Last Friday night I recorded the first episode of Reggie Perrin.

Yesterday I watched it.

Now I’m out of touch with British sitcoms.  I can’t remember the last consistently good British sitcom I saw.  The first series of Green Wing was good.  The short-lived Freezing certainly showed promise.  There was the occasional chuckle to be had in Free Agents.  Extras was a curate’s egg but when it was good it was bloody good.  The first series of The Office was obviously superb.

The other British sitcoms I have seen in the past decade have been so mediocre as to have made no lasting impression on me.  Any supposed golden age long behind us, perhaps “anonymnous mediocrity” is the standard by which British sitcoms should now be judged.

Still, however, I can’t remember seeing anything so woeful as Reggie Perrin.

Reggie Perrin makes Paul Merton’s remake of the Hancock scripts look like a good idea.

Reggie Perrin was so bad that I do not believe there to be sufficient hyperbole in the world to express just how cosmically wretched it was.

Throughout the never-ending 28 minutes’ running time I not only didn’t laugh or chuckle once, I didn’t even smile.

I am a fan of the original Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin from the 1970s: I own the two series on DVD.  My complaint, though, is not that something untouchable has been remade or even that it is not as good as the original, simply that Reggie Perrin is so irredeemably poor in every aspect that it should never have made it to broadcast had an even remotely effective quality control process been in place.

The pre-broadcast interviews were keen to point out that this was a sitcom filmed before an audience.  If that’s the case, the audience in question must have been either watching a different performance, stoned or a combination of the two.  The “laughs” came a good couple of seconds after the “punchlines” and their intensity bore no relation to the strength of the gag.

Having sat open-mouthed in disbelief through the entire car crash, I invited The Minister’s Wife to dip her toe into the waters.  She lasted less than three minutes before deleting the recording from our Sky+ box in horror.

Yet perhaps we have been spoiled by the likes of 30 Rock because – remarkably – the programme did not get a total flaying in the papers.

Damian Thompson in the Telegraph hits the nail squarely on the head:

The updated Reggie Perrin [is spectacularly] worse than the original… There aren’t enough sofa cushions in the world to cover viewers struck by chronic embarrassment after tuning in to the remake. “Have a good day at the office,” says Mrs Perrin as Reggie heads off to the railway station. “I won’t,” he replies. Cue cackle from the audience, little realising that it has just heard the best joke of the episode, if not the series.

At least now we know why Clunes seemed defensive in the interviews he gave for the show. The revamped Reggie Perrin belongs in the annals of comedy disasters.

It’s nowhere near enough, but at least Thompson made an effort.

Sam Wollaston in The Guardian managed to critique the programme without once referring to its content, instead choosing to lament the paucity of imagination behind the commission.

I wish I could get paid for avoiding doing my job but at least he didn’t say it was good.

Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent comes dangerously close to that crime by concluding that, “it’s not a disaster, by any means, which may be the best you can hope for from such an unimaginative commission.”

Like the studio audience, Sutcliffe was clearly watching something else.  I shudder to think how bad something must be for Sutcliffe to consider it a disaster: by this measure the World Glass Coffee Table Shitting Championships hosted on Sky 3 by Elton Welsby, Matt Lorenzo and a naked Keith Chegwin might just about qualify.

The war criminal, though, is Andrew Billen in The Times.

HE GIVES THIS PUTREFYING CORPSE OF A PROGRAMME 4 STARS.

OUT OF 5!

It is… very funny, largely because of Martin Clunes as Perrin who lumbers through home, his daily commute and his office life, like a giant suffering the early stages of pathological disinhibition. Clunes must have been wary of stepping into Leonard Rossiter’s shoes. He is funnier than Rossiter was in the part.

“Funnier than Rossiter”?

What the buggery fuck is Billen on?

My unbridled outrage is let down by my inability to express just how dire this programme truly is.

Anyone can say that something was an unadultered disaster, but that doesn’t do this anything like justice.

This dreadful, awful, abysmal programme is so thoroughly poor on every level that anybody who laughed at it should be sectioned for the good of the rest of the community.

That something so bad could have been produced without the involvement of Simon Cowell is a very worrying development.

Roget’s entries for “execrable” are:

accursed,  blasted,  blessed,  bloody,  confounded,  cursed,  damn,  darn,  infernal

None are remotely strong enough to describe how inept Reggie Perrin is.

The adjective “poor”, defined as “deficient, inadequate” Roget brings us:

base, below par, common, contemptible, crude, diminutive, dwarfed, exiguous, faulty, feeble, humble, imperfect, incomplete, inferior, insignificant, insufficient, lacking, low-grade, lowly, meager, mean, mediocre, miserable, modest, niggardly, ordinary, paltry, pitiable, pitiful, plain, reduced, rotten, scanty, second-rate, shabby, shoddy, skimpy, slight, sorry, sparse, subnormal, subpar, substandard, trifling, trivial, unsatisfactory, valueless, weak, worthless

Add them all up and you still only get 7.38% of the way towards appreciating how desperately appalling Reggie Perrin truly is.

It is so bad that in any walk of life other than The Arts, the Chancers responsible for passing off such substandard produce would lose their jobs.

Before facing a public flogging.

And being imprisoned.

For life.

Imagine that Microsoft ad for that music software I posted the other month.  Triple its paucity.  And extend it to 28 minutes…

YOU’RE STILL NOWHERE NEAR REGGIE MOTHERFUCKING PERRIN.

The first episode was so bad that you have to watch it to understand.

It’s on iPlayer – the gizmo that makes “the unspeakable unmissable”.

Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.