I first watched The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin as a child (not on first broadcast – I wasn’t born), and found it absolutely hilarious. It appealed to me on one particular level, mainly thanks to the farting chairs in CJ’s office and the frequent appearances of a stock footage hippopotamus to represent Reggie’s mother-in-law. As an adult I bought the series on DVD and was struck by the melancholy nature of the series. British comedy is often tinged with sadness, and this is the perfect blend. Oh, and I still loved the farting chairs.
Leonard Rossiter was of course a comedy genius, and his performance in this episode takes us on a journey through the first stages of his mental breakdown. Over the course of three days his world starts to unravel. We start on a Tuesday, that most uneventful of days. Reggie goes through the same routine he lives through every day, with very little variation. His wife doesn’t help, saying the same thing every time he leaves the house, including a rather pointless question: “back at the usual time?” Reggie is always back at the usual time, and that time is always 11 minutes late, due to train delays which are more reliable than the timetables.
“Have a good day at the office.”
“I won’t.”
He walks through Coleridge Close, Tennyson Avenue and Wordsworth Drive, the very picture of 70s suburbia. As he approaches the station he joins a crowd of other business men all dressed the same, in business suits, carrying umbrellas and briefcases. These are cogs in a machine, men who have lost their individuality, swallowed up by the bland and repetitive 9-to-5 office toil. He arrives at Sunshine Desserts eleven minutes late, but the sign says “Sunshine Des erts”, an indication of his world started to fall apart. This will be the day Reggie starts to lose his mind.
Everything about this episode brings home his humdrum, repetitive existence, where nothing seems to really matter. The genius of the writing is that it manages to be hugely funny, while portraying a boring life. That takes some doing. CJ’s office is full of photos of CJ, and he repeats his catchphrase whenever he can, in his self-aggrandising way: “I didn’t get where I am today…” Reggie is surrounded by yes men (“Great!”; “Super!”) a role he can’t quite manage himself. His mind wanders into a fantasy sequence about his secretary Joan. He is starting to lose concentration, and he is also fantasising about cheating. This is a man who is looking for an escape route. CJ notices, and responds with a thinly veiled threat:
“We’re not one of those dreadful firms that thinks a chap’s no good after he’s 46 goodbye Reggie.”
There is definitely no full stop in that sentence. The first day is complete and a huge amount of information about Reggie’s day has been imparted to the viewer, plus a lot of very funny comedy, and we are only at the eight minute mark. Over the next two days Reggie continues to lose control of himself, fantasising more and more about outrageous behaviour, including flashing at his neighbours, and forgetting what he said earlier in the day. He is surrounded by absurd characters (well, mainly the male ones), including Doc Morrissey, who is the one person who could have identified his symptoms of depression and warned Reggie that he is heading for a mental breakdown, but of course Morrissey is just as useless as everyone Reggie works with. There is a rather prescient joke later in the day about the frustration of malfunctioning computers, when some data about flavours of ice cream is fed in to the system and the resulting top three flavours come out as “bookends, pumice stone and West Germany”. Rossiter’s performance during this scene in particular is remarkably clever. He is breathless and his voice is starting to crack. This is a man breaking down in front of our eyes, and we are invited to laugh at that. This is dark humour, when you think about it.
The interesting thing about the third day is that Reggie is trying to find a solution to his problems. He makes a change. Snapping out of an obvious moment of depression, where he is reluctant to leave, he steals a flower for his button hole from a neighbouring garden. He is starting to rebel. Then he reaches a revelation:
“From now on, I’m going to do everything differently.”
For a while that seems to work for Reggie. His umbrella finds the hook on the stand for the first time, as if he is starting to regain control of his life. He catches a later train “because the sun was shining”. He seems to have found a new philosophy of life that might just work. The really clever bit is the foreshadowing that happens when he walks under the sign. It is the same as the day before, so this indicates that he has stopped his life from falling apart… until one more letter drops just as he enters the building and breaks on the steps behind him. And it all starts to go wrong again. The biggest problem is he doesn’t know how to rebel. He ends up harming himself instead. His three course meal of “ravioli, ravioli and ravioli” is hilarious, but just makes him “rather full of ravioli”, and by the time he returns home he is drunk. His scream that ends the episode says it all. He is a man who is trapped, and his escape plan has only made things worse.
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is a great series, deservedly remembered as one of the highlights of British comedy, and I love every minute of the first two seasons (the third is a bit of a slog), but for my money this first episode is an absolute masterclass. It’s not just that it’s enormously funny. If anyone wants to know how to structure half an hour of television, take a look at this episode, which has as much character development as you would find in most series over the course of a whole season. This is what happens when writing and acting come together in perfect harmony, and both are the work of a genius. It’s great… and indeed, super. RP
The junkyard presents two articles about the Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-Chan episode Fireworks...
I love the title of this episode almost as much as what happens in it. The line is a part of the Minbari mantra from the Grey Council. They stand between the darkness and the light. Like so much else in this episode, that’s interestingly symbolic. The “good guys” are doing bad things for the right reasons – they are killing their own people but in the hopes of putting an end to a terrible reign. I love symbolism when it’s done well. How about Michael getting stabbed in the back – both representing what he did to Sheridan as well as a reminder that even in season one, Michael was told to “watch his back”. (And I’ll avoid all the symbolism with the names of the ships and leave that to the inquisitive viewer.)
