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Date Posted: 01:18:51 03/05/13 Tue
Author: BB
Subject: I didn't get where I am today.......

In 1976 I watched the first telly series of “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin”. I didn’t have much in common with Reggie. He was about fifty, I was nineteen. He lived with his wife in a bought house in middle class suburban England, I lived with my mum and dad in a council house in Bathgate. He was a sales executive for Sunshine Desserts, I was a lab technician in a steel works. But Leonard Rossiter’s performance as Reggie was a wonder to behold and hear: the sharp-witted muttering, the rapid-fire putdowns disguised as compliments, the expressions of despair at the meaningless futility of everyday routine, and behind it all a good-heartedness that prevented him from going on the rampage with a gun and instead had him faking his own death to start a new life. Reggie and his circumstances were alien to me, and the novelty had me hooked.

Two weeks ago I discovered I could watch all three series, from 1976, 1977 and 1978 for free “on demand” through my cable telly package. I’ve watched all of the twenty-one episodes.

Good God, Reggie was younger than I am now. I’m fifty-five. Like him I’m a granddad, and that’s only one of the many things that had me watching the programme with new, older eyes.

At one point Reggie gets a new job with a company that makes aerosols and he has to organise a “smelling”, an event where employees have to rate new formulations for under-arm deodorants. This seemed hilariously ludicrous when I first saw it in the seventies but.........I once visited a company laboratory where a dozen toilet bowls in a row were automatically flushing every five minutes to test the longevity of those cleaning blocks that you hang from the rim in plastic holders. I had a conversation with the chief chemist, punctuated by the WHOOOSSSSHHHH of those synchronised cisterns. Of course this induced the need to pee and I was directed to the gents, past the line of labouring lavvies and down a corridor. I didn’t think of Reggie at the time, but I now realise his experiences weren’t so bizarre, and my fondness for the programme has been enriched by the thirty-odd years it's taken me to re-discover him.

P.S. I've only just realised that Reginald Iolanthe Perrin (helluva middle name) had the initials R.I.P.

BB

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