Martin Clunes

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.

This week, Reggie (Martin Clunes) is having trouble with small talk. Of course, Reggie is struggling with bigger and worse things, but it's the small talk where it breaks out. Whether chatting by the water-cooler or having a glass of wine with his mother, he can't hit the right note, and those vivid fantasy moments he has don't help. He also continues to pine for Jasmine (Lucy Liemann), the gorgeous woman at work. Liemann has practically nothing to do, but does it well. Likewise, Fay Ripley seems wasted as Reggie's wife and tonight Geoffrey Whitehead and Wendy Craig add to the roster of comic talent worthy of more and better material. Better is the occupational health "wellness woman" whose response to any ailment is a perky "Oh that's horrid! Oh you sad sausage!" But it's a brave move for the script to mock poor-quality TV - luckily it's in one of the better lines, as Reggie notes, "Quite tiring the telly, isn't it? At one point I seemed to be watching CSI: Bournemouth."

"I am not a sheep; and there are thousands of people out there who feel exactly the same way!" So, with finely tuned impotence, protests frustrated office worker Reggie Perrin (Martin Clunes) in the second episode of this underwhelming sitcom remake. Perrin's daydreams about a different life get more and more outlandish until, with a fateful kiss, they spill over into the real world.

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.

Reactions to this remake have been pretty mixed and if things don't pick up in week two, the BBC could find that it's the viewers who are doing a disappearing act.

Tonight finds Martin Clunes's Reggie having trouble with office small talk and a visit to his company's sympathetic Wellness Person is called for. There are also unwanted visits from his mother and father-in-law to contend with - and Geoffrey Whitehead and Wendy Craig, in particular, have both been pulled from the BBC's bottomless pit of stupidly posh-voiced thesps.

Like the show's ill-judged laughter track (the weaker the gag, the bigger the laugh), these cardboard cut-out characters are harder to believe in than Reggie's flights of fantasy - although Clunes continues to do a heroic job conveying Reggie's disconnection with the rest of the human race.

Don't do it. Seriously, you'll want to sue the Beeb for the 30 minutes you've just lost. Dreadful stuff that even Martin Clunes can't save. Things are lifted a fraction by the presence of Wendy Craig as Reggie's mother. But, sad to say, even her saintly presence doesn't make this worth watching.

Martin Clunes returns as Doc Martin for Series 4

Martin Clunes is back in Cornwall to film a new series of the ratings winning comedy drama Doc Martin for ITV1. He returns to play the curmudgeonly Dr Martin Ellingham whose truculent and tactless manner upsets the convivial community of the picture postcard village of Portwenn on the North Cornwall coast.

The fall and rise and fall and rise and fall

Individual lines, which may have been Nobbs's, and may have been Simon Nye's, were fine, and Martin Clunes did a fair job as Reggie, also driven to fantasy by his humdrum life. But there was something wrong about the whole thing.

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.

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.