Eldritch castles and elder signs, squatting squid-headed statues and hooded cultists, fishmen and shoggoths, the dreaded Necronomicon and talking cats… what do they all have in com…. wait a second… talking cats? In my quest to play a few more Lovecraft themed games before HBO completes its season of Lovecraft Country has been far easier than I expected. There are a lot of Lovecraftian games out there. Alas, I didn’t play one for each week of the show, but I have managed to keep a few going with unexpected results. This latest had me quaking but unlike most Lovecraft stories, it was not quaking in terror. I was quaking with laughter.
The game has you playing 2 characters in alternating chapters. The first is a detective named Don R. Ketype. It took me ages to realize who he sounded like: Batman. But this Batman has some damned funny lines. Think of the How It Should Have Ended version of Batman – the one that’s great, and you know why? Because he’s Batman! (Sorry, couldn’t resist!) Ketype’s description of things in that clipped tone adds a magnificent sense of humor that had me talking that way to my wife until she eventually told me to stop talking like that. (By eventually, I mean, I got one sentence out!) He was by far my preferred character. At one point in the game, he wants to say something profound. You get options on which of four choices you will go with. I selected the most meaningful one. The one that summed up freedom and something intrinsic to all that is right and good in the world. I was rewarded with a one word comment that left me in tears! Mind you, this might be the funniest chapter too because of what I ended up doing with a fire extinguisher moments earlier which had me in full-on belly laughs. Buzz Kerwin is the local librarian who you play as who accidentally humanizes his cat when he finds the Necronomicon. Kerwin is a good character as well but the cat really adds the comedy. Her annoyance at being humanized is outstanding. However, Buzz has his moments especially when he ends up in Transylvania and has to have a rap battle to move the story along. I am no fan of rap, but again found myself wiping the tears from my eyes. Truly outstanding.
But that really was the weakest element to the game. Everything else about the game was amazingly good and I still have a chapter to go! The voice acting is brilliant and the use of the space bar to illuminate all the clickable items means there’s no worry about pixel hunting – a quality that diminishes Adventure games. As I mentioned above, I picked this up during a sale, which gave me the digital soundtrack as well; this should tell you that there’s a soundtrack worthy of inclusion. The cast of characters is utterly marvelous and some of them really enhance the experience. I’m looking at you Piscilla. (No, I don’t mean Priscilla!) And you Finman! And Css Css. And of course, Otis!
In terms of the lore of Star Trek, Space Seed may be the single most important episode of the original 79. We are introduced to Khan. While I’m guessing that most visitors of the Junkyard will know, I won’t go jumping through time to talk about why he is important, but he’s a guy we want to keep an eye on. Ricardo Montalban does an outstanding job bringing the would-be dictator to life and his powerhouse performance is remembered years after this episode was created. Mind you, years after the episode was created, the writers Gene Coon and Carey Wilber predicted some major events in our planet’s history. The 1990’s were “the future” and we were due to have some major advances including in the field of eugenics. But that wasn’t all we were worried about. A “final” world war was anticipated and with the tensions of the late 60’s, that might not have been that surprising. Thankfully we had neither a final world war, nor an Eugenics War. At least they anticipated that by the far future, 2018, things would have improved. (Surely, they meant scientifically. No one was talking politics at the time…)
Day 5 is upon us and we have an opening of Gwen looking into a camera commenting that it’s the end of the world. She talks of Jack’s old friend, the Doctor, and how he must look upon this world in shame. It’s a tough opener, but when that scene comes into focus later in the episode, it packs an even greater punch because of the conversation she has with Rhys next. Earth is doomed. It’s doomed to lose 10% of the population of its children or be destroyed if they retaliate. The burden is almost too much to take but that doesn’t stop the writing for adding salt to the wound: John Frobisher is expected to allow his own children to be taken to the 456.
This feels like stating the obvious, but you have to watch the Eden of the East television series before you watch the two films that follow it. I shouldn’t really need to say that, but bizarrely just about every review I’ve read of The King of Eden complains that it requires knowledge of the television series and doesn’t stand alone. I find that strange. Why would anyone want to watch this if they don’t know the series? It seems to be a thing that people always say about films that spin off from television shows, and yet I would be surprised if one person who wasn’t already an Eden of the East fan has ever attempted to watch it, certainly outside of Japan. But I think the reason why it always gets mentioned for this film in particular is that the writers clearly have no interest whatsoever in those (probably mythical) viewers who come fresh to the films. This follows directly from the television series, albeit with a gap of about six months, and at no point attempts any kind of explanation as to what’s going on. I’m fine with that. I don’t want any of the running time of a spinoff film wasted on explaining the basic premise. I already know that.
Persons Reported Missing
This series veers back and forth between slice-of-life, rom com, the usual Haruhi shenanigans, and a compelling amnesia storyline for a few episodes. Approaching the end of the series we are firmly back in slice-of-life territory, riffing on the original Haruhi Endless Eight arc as an excuse to show the characters having fun and slowly move the love angle between Kyon and Yuki along. This week, the group of friends are having fun at the beach.
There was an element of fanservice to the original Endless Eight arc, but this series goes much stronger with it, and mainly that distinction comes down to shot choice. If you are focussing a shot on Kyon’s little sister, and she is being upstaged by Mikuru’s chest, that’s not an accident. Poor Mikuru doesn’t even get her head in shot at that moment. Her costume also doesn’t fit with her character. She’s supposed to be a shy, nervous thing. Would she really choose that bikini? And Tsuruya’s costume is just crazy – surely no teenage girl would wear that for a day at the beach with her friends? Also, the way Kyon ends up on top of Yuki is rather contrived, although it is quite amusing. Where Kyon’s little sister goes, trouble will always be found.
The junkyard presents two articles about the Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-Chan episode His Uncertainty...
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DrAcrossthePond
Roger Pocock
