Why Reggie Why? (Reggie Perrin)

Member Name: LisaW82

Product:	Reggie Perrin
Date:	22/05/09 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Martin Clunes does his best

Disadvantages: It just isn't funny

I actually got quite excited when I heard a remake of Reggie Perrin was to hit our screens this year. My dad had always told me how funny the original show was but I had actually never seen it, so I was keen to see what this new version, starring Martin Clunes, had to offer. I am very sad to sat that the answer to that is not very much at all.

Reggie is a complex and miserable character overall who suffers from extreme boredom in his day to day job as a marketing expert for razors at Groomtech. He is fed up with life and his boss so in that respect he does hit home with an awful lot of people in this world. I just find him over bearing and totally unconvincing, especially in his infatuation with one of his much younger female colleagues. There is just no onscreen comedy chemistry between them at all.

I am a big fan of Martin Clunes from his Men Behaving Badly days and, to be fair to him, some of those laddish moments that he does so well do come out in Reggie, but he really should have let the role go to someone else for his credibility if nothing else. There is just very little that is funny about Reggie or the show overall. He is a fine comedy actor, but he can only work with the material he is given and I would have thought he would have knocked this role back in the blink of an eye. Perhaps he, like my father, had been a big fan of the original and saw this as some kind of honour, but sadly even he couldn't make this poor comedy writing sound and look funny.

The comedy is far too contrived to work and the little "over the top" sketches that play out Reggie's imagination are far too frequent and too "out there" to really work. I would much rather see some more thought put into the words that are spoken rather than slap stick humour that has had its day a long time ago.

The last episode in the first series is due to be aired tonight and I will force myself to watch it just because I have watched the previous five and live in hope that something especially funny will happen sooner or later, but in the unlikely event of a second series, they will lose me as a viewer.

Summary: No more after this series please