Rob Reiner

Is the star director about to turn up the dial again with Spinal Tap II, asks Andrew Anthony

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Next week sees the release of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, some 41 years after This Is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that brilliantly satirised rock star pretensions and the hagiographic documentaries that indulged them.

Although a low-budget production without any star names, the original film gradually established itself as a cult classic. In the years since, its distinctive style of awkward naturalism has become a comedy staple, adopted by countless films and TV shows, including The Office and Flight of the Conchords.

The director of both films is Rob Reiner who, at 78, has enjoyed one of the most active and diverse careers in Hollywood, without ever quite attaining the recognition his successes deserved.

The son of the comic actor turned screenwriter and director Carl Reiner, Reiner Jr grew up surrounded by some of America's leading comedy figures. His father partnered Mel Brooks (their double act, The 2,000 Year Old Man, started as a party trick and became a comedy classic) and wrote for The Dick Van Dyke Show before going on to make his name as a director in a series of films starring Steve Martin.

The teenage Reiner also worked alongside Martin when he started out in the late 1960s as a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Afterwards, he became well known for his role as Mike “Meathead” Stivic in the hugely popular sitcom All in the Family, based on the BBC's Till Death Us Do Part (Meathead was the equivalent of Tony Booth's liberal son-in-law character).

Impatient to measure himself against his father on the other side of the camera, he once told Howard Stern that he was so jealous of the relationship that his father formed with Martin - who changed the face of US comedy - that it sent him into therapy. The same year that Martin starred in Carl Reiner's The Jerk (1979), the younger Reiner produced a satire on TV called The TV Show.