Ok, so I've figured it out!
As the files were updated on a Windows machine, it appears that there were dos characters somewhere in the file.
Running the cgi file from the command line:
> ./nph-247realmedia-opt-out.cgi
showed an error of bad interpreter: No such file or directorybin/perl
though the first line of the cgi file shows as #!/usr/bin/perl
The following steps solved the problem:
1) dos2unix FILENAME ---> resets owner and permissions
2) chown xxx:xxx FILENAME (to correct ownership)
3) chmod 775 FILENAME