RIP RIP

David Nobbs has died. He was a novelist, scriptwriter, creator of sketches for the Two Ronnies, Frost Report and much more. But the achievement that I love that man for - and which, to my mind, confirms him as something of a genius of comedy - is The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. It's just one of the funniest and most melancholy shows that British television has ever produced and the books on which it was based are heart-stoppingly funny and sad.

If you don't know, it's a trio of books and tv series about a suburban, middle-class, middle-aged man working for a puddings company, with the grimly utopian name of Sunshine Desserts, who goes through a midlife crisis. Appalled by the routines of his life, his marriage, his family and his work, he fakes his own suicide; he returns in disguise, remarries his own wife, Elizabeth, and then, in a desperate act of nihilistic resistance to the corporate world, he sets up a shop called Grot, where everything on sale is completely useless. Grot becomes enormously successful and he determines to fake-end it all again; returning for a second time, he decides to set up an alternative community, based on love and trust and openness to make stressed, bored people happier and better. This also does not end well.

I saw some of the episodes when they were originally on TV and loved them. But I read the books, because my mum had them. They were endlessly sad, beautifully moving (oh my word, the last scene of the first book. Seek it out, read it. It's beautiful and the last line will kill you). David Nobbs wrote beautifully; the scenes that most stay with me are the saddest ones; Reggie taking the decision to commence an affair (which is not consummated) with his secretary Joan: Nobbs writes beautifully about his hesitation, his anticipatory regret, his sense that nothing will be the same again. And the last sequence of the third book, where a group of vandals break into the commune and destroy everything, despite Reggie and his friends trying to resist; I remember reading it, probably aged 10, my cheeks hot with anger at the injustice.

And, of course, they are funny. Joyfully funny. Hobbs created a magnificent cast of characters who were both grotesques (with their famous, wonderful catchphrases 'I didn't get where I am today...', 'Great'/'Super!', 'Haven't the foggiest', 'Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden', 'Of course, Cuddlypuddles') but also recognisable, vulnerable, sweet, damaged and wonderful people. And Reggie himself is the most wonderful creation: there's a brilliant scene where his son-in-law, Tom, has brought round some of his famously dreadful home-made wine and Elizabeth has made him promise not criticise it, at pain of having to put money in a jar. But he cannot stop himself. 'This is actually quite drinkable,' says Tom modestly. 'Oh I wouldn't go that far,' says Reggie. I've tried to engineer situations to use that joke for thirty years. 

As in all great comedy, the comedy has an undertow of despair, but the despair is also leavened by moments of peerless joy. The horrifying climax of the third season's experiment in alternative communal living is requited by a scene in which Reggie has gone back to work for Sunshine Desserts. He has taken part in a blind tasting of new desserts and now CJ, his boss, has called him in to discuss results. For every dessert the tasters have been asked to identify the taste; amid the usual guesses at raspberry, lychee, and the rest, there is one discrepant answer that keeps being offered: 'Bolivian unicyclist's jockstrap'. How can this be explained? CJ asks Reggie meaningfully ('I didn't get where I am today by everything smelling of a Bolivian unicyclist's jockstrap!' he barks). 'Computer error?' suggests Reggie, clearly the culprit. 'It doesn't have a computer ring about it,' replies a sceptical CJ. It's a beautiful scene because it affirms Reggie's undiminished spirit of resistance, however childish, however futile.

And throughout, the jokes are somehow just beautifully about despair. Look at this wonderful exchange with Sunshine Desserts' hopeless Dr Morrissey, to whom Reggie has gone for a consultation:

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can't finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can't stop thinking about sex, can't start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during Play For Today?

Reggie: That's extraordinary, Doc! That's exactly how I've been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is?

There's a remarkable scene in which Reggie, in a terrible Italian restaurant, eats three bowls of ravioli in a row in an act of impotent surrealist resistance. (I always remember the description of the women at the next table: 'They had the look of people who, having spent too much, now saw no barrier to spending much too much'. How brilliant an observation that is.) Looking back at them now, they seem so clearly a product of their time: the books taking on corporate culture, and then exploring a, successively, punkish spirit of anti-corporatism (s2) and then a kind of new age therapeutic redemption (s3). His brother-in-law Jimmy is a product of the divided 70s which imagined open civil war between the forces of the far right and far left. The books are just beautifully sad. Read them and weep.

Looking back I don't know what nine-year-old me made of the show's critique of 1970s corporate culture, but I think the image of his frustrated acts of lunacy were familiar to me from what I'd seen of the drab 1970s - and that image of his daily commute, umbrella, three-piece pinstripe suit and briefcase, always seemed to me a Ministry of Silly Walks waiting to happen. Maybe I was primed to find that absurd. But also, as a kid, heading towards big school, having that vague foreboding sense that I was imminently to put away childish things, Reginald Perrin was like a child, dressed up in a suit, pretending to be grown up, badly. On the back of the paperback I read, there was a quote from Ronnie Barker. He said 'I still feel I am Reggie Perrin as I walk around'. I knew what he meant. Reggie was in me.

If you haven't seen the show, please get hold of it now. Leonard Rossiter gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. Rossiter had splinter-sharp comic timing (watch the 'Pillock Talk' scene (series 2, ep 7) for a great example of his quicksilver oscillation between mocking seriousness and anarchic disrespect; it's deliriously brilliant - and when he starts to notice his interviewer's name, it just becomes stratospherically funny. Oh fuck it, I'll give you the clip below. 

