Leonard Rossiter

If you've ever wondered what someone tap-dancing on Leonard Rossiter's grave would look like, tune in for this version of Reggie Perrin. It's sort of like watching the original Seventies sitcom, only without any decent jokes and recorded in front of an apparently lobotomised live studio audience who guffaw at puns that Two Pints of Lager would have scorned. Even solid comic actors like Fay Ripley and Alexander Armstrong can't make this script work, while Martin Clunes, though affable enough, is badly miscast as the blackly witty Perrin. Tonight, our hero is ordered to fire one of his staff, with unhilarious consequences.

If there's anything more surprising than the BBC deciding to remake The Rise And Fall Of Reginald Perrin, it's that they decided to plough on with series two.

Martin Clunes received a mixed reception as an updated incarnation of the melancholic middle manager but we rejoin him now on a beach where he has gone to resolve his mid-life crisis. Having decided against death (faked or otherwise) as an exit-route out of his daily grind, he makes a momentous decision to resign and utters the immortal words to his Groomtech boss: "You can take this job and stuff it up your a***."

As Reggie walks away from the cut-andthrust world of disposable razors to embark on a brand new life of self-sufficiency, it's a constant struggle for him personally and for the series as a whole to shake off the ghosts of the past - not only Leonard Rossiter's original, but another 70s sitcom giant, The Good Life. So referencing the US sitcom Mork and Mindy probably doesn't help either in that regard.

On the positive side, it's not without its laugh-out-loud moments, especially when his wife Nicola (Fay Ripley) explains why she's jobless too.

Martin Clunes recreates Reginald Perrin's fake suicide

Thirty-four years after Leonard Rossiter stripped off and ran naked into the water on a Dorset beach in The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, Martin Clunes is doing it again.

Reggie Perrin isn't dead, worse luck. He's down at the beach, nodding cruelly back to Leonard Rossiter. "Goodbye Old Reggie, hello New Reggie," says Martin Clunes, butt-naked. "Or why not just end it all? Prove once and for all that I'm not a fraud, just walk out to sea ..."

Good idea. Go on, do it. Put yourself out of your misery, and us out of ours. This remake has been a catastrophe, a massive error of judgment. If you go now, maybe the whole thing will be quietly forgotten and the memory of the original can recover.

But he has a packed suitcase with him, ready to come back from the dead, just as Rossiter did. And I fear that can only mean one thing: another series. [Cue lots of canned groaning.]

It may have lost more of its audience than the band on the Titanic, but this sitcom - which we still find hard to talk about in the same breath as the Leonard Rossiter original - has not been hounded out of Britain as most people predicted. In this final episode, Reggie starts to crumble when he realises his mother and father-in-law have enjoyed a clinch...

Why couldn't the BBC leave my father's legacy alone?

Leonard Rossiter's daughter slams Reggie Perrin remake.

In this sitcom's original 1970s version, Reggie Perrin was a character who could do something bizarre at any moment - his frustration with the daily, middle-class grind was palpable. Tonight the BBC's remake splutters into its third episode but there's still no sign that Martin Clunes's Reggie is a tenth of the man Leonard Rossiter brought to life.

Martin Clunes knew he was taking a risk when he took on Leonard Rossiter's famous role. He said in an interview: "I'm sure they'll say, I'm not as good as..." For all that, he brings a sympathetic gloom to the character, and there are plenty of good jokes swirling around his misery. Better yet, all the smaller parts have been cast to perfection. With good jokes, strong characters and a classic set-up, what's not to like? Only the lack of ambition. Tonight Reggie tries to find a programme on television that is "easy, warm and comforting". This would have suited him perfectly.

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.

The debut of Reggie Perrin on Friday night was dated in both form and content. It was a sitcom shot in a studio before a live audience (you don't see them so much these days), and it was a revival of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin which between 1976 and 1979 carried some weight as a critique of the little man lost amid corporatist capitalism. I didn't think it had much original to say then and I don't think that it does now. It is, however, very funny, largely because of Martin Clunes as Perrin who lumbers through home, his daily commute and his office life, like a giant suffering the early stages of pathological disinhibition. Clunes must have been wary of stepping into Leonard Rossiter's shoes. He is funnier than Rossiter was in the part.