Reggie Perrin
BBC 1
Ashes To Ashes
BBC 1
ANOTHER week, another remake. I wonder what it all means. Could it be the credit crunch? That seems to be the root of all our evil. Perhaps the present day is so unbearable that we are compelled to retreat into the televisual past. TV producers apparently think so. At first they brought us the “revamped” Minder with Shane Ritchie playing a chip off the Arthur Daley block. Now they’re getting even bolder, daring to imitate the inimitable: Leonard Rossiter in the legendary 1970s sitcom The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. As I sat down to watch the remake, Reggie Perrin, I was determined to give it a chance – you have to believe me. I tried not to consult my mental list of all the remakes that have ever worked on big or small screen (The Thomas Crown Affair and, er, that’s it). After all, you never know, do you?
Yes you do. I feared Martin Clunes would be hopelessly miscast and he was. Too tall, too imposing, too much macho charisma – a sort of anti-Perrin, if you like. Far from being the little man crushed by society, Clunes looked rather splendid in his business suit and swept-back hair. He towered over his fellow commuters and work colleagues, snapping sarcastically like someone with a superiority, rather than an inferiority, complex. He even loomed over his ghastly boss (a wasted Neil Stuke) and seemed quite capable of swatting him away like a buzzing fly. It was hard to imagine how such an alpha male could wind up in middle management mediocrity in the first place. When he lusted after foxy new office colleague Jasmine – a bit of PC updating there – you wondered why she didn’t leap on him at once. He came across as a better-looking Doc Marten, with a dash of man-who-once-behaved-badly. I quite fancied him myself.
So what, exactly, was his problem? In what way was the new Reggie a victim of the system? Because his wife was a bit too busy with her committees? Because his fellow commuters didn’t chat to one another on the train? Because his sycophantic underlings at work were trying too hard to please him? These days it’s not easy to empathise with someone who despises his job in manufacturing. At least Groomtech was making something useful (razors, shaving foam) rather than speculating in hedge funds, derivatives and toxic debt. And at least he’s got a job.
That’s the trouble with trying to resurrect past TV triumphs. That particular constellation of writer, performers and cultural zeitgeist can never return, however much you “reimagine” it. We are less intimidated by social conformity right now than they were in the 1960s and ’70s. We’re worrying more about basic survival. Perhaps there are some new laughs to be generated by our current reality, once we stop “updating” and “reimagining” entertainment history and have the courage to create something original. Maybe it won’t get the automatic publicity of a remake. But neither will it feel an automatic critical boot up its arse.
As for the new series of Ashes To Ashes, is it another case of “never go back”? Yes and no. On the one hand, it is very much the mixture as before – tough retro geezer Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) sparking off posh know-it-all detective Alex Drake, timewarped from 2009. The early 1980s cultural references come thick and fast: Russell Harty, Radio Rentals, strip-o-grams, Rod Hull and Emu. The time travel Macguffin seems as flimsy as before, although it now seems set for an intriguing complication somehow involving the death of Princess Diana.
While I still feel Keeley Hawes is miscast as the female lead, however, the critical disapproval of her performance seems to me to have a whiff of misogyny about it. For now, the show is still an entertaining watch. Has it got enough juice for the rest of the series, let alone a rumoured third outing? Now you’re asking, I can’t resist saying it. I didn’t get where I am today by making dodgy predictions like that.
Helen Chappell