But now he's gone because David Nobbs has died. (It would be wonderful, though, would it not, if David Nobbs had faked his own death and will come back in a new guise. Look out for a brilliant new comedy writer called Martin Welbourne.)

David Nobbs RIP. 
Reginald Iolanthe Perrin RIP.

Sacrifice

When I was a boy, I used to read 2000AD magazine. It was a bloody great magazine for a kid to read; amazing artwork, really well-written imaginative stories. In the 21 April 1979 issue (prog 109), there's a very good 'Tharg's Future Shock'. If you don't know, Tharg was the green alien who supposedly edited 2000AD and his 'Future Shocks' were usually cautionary tales of a science-fiction kind. Between that and Fantasy Island, the lesson 'be careful what you wish for' was pretty ingrained before I was 12.

I've thought about this a lot in the last four years while I've been Head of Department at my university.

We're in the future. The Earth is depleted and humans are driven to find new planets on which to live. Some pioneers have colonised Tarka III for thirty years when the Planetary Assessment Group come to inspect their progress. It's not looking good. The planet is parched, still suffering from the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war between its previous occupiers. The air is thin, though the colonists have been drilling in an attempt to liberate the vast oxygen pockets under the ground, with mixed success. The colonists' leader, Reed Benson, is optimistic for the future but the Assessors see the colony as uneconomical and are minded to close it down. 

Benson is angry and despairing about the future of the colony he has worked so hard to support. When his archeologist daughter shows him the underground cavern they have discovered, he welcomes the chance to take his mind of the colony's impending death sentence. Exploring on his own, he accidentally uncovers a secret room, filled with technology from an earlier Tarkaan civilisation. Communicating with him telepathically, a recorded message explains that their people have destroyed themselves, but before they died, they determined that their planet would only be inherited by people who truly love the planet. 

By entering the chamber, they explain, Benson has triggered the countdown to a thermonuclear explosion that will destroy the planet. However, if he sacrifices himself, by stepping onto a dais in the chamber, the bomb will be stopped, and indeed the oxygen pockets will be liberated, throwing clean air into the atmosphere and making the planet fully habitable. He has a choice: let the planet die or sacrifice himself so that the colony can prosper. He hesitates for a moment: can he bear never to see his family again? He steps onto the dais and is immediately wracked with pain.

The Assessment Group are about to declare the colony uneconomical and close it down when the news comes through that oxygen is pumping out from vents in the earth. The planet will be habitable within weeks. The best news is that this new atmosphere will not cost a penny. 

But where is Benson? someone asks. He's nowhere to be seen. But of course, they remark. Over a panel that shows Benson grimacing and writhing in his death throes, one of them cynically observes, 'Benson couldn't care less about the cost of anything'.

Wars of the Rose(s)

The Rose Theatre in Kingston recently announced its cast for The Wars of the Roses, its revival of the compilation by John Barton in 1963 of a bunch of Shakespeare's history plays (All the Henry VIs and Richard III) into a single continuous saga. Trevor Nunn is to direct and if anyone can handle the scale and pageantry of such an event, he can. It's a great idea to revive it and I was looking forward to seeing it. And then they announced the cast (above). A cast of 22 and not a single non-white face. Nor, apparently, anyone self-identifying as disabled.

The production's been quite strongly criticised for this, not least by Equity which has been campaigning for theatres to reflect the demographic of the acting profession. This has prompted the theatre to defend its casting decision. Apparently, it made its decisions on the basis of 'historical accuracy'.

What fresh bullshit is this? Historical accuracy?

(a) it's theatre, not a history book. In the theatre, old people play young people, young play old, rich play poor, women play men, men play women, black play white, chairs play thrones, backcloths play the fields of France, words play swordfights and on and on. Where did this demand for accuracy come from?

(b) It's the Rose Kingston, based on the non-realist Rose Theatre of Elizabethan London. It's an open, presentational stage; the audience can see the rest of the audience; it's not a theatre that tries to represent the world realistically. Historical accuracy is weirdly inappropriate for that space.

(c) How historically accurate are the original plays? Clue: not very.

(d) And these plays, the ones you are being so strict about, they were written to be performed with a small acting company who would just have the parts allocated between them - with boys playing the women. These aren't plays written for historically accurate casting.

(e) And  how historically accurate is the rest of the casting going to be? Are French actors going to play the French? And, if you are going to be historically accurate, then you remember last year when they dug Richard III out of a car park and everyone could see his scoliosis of the spine. Why don't you have a disabled actor playing Richard III? 

(f) Is a lack of black people historically accurate? There is archaeological and other evidence of Africans in Britain from Roman times and by the fifteenth century there were black people in English armies. These are big war plays. Why no black people? 

(g) And anyway, in a big, ambitious project like this, that tries to show a whole nation at a moment of transition and flux, isn't it a great opportunity to emphasise the diversity of Shakespeare's characters and the range of his imagination with a cast that reflects our own nation in transition and flux? Why create an arbitrary rule that keeps Black and Asian actors out of your production?

In other words, the Rose Theatre is ignoring the nature of theatre, the nature of the theatre building, the nature of the plays and the theatre of Shakespeare's time, the nature of his history and ours, and the rest of its own casting in order to defend an all-white non-disabled cast.

The casting was bad enough; the excuse is even worse.

UPDATE. The wonderful actor, Tanya Moodie (who was in my A Modest Adjustment at the National), has forwarded me these details from Hans Memling's Seven Joys of the Virgin, painted as an altarpiece for the chapel at the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, but now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Note that this is dated as 1480, so basically painted during the events of Richard III Act I.

Notice anything? And you can see the full thing here.