The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger

David Nobbs was born in Petts Wood, England on March 13, 1935. He graduated from St John's, Cambridge, where he studied English in 1958. He joined the Sheffield Star as an apprentice journalist, but soon realized it was not the type of writing we wanted to do. He moved to London when one of his sketches was accepted for a revue, One to Another, at the Lyric theatre. In the 1960s, he became established as a gag writer for popular performers of the day including David Frost and Frankie Howerd.

His first novel, The Itinerant Lodger, was published in 1965. His other novels included Ostrich Country, A Piece of the Sky Is Missing, The Death of Reginald Perrin, The Return of Reginald Perrin, A Bit of a Do, Cupid's Darts, and The Second Life of Sally Mottram. His Reginald Perrin novels were later adapted for television as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which ran between 1976 and 1979. He also wrote a memoir entitled I Didn't Get Where I Am Today. He died on August 9, 2015 at the age of 80.

030