Hero Corner No.1: David Nobbs

A couple of years back I had the absolute pleasure of meeting one of the best TV writers there's been: David Nobbs. He created The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, A Bit of a Do and Fairly Secret Army among others, and was a regular contributor to all of the satire boom sketch shows right through to The Two Ronnies. It was at a book reading, and he was incredibly interesting, talking through his career highs and lows and giving advice about how to write and what makes a joke work.

It is, of course, Perrin that he shall remain known for, and rightly so. He created an archetype of the mid-life crisis executive that we all on some level can sympathise with. Certainly even as a small kid watching it I felt that I understood Reggie's plight: the bullying, the tedium, the fantasies, the increasing inability to control himself, the desire for re-invention and violent change. My dad was a car mechanic, not an office worker, and the whole situation was alien to me, but for some reason this crazed, unhappy and very, very funny man struck a chord and I find that thirty years later I'm still obsessed with him. Reggie is my role model: I am a middle-aged office worker trapped in a routine and a lovely suburban existence, and part of my brain is desperate to leave my clothes on a beach and start again. My heart breaks whenever I hear him do his doomed, drunken speech 'Are We Getting Our Just Desserts?'. I went to just such a godawful and pointless conference today, and it brought it all flooding back to me:

'We are told that we need more growth: 6% per year. More chemicals to cure more pollution, caused by more chemicals. More car parks for more tourists who want to get away from more car parks. More food, to make us more fat, to make us use more slimming aids, to make us take pills, to make us ill, to make us take more pills, to make more profit. More boring speakers, making more boring speeches, at more boring conferences. But what has all this growth done for me? Well, I'll tell you. One day I'll die, and on my grave it will say: "Here lies Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. He didn't know the names of the trees and the flowers, but he knew the rhubarb crumble sales figures for Schleswig Holstein."'

Apparently Nobbs is working on a new version of Perrin with Simon Nye, to star Martin Clunes. I have mixed feelings about this. I want a new generation to discover Reggie, especially at the moment, when like the seventies, everything is crumbling around us. His story is timeless and shouldn't be put away in a box along with the Bay City Rollers and the three day week. However, the original series must surely be definitive? Leonard Rossiter is a thousand times more heartbreaking than your average tearjerker and has a harsh quality which Clunes does not possess. In my head I'm seeing him as less the sharp, birdlike Perrin of yore than a lumbering annoyed bear. Of course, Clunes may be brilliant, and I hope he is, as Perrin, and David Nobbs, deserve nothing less.