Henry Jeffreys

Why the Reggie Perrin novel deserves to be considered a classic in its own right

It was eerie the first time I watched The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin because it all felt so familiar. Suddenly my parents’ baffling banter made sense. When I thought they were speaking gibberish they were in fact quoting Perrin. My mother would say ‘great’ and my father would say ‘super’. My father would say things like ‘I didn’t get where I am today’ and my mother would say ‘I’m not a committee person.’ If lunch was going to be late my father would say ‘bit of a cock-up on the catering front.’ It’s difficult to overstate how thoroughly Perrin has seeped into popular culture and language.

David Nobbs, who died last month, is best known as the writer of three series of Reggie Perrin starring Leonard Rossiter but it’s worth going back to his original novel The Death of Reginald Perrin published in 1975. The eponymous hero is Reginald Iolanthe Perrin whose inane job as middle manager at convenience pudding company, Sunshine Desserts, is sending him slowly mad. He’s married to Elizabeth with two children Mark, a failed or rather failing actor, and Linda who is married to Tom, an estate agent who Reggie dislikes. He catches the same train with the same people every day. CJ, Reggie’s boss, thinks that Reggie is losing his drive and indeed Reggie is temporarily impotent. Worse still, Reggie has anarchic urges that he finds impossible to control. This is the opening line of the book:‘When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he has no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus.’ Random words such as ‘parsnips’ and ‘earwig’ pop out of his mouth at unexpected moments.

As the novel progresses his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. He then disappears, fakes his own suicide and adopts a series of increasingly outlandish assumed personas. The first series follows the plot of the book extremely closely but in some ways they are very different.

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