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, having disposed of his shares in Grot, starts a suburban commune for the middle-aged, middle class, designed to help them become "better, happier people". As at Grot Reggie's staff are all drawn from his own family and from his colleagues at Sunshine Desserts.
Unfortunately, the third series was a flop. The first two series were essentially satires on seventies consumerism. The third removed this element of satire which made the whole thing rather pointless. Figures like John Barron's CJ and the ambitious go-getting junior executive Tony Webster look like fish out of water when removed from the business environment in which they were first conceived, especially as CJ is always boasting about how he achieved his success. His catchphrase "I didn't get where I am today by...." no longer seems relevant after his original business has failed and he has ended up working in a commune. (Barron is allowed one chance to recapture his lost glory in the final episode where he appears as CJ's even more unbearable brother FJ).
Leslie Schofield as Reggie's priggishly liberal son-in-law Tom has the thankless task of taking on a character originally created by another actor, in this case Tim Preece who was presumably unavailable. The one major new character is the community's Scottish chef McBlane, dirty, insanitary and foul-tempered, who struck me as relentlessly unfunny and probably struck many Scots as a racist slur on their country's good name. He speaks a dialect so thick that nobody can understand it- not the English and probably not the Scots either as it seems to be a dialect of Nobbs's own invention.
Some of the other characters, such as Doc Morrissey (a notoriously incompetent doctor, appointed as the commune's medical officer) and Reggie's brother-in-law Jimmy (a former army officer who likes to think that he runs his life with military efficiency but is in fact hopelessly disorganised), do still retain something of their comic potential in the new setting. Leonard Rossiter as Reggie, however, seems wasted here, which is a shame as he was one of the finest comic actors of his generation. The BBC seem to have agreed that Series 3 was a failure, because there were no immediate moves to follow it up with a Series 4. The programme did have a bizarre afterlife nearly twenty years later, long after Rossiter's death, but that is another story. 5/10
