the absence of Reggie. He was the central figure around whom all the others revolved, and they were essentially defined in terms of their relationship to him. Take away that central figure, and all the others seem to lose their relevance.
All those catchphrases ("I didn't get where I am today by....", "Bit of a cock-up on the .... Front", "I'm a .... person" no longer seem very relevant either. In the original series their function was to satirise the sort of lazy ways of speech people slip into as a substitute for thinking. Here, however, they are so overused that they no longer have a function, other than that of keeping happy fans who would be disappointed if David Nobbs did not trot them out several times in every episode.
The surviving cast are not always as good as they were in earlier series. John Barron's CJ and John Horsley's Doc Morrissey both look old and tired. I would agree with the reviewer who said that Leslie Schofield (who played Tom in Series 3) missed the character's essential priggishness, so the return of Tim Preece should have been a bonus. The problem is, however, that part of the fun lay in the fact that Tom was still a young man but prematurely middle-aged, an ageing, bearded head on young shoulders. Now that Tom actually is middle-aged (and clean shaven), he no longer seems so funny.
Some of the cast do retain something of their old appeal, such as Geoffrey Palmer's Jimmy and Bruce Bould's wet-behind-the-ears David, but nobody does enough to persuade me that resurrecting the series was anything other than a mistake. There seem to have been plans to extend the strange afterlife of Reginald Perrin even further, but they came to nothing and we were spared a Series 5. 4/10
