An ordinary bloke : Leonard Rossiter as Reginald Perrin
Credit: BBC
“Mother rang – she wants to know if we’re going to see her on Sunday.” Cue the image of a hippopotamus trotting through the mud. The best-remembered gag from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is – almost 45 years since it first aired – still very funny. Sure, that hippo trots right into the category of standard Seventies mother-in-law material, but there’s really nothing standard about The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which is now being repeated on BBC Four after being absent from our screens for decades.
Though set in the leafy south London suburb of ‘Climthorpe’, it’s not a cosy living room comedy; nor a sitcom in which the characters’ weekly schemes revert, as most sitcoms do, to a familiar status quo before the following week’s episode.