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“So that Martin Clunes remake of Reggie Perrin starts this week,” the TV
editor said, in our regular Wednesday morning “What are we going to cover
this week?” chat. It is the point where, between us, we weigh the whole
televisual world in our hands, as if we were King Solomon, deciding Fate,
and meting out critical justice. Then, after half an hour of intense debate,
we just choose whichever programmes I can get the most jokes out of.
“Dunno, what you think of the original Reggie Perrin?” the editor continued.
“Part of our heritage? Your Leonard Rossiter classic?”
“We got the boxed set for Christmas and I’ve watched a couple,” I said. “But I
was a bit meh of it, TBH. I’m a modern lady, like Melanie Griffith in
the 1988 movie Working Girl. I can’t buy into a world that thinks
that showing some stock footage of a hippopotamus, accompanied by a
slide-trombone, is funny.”
At this point, after a minuscule pause, both the TV editor and my husband,
whom I thought was absorbed with the Lady Gaga album in the corner, burst
into proper, Ha! Ha!”, thigh-slapping, red-faced, mirth-tears
laughter. My husband was so taken by the memory of Reggie’s hippo that he
eventually had to cast his eyes up to heaven, in a “God! Save me now, before
the memories cause me to laugh myself into a grave.”
Meanwhile, at the other end of the phone, the TV editor appeared to have
turned into Chairman LMAO, having some manner of Cultural ROFLution, ie, he
was laughing a lot.
“Ah, that is good, though,” he said eventually, and weakly.
“Reggie Perrin’s hippo. The mother-in-law. My my.”
So you can see where this leaves us. You can see how this establishes that I
cannot hope to tell nervous fans of the original Reggie Perrin whether or
not this modish remake will break their hearts or not. What I can tell you
is that as someone who didn’t care tuppence ha’penny for the original — and
so was, therefore, essentially irritated by the idea of it happening all
over again — I actually like this new one. It gently warmed me. It warmed me
as As Time Goes By warms me. Co-written by Perrin’s originator —
David Nobbs — and Simon Nye (Men Behaving Badly), Perrin 2.0
simply appears to be a classic comedy chassis, remade with modern
technology. Reggie Perrin is still a man so bored, frustrated and crushed
that he has become borderline psychotic — hallucinating sight gags here,
making inappropriate gags about menstruation to his wife’s Women’s Support
Group — “I take my hat off to anyone who bleeds for five days a month and
doesn’t die!” — there. His commuter train is still regularly late — “Wrong
kind of passenger at South Norwood.” His boss — Chris, now, rather than C.
J. — is still a dick.
However, because it’s the 21st century, his wife is Fay Ripley, who gets lines
instead of being just a cipherous housewife. Similarly, Reggie 2009 fancies
not his secretary — could be a bit oppressive, etc — but the new hot
executive at his work, Jasmine. “Oh Jasmine!” he says, sitting at her desk,
brushing his hair with her hairbrush. “You have opened up a wound in me
called ‘Hope’!”
The biggest difference here is, of course, Martin Clunes — a man who reliably
delivers slightly wonky likeability in the way that John Lewis reliably
delivers affordable, quality linens. Personally, I engage with the
escalating depression and insanity of Clunes’s Perrin more than I did with
Rossiter’s — who, however talented an actor, couldn’t quite cover up the
fact that he would have been a ferociously bitter, difficult and demanding
next-door neighbour, say; or company if seated next to him at a dinner
party. I can’t be doing with difficult “classic comedy” geniuses. They all
seem the same to me. Indeed, I can segue Rossiter’s Rigsby saying “Oh, Miss
Jones!” into a postwar, light-entertainment catchphrase mega-mix of
big-chinned legends, co-starring Norman Wisdom, Michael Crawford, Tony
Hancock and Bruce Forsyth: “Oh, Miss Jones! Mr Grimsdale! Bettyyyyyyy!
That’s practically an armful! Didn’t they do well?”
And that’s about all I want from any of them. Oh, and, as yet, no
hippo-and-slide-trombone! Who knows what the next few weeks will bring.
Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles centred on the Coalinga
State Hospital in California — a place whose inexplicably
suggestive-sounding name was, perhaps, purposely formulated as a
distraction, so that people didn’t automatically refer to it as “That
paedophile place” instead. For those who broadly like Theroux and what he
does, but wish he wouldn’t go in so hard on the wide-eyed “I’ve just dropped
out of a spaceship and I don’t understand what these crazy human people are
doing!” schtick, this was a welcome pop from Theroux’s more savvy end —
possibly because effecting an air of childlike innocence around a bunch of
paedophiles struck everyone as wildly inappropriate.
