The observant among you may have noticed the three faces that grimace down at you from the top of this column each week, and I would be very surprised (and not a little dismayed) if you failed to recognise them. They were compiled from various avatars that I adopted while traversing the delightful expanses of the Planet Skaro Message Board - in the months since the above banner was produced by our ingenious editor-in-chief, they have been augmented by, first, Paul Eddington from "The Good Life" and most recently by a picture of Jack Benny. Well this is all very fine and lovely, you might be thinking, but for goodness sake Curnow get to the point will you.

Well, yes I will. But, in the manner of Styre in "The Sontaran Experiment" who genuinely does say, "I'm going to kill you all now - but first I have some more important things to do" I will get to the point... but first I have some more important things to do. Well, alright, one thing, and of arguable importance.

You see, before I proceed I think I ought to clarify the word 'avatar' for the uninitiated. My brother recently won a fiction award in a local magazine, and the story contained the word 'doppleganger'. My Mum read the story, but admitted to being baffled by this word. Any fan of telefantasy will of course be very familiar with it. The old 'doppleganger' plot, where an exact physical twin (usually an evil one) of one or more of the regular cast turns up, has probably been used on every sci-fi show from "Lost in Space" to "Enterprise" and sometimes more than once (hello "Doctor Who"). So in case any readers don't know what I'm wittering on about when I use the word 'avatar' I will attempt to explain. Any readers who don't know what I'm wittering on about in just a general sense rather than specific words (a) are by no means alone; and (b) should be well used to me by now and therefore only have themselves to blame.

I don't know what the dictionary definition of the word 'avatar' is. (I do know what the definition of 'lazy' is, and it is "somebody who cannot be arsed to go upstairs to get the dictionary and look up avatar".) For myself, until I developed my Message Board addiction I had only ever come across it from its use in the title of an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" called "Crystal Avatar". (And by an extraordinary coincidence, this episode featured a doppleganger In fact now I think about it, it might actually feature two. Small universe isn't it.) However in online jargon, an avatar is a little photo/picture that can be displayed alongside your name when posting to a Message Board. I wouldn't be surprised if the original idea was for people to append a picture of themselves so that we would all know what each other looked like - but the reality is that people attach whatever appeals to them, whether it be popstar, actor, or cartoon character. Regulars on the Planet Skaro will know of course that James Lindsay until recently changed his avatar more often than most people change their socks. Well OK, that sounds catchy but isn't quite true, but he did used to change it religiously once a fortnight - which I hope is significantly LESS often than any of you people reading this change your socks.

So, having devoted so much space to definitions and explanations, where am I going with this? Well, I thought I would explain why I chose who I chose for my various avatars. The first one I ever had was the esteemed gentleman to the far right, which is Leonard Rossiter being absolutely great, and indeed not a little bit super, in "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" (now available on DVD if anybody should be wondering what to get me for my birthday).

I first saw the first episode of the first series of "TFARORP" (hmm, not happy with that acronym) on the 11th of November 1985. In case you are wondering how I can pin it down with such extraordinary (some might even say, anal) precision, the reason is that it was my brother's birthday and as such, and because he wanted to watch "The Bill" on ITV, and because we were still at that time some 12 months away from owning a VCR, I deferred to the occasion and watched Reggie on the little black & white TV in the kitchen.

This wasn't quite my first taste of Reggie P. A few years earlier, when Leonard Rossiter died, an episode was shown in tribute. It was episode 6 I think (maybe 5) from the second series - it is the episode where the ludicrous, but scarily possible, Grot Shop has become a huge success and during the episode Reggie employs all his old friends/colleagues/CJs. The half hour is full of ironic reversals of previous situations (such as CJ being the one who has to endure the farting chair) which are superbly funny if you know the series. At the time I saw the episode I didn't know the series at all, and therefore much of the humour from the situations was lost on me. (Although I expect I found the farting chairs very funny.)

Prior to that, though, I had heard of Reggie from my parents. Not the character as such, but the programme. The reason for this was not actually Leonard Rossiter, but John Barron who played CJ. Once you've seen him, it is a memorable performance, and in hindsight this accounts for the fact that every time John Barron appeared in anything on TV, Mum or Dad (usually Dad, from memory) would pipe up, "It's CJ" (a bit like Harry Hill regularly proclaiming "It's Burt Kwouk!!!" but, in deference to my Dad's less excitable temperament, with less exclamation marks). Of course at the time it was rather irritating, but I can now see why it stuck in their minds. On a connected note we had a similar situation when the newly-arrived Channel 4 started to repeat "The Avengers". A character called Bagpipes Happychap (played by Roy Kinnear) had again lodged himself in my parents' consciousness (consciousnesses?) and every week the theme tune would play to a chorus of "I wonder if Bagpipes Happychap is in it this week?" The irony of course is that the character doesn't appear until the last ever episode of "The Avengers" so you can well imagine that we had several long years before the wait was finally over...

