The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

- Season 1

(1976)

Reginald Iolanthe Perrin is a 46-year old sales executive for Sunshine Desserts, run by the hearty but hectoring boss C.J. Reggie is clearly suffering a mid-life crisis. Though not unhappily married to Elizabeth, he calls her mother a hippopotamus and is finding no enthusiasm for marketing C.J.'s latest line - exotic ices. He wants something better for his life, but is not sure what.

Life is beginning to get on top of Reggie as he starts to dictate abusive letters. Perhaps he needs a nice peaceful holiday. Unfortunately his daughter Linda asks him to take her and her husband Tom and their children, Adam and Jocasta, to a safari park, as Tom has crashed their own car. Being cooped up in a hot car in a safari park is too much for Reggie who gets out of the car for a walk and has to be rescued from the lions.

Elizabeth has gone to stay with her sick mother so Reggie uses the opportunity for some afternoon delight with his glamorous secretary Joan, who proves herself to be up for it. Sadly, just as they are about to unleash their passions Reggie is visited, first by his layabout son, resting actor Mark, and then by Elizabeth's right-wing, scrounging brother Jimmy, wanting food. Eventually Joan, hiding from them in Reggie's bedroom, escapes down the drainpipe.

Still at her mother's house, Elizabeth rings Reggie to remind him that she had planned a dinner party but Reggie does not cancel it. Instead he asks C.J. and his wife, young colleague David who toadies to C.J., the well-endowed Davina from the custards department and his rude uncle Percy, who makes sexist comments about Davina. Then he tells them that there is no food as he has made a donation to Oxfam instead. Next morning he finds a hung over David has stayed the night and can remember nothing of the evening before, not even when his trousers fell down, exposing his...

A nervous Reggie is to address the British Fruit Association and mixes Dutch courage with sedative pills, with the result that the speech is a disaster and he has to be dragged off the stage. He is now at breaking point and tells C.J. that blood will flow. C.J. takes this literally when Reggie empties a lorry load of loganberry essence into the river where C.J. is fishing. Next Reggie leaves his clothes by the edge of the sea to fake his suicide and considers which false identity to assume.

Reggie tries out various new identities, including Lord Amherst (which attracts the attention of the comely Jean) and Donald Potts (which attracts the less comely Miss Pershore). However, he misses Elizabeth and is upset to find that, since she assumes that Reggie is dead, she is seeing an old flame, Henry. He even encounters them whilst pretending to be an Italian, though she fails to recognize him, as do his work colleagues when he sits near them in their local pub. Finally he gets a job in a sewage works.

Calling himself Martin Wellbourne, an alleged friend of the deceased newly arrived from Brazil, and sporting a curly beard, Reggie gate-crashes his own memorial service where a vague vicar plugs Mark's new play and people seem to miss Reggie less than he had hoped. Elizabeth is engaged to Henry but recognizes Reggie immediately. She allows him to romance her and plays along with his deception, finally agreeing to marry him, as Martin. Linda has also seen through the disguise but Elizabeth tells her to say nothing as Reggie is clearly much happier in his new skin. He ...