The aim of the $400 million Coalinga centre is, basically, to take on
convicted paedophiles after they have served their jail terms, and “cure”
them for a charge of $200,000 per patient per year. However, with more than
70 per cent of the inmates refusing treatment, the success rate looks
pitiful — only 13 inmates have yet been approved for release. In effect,
Coalinga is an incredibly expensive, and pretty luxurious, storage tank for
society’s least-wanted.
“Most people would describe [the inmates] as the least-likeable people in the
world,” Theroux commented, before attempting, as a reflexive documentary
exercise in contrariness, to make us like them. Mr Lamb — everyone was
referred to as “Mr” — had requested first chemical, and then physical
castration. Looking like a fat, mournful Bill Murray, Lamb explained that,
despite being “cured”, more than 1,100 potential landlords had rejected him,
leaving him stranded at Coalinga. Mr Rigby, meanwhile, was one of Coalinga’s
star inmates, apparently making “excellent” progress — until Theroux noticed
a painting, pinned up by his bed, of a very young male ballet dancer, in
extremely clingy tights, lying face down on a bed. Amazingly, no one else at
Coalinga had noticed this. An urgent meeting followed.
Theroux tried his hardest to make us care about the men of Coalinga. He left
it until the last ten minutes before phrases such as “50 or 60 offences”,
“the child was aged either 6 or 7” and “with your own son” arrived. As
Theroux drove away from the centre, stuck in the middle of the Californian
scrub, it was as if he were leaving one of those nuclear processing plants
where radioactive materials are vitrified and stored in deep, guarded and
lonely wells, indefinitely, out of sight and out of mind, at a cost of
millions.
The second series of Ashes to Ashes, and I think I’ve worked out the
problem. As a show that’s been reviled for being both stupid, and a pitiful
attempt to crowbar the Eighties into the Life on Mars retro-spooky
franchise, the error is that it’s not Eighties enough. It’s not stupid
enough. It keeps trying to be dark and clever, but if we’re going to have a
spin-off Gene Hunt series set in 1982, what we basically want is, as one
friend put it, Juliet Bravo meets Fame”. Bigger hair! Sillier
make-up! People running in and shouting “I’ve just apprehended a
break-dancing murderer killing people like a Pac-Man, and now I’m off to
watch Diff’rent Strokes.”
Just so you know, the big story arc of the second series appears to be
something to do with the Princess of Wales. Theoretically, this is stupid
and Eighties enough to be brilliant — but as it’s shoehorned into the last
30 seconds with all the delicacy of a punch in the ear, it just makes you
shout, “Oh, shut UUUUP!” instead.
Do you know what a documentary likes? It likes a bumptious, posh arse who
thinks he’s “all that and a bag of chips”, as the shouting ladies are wont
to shout on Ricki Lake. In Heritage, BBC Two found just such
an item in Dr Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage. Thurley
was pioneering a novel scheme for EH — he had bought “Britain’s only Jacobean
palace”, Apethorpe Hall, for £3 million, and had then spent £4 million
assassinating death-watch beetle. English Heritage is, after all, as Thurley
put it, “the social security system for grand houses. When they’re
destitute, and living in a box, we take them on.”
However, by Thurley’s logic, the next part of his plan — selling on Apethorpe
to some billionaire who would spend £10 million doing it up properly — made
Apethorpe out to be some manner of tramp-manor prostitute, and English
Heritage its pimp. Even worse, despite EH putting Apethorpe in a sexy bra,
and shouting “Come and have a feel of James I’s hunting lodge!”, absolutely
no one was interested in buying it.
This is because a) the former owner lives next door and had belligerently
planted a gigantic wall of leylandii around the place so he did not have to
view the new occupant and, more importantly, b) Apethorpe is in
Northamptonshire. Northamptonshire. Let’s face it, if you’re a billionaire
looking to spend upwards of £17 million on a palace, you’re just not going
to do it for one sandwiched between Peterborough and Corby.
“I said to Prince Charles — can you be an estate agent for us, and see if
there’s anyone who wants a country house?” Thurley sighed. English Heritage
a pimp, Apethorpe a whore, and the heir to the throne an estate agent.
That’s the level of stupid Ashes to Ashes needs to aim for.
