David Nobbs

David Nobbs is a funny man. Not only did he create one of the greatest comic characters in Reggie Perrin but he also has a funny name, ripe for comic exploitation - something he's not shy of in this hugely entertaining talk on his life and career.

He wryly covers everything from his ten-year-old self's attempts to write books, which only stretched to the titles, to the moment he first got a sketch - or a line from a sketch - on That Was the Week That Was. There are also readings of excerpts from his first staged work, an extract from his first book and the revelation that, like Reggie Perrin, he likes ravioli. He lived off tins of it while in lodgings.

David Nobbs, wonderfully comic writer whether on radio, TV or in print, begins a three-part series talking to an audience about his work and some people he's worked with over the years. As he's written for Frankie Howerd, David Frost and The Two Ronnies, invented such TV comedies as A Bit of a Do, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and (for Radio 4) The Maltby Collection, it's a rich field. Mia Soteriou and Martin Trenaman are the readers, Andrew McGibbon produces for independents Curtains for Radio.

The sitcom and the sexual revolution is the subject of a documentary that wonders at everything from sexual frustration to the British love of innuendo and the changing role of women. Leslie Phillips, Leslie Joseph and Wendy Craig together with sitcom writers David Nobbs and Simon Nye are among those discussing such old favourites as Up Pompeii!, Hancock's Half Hour and Him & Her. In browsing the decades, the film asks why Butterflies caused a stir in the Eighties and if Men Behaving Badly really did capture the sexual politics of the Nineties. Also, how do American sitcoms differ in their approach? And does the modern British sitcom recognise any taboos at all?

David Nobbs writes wonderful comedy because his characters invite odd situations to evolve around them. Here we have Tony (James Nickerson) and Sal (Olwen May), middle-aged, comfortably off, no kids. One morning their doorbell rings. It's Monty and Janey from America, who'd once put them up and to whom they'd said, on parting, "If ever you're passing..." No sooner have they settled them in the best bedroom than the doorbell rings again. And again. Wine is drunk, conflicts arise, accommodations are reached. Funny and curiously credible.

Once upon a life: David Nobbs

The peaceful manner in which his mother died after a long happy life and a short illness, changed David Nobbs's attitude to death. It also persuaded him to become a humanist...

This remake has done well in the ratings and hopes for a second series must be high. For my money, Martin Clunes has carried the thing more or less single-handed, but tonight's episode is a joke-free zone. Writers Simon Nye and David Nobbs have tried to persuade us that being bored with suburban life is funny; now they want to persuade us it's tragic, too. But it's 2009, not 1974; it's a world (as Reggie observes) where choice is plentiful. So when he goes on about the pointlessness of his life, you want to slap him and tell him to resign, elope with Jasmine and go remake The Good Life instead. Instead he gets more and more frazzled. It's the night of the office party: "I'm going as existential crisis man," he quips. And that's about the best joke in the show.

Comparisons are all but unavoidable in the case of Reggie Perrin, a remake of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, with Martin Clunes making the bold attempt to fill Leonard Rossiter's boots. I don't know if I can stress enough what a depressing idea this is on paper. A television channel should always have the ambition to create its own fond memories rather than lazily refurbish those from 30 years ago. And if you do go the recycling route you're likely to find that the fond memories of five years ago will probably get in the way. When David Nobbs's sitcom first went out, its bleak take on the purgatory of office life had very few rivals. The remake has to compete not only with memories of its own source, but also of The Office, a comedy that effectively rewrote the rules about how you could tackle the anomie of the nine-to-five.

It really is a bit surprising, then, that Reggie Perrin should work as well as it does. Martin Clunes helps a lot. He looks funny when he's glum, in a way that's sufficiently different to Leonard Rossiter. And the script - a collaboration between Simon Nye and David Nobbs - has some good lines in it. Reggie doesn't work at Sunshine Desserts anymore (though he walks past the sign on his way to the office), but at a grooming products company. CJ is younger and rather less dependent on his "I didn't get where I am today" catchphrase, and Reggie's toadying subordinates have been replaced by an unconvincing pair of marketing-types. It's not a disaster, by any means, which may be the best you can hope for from such an unimaginative commission.

We tried to pretend this didn't exist before and wasn't a 1970s TV great mixing misery and mundanity in a cynical sitcom. Pretend it's brand new. Come to it fresh. The verdict: this is quite a funny sitcom with a few good characters and a few good lines, possibly even worth watching throughout its run. Without such pretence: this is a horribly weak, unnecessary remake with all the lovely unique touches ironed out by the BBC comedy department's blandness steamroller, no doubt inflicted by Simon Nye, who can churn out humdrum sitcoms in his sleep and has been paired up with Perrin's brilliant creator David Nobbs.

The nation can breathe a collective sigh of relief. The new Reggie Perrin is not an insult to the memory of a much-beloved original, in fact, it's a rather good sitcom in its own right. Simon Nye and David Nobbs' remake cranks up the misanthropy and the joke count, with Martin Clunes bringing his own brand of caustic charm to the role of the executive suffering existential angst.

Interview with creator David Nobbs

The show's creator David Nobbs has placed his character in the contemporary world - but the pressures of the rat race faced by the original Reggie (played by Leonard Rossiter) remain relevant today, as David explains.