Reggie Perrin

Fay Ripley interview

Fay Ripley's back as put-upon wife Nicola in a new series of Reggie Perrin on BBC One...

It's a good remake - written, performed and produced by talented professionals - but of a brilliant original. Why do we have a broadcasting environment where the skills displayed in the remake aren't channelled into a new idea, a different comic take on a middle-aged man undergoing a breakdown, rather than an attempt to recreate the unbetterable. I expect those that made and commissioned it would argue that the remake actually was a new take. Well, if so, have the confidence to give it a new name, to forget the original other than as a subliminal influence, rather than to piggy-back on people's fondness for it and consequently dilute their perception of its excellence.

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.

BBC1 eyes more Reggie Perrin

The BBC is understood to be close to commissioning a second series of Reggie Perrin after dusting off the 1970s sitcom earlier this year.

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.]

Reggie's existential crisis comes to a head in this final episode, which sees him go into public meltdown during a speech about male grooming products. As ever, Martin Clunes s on top form as the sarcastic monster/creature of pity, and the dialogue has been sucker-punchingly good fun. Fittingly, it all ends up on a beach.

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.

There has been much to admire in this update of the Seventies sitcom, which comes to the end of its six episode run tonight. Martin Clunes's performance has been terrific; a reminder of his many strengths as a comic actor that were starting to become buried under less-pleasing memories of mawkish turns in undemanding ITV comedy dramas. The writing has been sharp and the laughs have come thick and fast. In fact, the series might have been better served if it hadn't been named after its predecessor, leaving it so open to comparisons. The key themes still resonate, especially in the current climate, and without the name 'Reggie Perrin' hanging over it, the writers may have been able to move it into unchartered territory rather than sticking so rigidly to the original plotting. But it should still be considered a resounding success.

It's the final episode of what's been a far better series than many expected (at least if you avoid too many direct comparisons with the original). Already suffering from worryingly high stress levels, Reggie now finds himself with just a day to prepare a big speech. He's also distressed by his fantasy figure Jasmine's behaviour at the office party.

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...