Even in death, David Nobbs was attached to his greatest creation. Unwittingly perhaps, social media mourned the writer’s passing by placing his name alongside the initials of Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. The inevitable hashtag of mourning was the same as the monogram on Reggie’s executive briefcase: RIP.
The tributes to Nobbs, which have centred on Perrin – eponymous hero of a clutch of novels and BBC TV series – have praised the character as an enduring embodiment of the futility of contemporary life. Reggie was a beleaguered everyman, a sitcom Joseph K, trapped in a Kafkaesque system that was both absurd and bent on crushing the spirit of all it touched.
Inevitably, Perrin’s been mourned too as an avatar for suburbia, typified by his daily commute from Coleridge Close via Norbiton station to catch the 8.16 to Waterloo, a train forever delayed by increasingly improbable calamities (“Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden”). But however much he spoke for a certain space, Perrin was also a man of his time.
For Reginald Perrin stands as an emblem of the 1970s. It might lack the slickness of Mad Men’s seventh season, but the show resembles more closely that era as it was actually lived and looked, at least in Britain: the shabby commuter trains, the tired suits, the tablecloth and doilies at home. It depicted the quotidian tedium of white-collar life. Indeed, in its fantasy of escaping the rat race, it shared a theme with an equally successful comedy of the age, The Good Life. In this, Perrin was a relative of Tom and Barbara Good, only without their optimistic faith in a better alternative.
TV comedy has an uncanny knack for capturing the spirit of its age like this. For one thing, these shows inadvertently reveal the sensibilities of their time. The death this week of Stephen Lewis, who played the reviled Blakey on On the Buses – where the black drivers were known interchangeably as “Chalky” – is a reminder that it was not just Love Thy Neighbour that exposed the casual racism of British life 45 years ago.
But usually it’s subtler than that. Perrin boasted more than the trappings of 70s life, the union stoppages and drinks cabinets. He was a middle manager in a middling company who felt trapped partly because he knew he had a job for life. To him, that sounded like a prison sentence. To millions of workers today, that would seem like unimaginable job security.
He was a man working with and for men. Women were either stay-at-home wives or, if younger, secretaries to be lusted after. And let’s not forget, Reggie worked for a company that actually made things. Even if the output of Sunshine Desserts appalled Reggie – one suggested slogan: “I like to stroke my nipple with Strawberry and Lychee Ripple” – it’s nevertheless a reminder that this was the Britain of manufacturing rather than service industries. Indeed, as the illuminating BBC series Back in Time for Dinner reminded people last week, the 1970s was when instant and processed food products of the kind churned out by Perrin’s despised boss CJ were hailed as marvels of modernity.
If that seems like ancient history now, Reggie the corporate time-server was already looking dated within a decade. For who were the standout comedy characters of the 1980s? Loadsamoney was the explicit expression of the Thatcherite id, but Del Boy Trotter and Arthur Daley – played by George Cole, who also died this month – were truly men of their time too. Daley was the huckster and spiv, Del Boy his luckless and underachieving counterpart – the Reliant to Daley’s Jag – but what united them was entrepreneurial zeal, their shared affection for a nice little earner. No CJ for them; they answered only to themselves. Impressively, given that Minder debuted in 1979 and Only Fools and Horses in 1981, both shows caught the mood of Thatcher’s everyman capitalism when it was barely under way.
Similarly, anyone trying to understand the 90s need only rummage through the comedy section of the DVD library. Witness Alan Partridge, especially in his more pathetic end-of-the-decade incarnation. Like Daley and Trotter, he too works for himself, now in the guise of a TV production company: Peartree Productions. There is no Perrin-like job for life; he hankers after a mere six-month contract. And he has no wife to hand him his brolly and briefcase in the morning: he occupies a painfully single room in a Travel Tavern.
Still, the longtime comedy writer David Quantick, now on the team behind Veep, reckons the true face of the 90s is Edina Monsoon of Absolutely Fabulous. For him, that decade was “the 80s pretending to be the 60s”: look no further than Britpop. So Edina was all new-age remedies and flotation tanks, concealing an utterly selfish interior. The turbo-capitalism of the 1980s was still there. Except now its edges were less angular, the shoulders less padded.
The face of the noughties? Malcolm Tucker serves as the political representative of the Blair era just as adroitly as Alan B’stard did for Thatcher’s. Still, surely that overall honour belongs to David Brent, the manager of The Office whose pseudo-informality would have appalled CJ. His attempts at corporate mateyness, the unsolicited shoulder rubs and team-building exercises, are all markers of their time. Most telling are Brent’s doomed attempts to navigate the shores of what he would call political correctness. In his bungled efforts at speaking to disabled or black colleagues, he showed that he, like Britain, had moved on from the days of Blakey, Stan and “Chalky” – but not as much as he, or we, might like to think.
There is much else that links these characters. The absurdity of corporate speak is a perennial theme. When Perrin’s colleague suggests they run an idea “up the flagpole and see who salutes”, he reveals himself as an ancestor to W1A’s Siobhan, she of the Perfect Curve marketing agency: “Right, let’s nail this puppy to the floor.” And, of course, most share the defining trait of the postwar British sitcom protagonist, from Harold Steptoe onwards: the thwarted, deluded man, forever falling short of his own fantasies of greatness.
Quantick puts comic writers’ success in bottling the essence of their times down to the fact that they’re not really trying. While more serious, literary writers toil to produce the state-of-the-nation novel, he says, the most the creators of comedy are hoping for is to get a series on TV and perhaps, one day, to see “a bootleg T-shirt with their catchphrase on it”. Under no pressure to reflect the times, they somehow pull it off.
Whatever the explanation, David Nobbs was part of quite a winning streak, one of the wise jesters who over several long decades have held up a mirror that allows us to see ourselves – and laugh.