David Nobbs said in a radio interview (BBC Radio 2 ??/09/96) he had half heartedly dabbled sporadically at many ideas during the late 70s and early 1980s to wrap up the Reginald Perrin series as he was never fully satisfied with the conclusion of The Better World of Reginald Perrin (series 3). Nobbs felt as though he had fulfilled his original intention and caught the zeitgeist of the 1970s workplace with the original Perrin trilogy and couldn't take that vein too much further as the original Reggie Perrin was mainly about increasing dissatisfaction in the workplace, and the breakdown in worker/management relations which plagued British industry in the 1970s and the lack of humanity in dealing with workers. He now had a chance to move the cast on to the materialistic nineties zeitgeist with the new series as well as a golden chance to tie up the character's loose ends. He fought off the temptation (and apparently a fair amount of pressure from within the BBC) to recast another actor as Reggie, especially as Ronnie Barker was, at the time the series was floated in 1994, only recently semi-retired and he was still highly keen to get a chance to play Reggie Perrin - a role originally written for him - though he was too busy in 1977 to play the role in the series - and Leonard Rossiter got the role instead, made it his own and the rest is history. While the series had its critics, it was a bold move to reintroduce basically a supporting cast without the star. The series rolls along nicely in the gang's quest for absurdity and a slab of Reggie's legacy but never breaks any boundaries of comedy as the original series did. There were too many rehashed Reggie gags from the original series which the others just couldn't carry off. The true joy of the series was, that after a long break, we had the chance to catch up with old friends once again to find them all in fine fettle apart from Tony Webster (Trevor Adams) and of course Reggie (Leonard Rossiter) himself.
Review of The Legacy of Reginald Perrin
