All Our Yesterdays
Article dated: Monday 20 May 2002
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

It was a typically English mid-life crisis comedy, lifted out of the rut by a superb script, and Leonard Rossiter's magisterial performance as Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. Reggie was a bored junior executive with Sunshine Desserts, who arrived for work exactly eleven minutes late every day from his home in the suburbs, after his train was delayed for some outlandish reason, later passed on to his superiors in an entirely matter of fact way ("Sorry I'm late, CJ, train attacked by Indians at Surbiton").

John Barron as CJ was pretty brilliant too - a distant relative of Ricky Gervais's character in the recent hit The Office - with his homilies about running a successful office ("I didn't get where I am today by complaining about Indian attacks at Surbiton"), through which Reggie daydreams. Reggie fantasises about escape from his workaday existence, and eventually fakes his own drowning by abandoning his clothes on a beach. Later, he returns from his watery grave and starts his own business, Grot, producing really useless items like square footballs and cruets without holes. It is, of course, a roaring success, and before long, Reggie's life is as before. David Nobbs's script, while bristling with really great jokes, caught the essential sadness of Reggie's situation.