But back to Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, who doesn't know the names of the flowers and the trees... The first episode is funny in various ways - the 'hippopotamus' gag, the various interplays and powerplays between the employees and employers at Sunshine Desserts, the neat little touches demonstrating the monotony of Reggie's routine (the train being 11 minutes late, doing the Times Crossword, Peter Cartwright blowing his nose in the newspaper's supplement). It entertained me enough to want to watch it again the following week, but it didn't knock me off my seat or make me rush out into the street proselytising about what a sublime experience it all was.

The next week of course wasn't my brother's birthday so I got to watch it in colour. Episode 2 is the one that ends with the Perrin family (Reggie, Elizabeth, Tom, Linda, Adam and Jocasta) stuck in a car going around a safari park, with one of the latter two unfortunately doing big ones in their trousers. Suddenly Reggie has had enough, he stops the car and gets out into the lion enclosure. The lion heads for him, and he bolts back into the car, panicked.

It's narratively a very powerful moment, but it was also a memorable moment for me. It showed what could be done within the arena of 'sitcom' for one thing - a very funny programme which nevertheless can maintains its integrity even when it suddenly becomes deadly serious. Later on in the first series (episode 5 this time) Reggie fakes his own suicide, and the same unashamed confidence in mixing genuine feeling with laughter is displayed. There's a beautifully shot sequence as the character walks into the sea and slowly dwindles into the distance, and we hear his thoughts as a voiceover: "Maybe I should just keep on walking out into the water, carry on until only the things are left..." A beat, then: "Blimey it's cold!" (By the way, these may not be 100% verbatim quotes - if only I had the DVD to refer to. Ah well...)

But this is all skirting around the issue isn't it. I could sit here praising the finest British Sitcoms until the cows come home (or at least until the final of "Britain's Best Sitcom" airs, at which point my sitting here praising would become a bit superfluous) and although I'm not going to do that, can I just say that although "Only Fools & Horses" won't win because it's gone off the boil over the past five years, there was a time when John Sullivan and David Jason could tell us everything about Del's broken-hearted love affair with a Texan lady with just the line and the delivery: "We had a pot of tea and a Lyons Victoria Sponge. It was very nice." (And I believe that is 100% verbatim - sublime under-writing doesn't come any better than that moment.) But yes, skirting the issue... I've established that I like "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" but why do I like Reggie himself? Why is he my number one avatar? Why do I find myself quoting random lines of dialogue from him in the car on the way home when there's nothing on the radio? And perhaps most importantly of all, who cares?

Well, somewhat selfishly, or at least personally, the chance to watch Reggie's season one descent into misery and despair coincided with those teenage years of self-conscious woe and angst-ridden misery. So there was the sense somehow of a kindred spirit there. Then there's the fact that, stripped of the detail of where he is and where he works and what he does and who he's with, Reggie is at heart a rebel. He wants to rebel against his boss, he wants to rebel against his marriage, he wants to somehow rebel against the relentless drag of life before he is too old to do anything about it. He's also, in the hands of Leonard Rossiter, amazingly unpredictable and entertaining and spellbinding.

OK, looked at again more recently (on repeats of course, not on wonderfully shiny DVD) the show has that classic 'cheap' tinge of the late 70s. Made nowadays it would be a lavish filmic adaptation of the books, including all the subplots about Jimmy sleeping with his niece Linda, and Reggie being suspected of being a rapist (no I'm not making any of that up) which were sensibly excised from the sitcom. And yes, you can for example see the actual wall of the studio just outside Reggie's office in episode 5 of series 1 (and possibly other places as well). But I can overlook all that, the less-than-perfect details swamped and overwhelmed by (a) the memory of a time when my week revolved around and hung on the Monday night broadcast of the next episode; and (b) the electric, livewire performance of the lead character.

So the short answer to the question (which I realise nobody actually asked in the first place, but it's a bit late to worry about that now) of why I chose Reggie Perrin for an avatar is... he's the office rebel, he's the worm that is forever turning, he's my hero!!!

And for no obvious reason, but perhaps curiously apposite, I was humming the theme from Pillock Talk at work just the other day. I didn't got where I am today by humming the theme from Pillock Talk at work, so I was very surprised to find that I am apparently a 'humming the theme from Pillock Talk at work' person....