Reggie Perrin: the remake

At first I assumed that this series would contain very little hummus - most likely none at all in fact, since I always have very low expectations of remakes. But, as with Doctor Who, it seems my pessimism was misplaced (not that Doctor Who had much hummus in, it just wasn't rubbish).

Let us examine, then, what Reggie Perrin has to do with hummus.

In the early episodes, I'll admit I feared my suspicions had been depressingly accurate. Not even so much as a glimpse of a chickpea, not even when there was a party. Worse still, the more I watched the more I found myself hoping not to see one. Any hummus that might appear here would doubtless be underwritten and unconvincing, it might even wobble like the set, and I don't think I could cope with that. Bad hummus makes me very dispirited.

But no, I needn't have worried. Soon enough, something about the internal power dynamic of the show began to ring familiar. A tang of garlic entered the televisual air... Was it? No, it couldn't be... Yes! It was! I could almost taste it!

On this show of crudely cut minor characters, I finally realised, but one thing existed that hadn't been woefully underwritten, one thing that wasn't so bland it could have come from ASDA, one thing mordantly sitting right at the centre of it all, one thing that somehow made it all just about worthwhile if you could ignore the rest: Reggie Perrin himself, came the epiphany, was a hummus among crudités! A giant, rubber-lipped, big-eared, morose hummus!

True, a couple of the characters - the Wellness Woman, Geoffrey Whitehead, Reggie's Mum - could, perhaps, be tolerable enough in their own right to count as, say, carrot batons. But what is a carrot without hummus? It's just a slightly sweet orange stick that hasn't realised it's full potential.

The celery sticks? The slightly limp bits of cucumber?

As in real life, the less said about them the better, probably. But I suppose something has to be left beside the empty tub at the end of the party. And as Reggie stands there, at the end of the series, stark naked on a stark, grey, empty British beach steeling himself to stride fatefully out to sea, is that not what it is? The end of the party?

Ultimately, then, perhaps this is how the show is best understood: as an extended riff on what is too often the place of hummus in modern Britain. A glorious, bitingly flavoursome hummus, some largely disappointing crudités, and a room full of braying idiots who'll laugh at anything and everything because they're probably drunk and got in for free - we all know the scene - and how joyously postmodern to implicate the studio audience in a satire of themselves!

And all this in primetime! It's almost enough to make you believe in BBC1 sitcoms again.