Moments of Bliss: Finding a Source of My Beliefs In a 1970s British Sitcom

As cultural artifacts from my formative years continue to surface via the Long Tail of the internet and through remastering and digitizing of analog content, I am getting a fresh exposure and a new view into possible seeds of ideas that I have carried with me for a long time.

For several years I've been looking for a DVD compilation of the BBC sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin which aired between 1976 and 1979, so I would have watched this pretty much as it appeared, in my early teens. (Between Perrin, Monty Python, and Soccer Made in Germany, I have to wonder who I would be today if the programmers of the central Arkansas PBS affiliate had not taken such a worldly view of its programming dollars.)

Perrin is, in BBC style, a series with a closed narrative arc, completed in 3 seasons. It concerns Reginald Iolanthe Perrin (R.I.P.) who, in mid-life crisis (46 years old!), fakes his death. The rest of the series is the long and bitingly satirical tale of how he rises back into his life by making completely counter-intuitive choices. (Such as opening a shop selling items to give to people you hate--a shop that turns into an empire.) It is a sitcom sui generis--more savage in its critique, and yet more humane than any other I can think of. (If you have counter-examples, please share them. All those Norman Lear sitcoms from the same era tried for a similar balance but were less smart in their anger and more maudlin in their sentiment.)

I was thrilled to finally find Perrin on Nextflix, and have been slowly making my way through season 1. And then I got to the scene below, in episode 4. As I watched Reggie's speech, I was struck by how closely his argument parallels my recent post on certainty and doubt.

Although all of the clip is worth watching to understand his state of mind as he gets to the podium, at 6:45 into this clip, he gets to the meat of things (transcribed here without attempting to catch all of the asides, stuttering and misspeaking):

“’What do you believe in?’ I hear you ask. I'll tell you. I know...that I don’t know. I believe in not believing. For every man who believes something, there is somebody who believes the opposite. What’s the point? How many wars--how many wars-would have been fought, how many people would have been tortured if nobody had ever believed in anything? I’ve never heard--have you ever heard?--of the wars of the apathetic, or the persecution of the apathetic by the bone idle?”

Of course to get the full effect you have to watch it delivered in the rubbery-lipped rapidfire stream of consciousness that Leonard Rossiter perfected.



So that's where it started, I thought. And that seed was nurtured  by the Taoist writings of Chuang Tzu, the common sense and skepticism of Wittegnstein and William James, and experience. I encourage you to start your own campaign against belief by renting the series from Netflix.