Office life
I missed the first episode of The Office – and I wasn’t alone. It was shown in a far-from-primetime slot on BBC2 in July 2001 to an audience of one and a half million, presumably devotees of co-creator Ricky Gervais’s previous hit-and-miss comic outings in The 11 O’Clock Show and Meet Ricky Gervais, or perhaps viewers who took the mock-documentary format seriously and thought the programme was a management primer. Either way, the audience was small, the pre-publicity limited, and the scheduling – the start of the summer holiday period – did not suggest overwhelming confidence in this everyday story of life in a Slough paper merchants.
Not catching those early episodes may have been a godsend, because the responses of some of those who did now read like those wonderful notices by Viennese critics who dismissed Beethoven’s Choral Symphony as long-winded. “How this dross ever got beyond the pilot stage is a mystery,” complained Victor Lewis-Smith in the London Evening Standard. “The series would be very funny if David Brent were not quite such a horrible monster … One can scarcely wait another four weeks to see him sacked,” said Peter Paterson in the Daily Mail. “Goodness knows how it will manage to sustain another five episodes,” added Jaci Stephen in the Mail on Sunday. It would be interesting to know if they attended all those black-tie dinners a year later at which Gervais and co-writer Stephen Merchant were showered with awards.
The first time I saw The Office was on a plane – on one of those tiny, fuzzy, back-of-the-seat screens – and for some reason I watched it without headphones. Now, I don’t want to claim any great prescience, but even in those constrained circumstances I knew it was good. It was the episode set in Chasers, one of Slough’s most fashionable nightspots. Even as a strobe-lit mime, Gareth’s sad, sunken face and the body language of the principals – the slobbish, drunken Brent, the predatory Chris Finch, Tim in his beige mac – made it fascinating. I was added to the list of those who wanted to know more; the cult was growing.
David Brent – the bombastic but desperately insecure boss of the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg – is now a legendary character, comparable to Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty in the pantheon of comic creations. The three share a common bumptiousness that invariably ends in disaster, but none is wholly unsympathetic: they are archetypal Brits doing their best; self-appointed organisers profoundly unsuited to their jobs. Brent could no more run an efficient office than Fawlty could keep a decent hotel or Mainwaring repulse the German army. They are hard-pounding failures who can’t see that their own defects are the source of their disasters. As with all great comedy, they are essentially tragic figures.
Brent is not the monster that Peter Paterson perceived. When he reads John Betjeman’s poem Slough (“Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now”) in order to attack the sentiments (or lack of them) of the poet, one applauds his humanism. Most of his staff are, indeed, leading lives of quiet desperation and he wants to make them better, but his fatal lack of self-knowledge makes that impossible. All his attempts to be a caring boss – his self-proclaimed distaste for sexism and racism, his championing of the rights of the disabled – end up undermining those he wants to defend. He is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Brent is weak, selfish and stupid, but not monstrous. When he is eventually sacked, we feel not glad, but sad. His tears seem real: his job, this wretched office, is his life. We cry with him. He is so much nicer and more human than his effortlessly successful rival, Neil. Brent needs this job, the security of this family, and we know that without it he would collapse.
Gervais was once asked what his TV alter ego would do at Christmas. “He’d spend it with his sister, though her kids hate him staying there,” he replied. “She lives in the Didcot area.” I believe this – and I believe that Gervais believes it. Everyone in The Office is fully formed – when I did eventually catch up with the first episode I understood and empathised with these people within 10 minutes. There is no canned laughter in The Office, and there are no canned characters either. The 11 episodes – Gervais has said there will not be another series – are more a five-and-a-half-hour minimalist drama than a sitcom. The silences resound; the emptiness fills the screen. This comedy is akin to Pinter’s, occupying that no man’s land sometimes called life.
Brent is the central character in the early episodes, but he is too one-dimensional to sustain interest throughout. In the second series, his antics become more absurd, the comedy coarser, the embarrassments less subtle; we are no longer laughing but squirming and seeking refuge behind the sofa. By now our attention, when we have returned to the armchair, has shifted elsewhere – above all to Tim’s relationship with Dawn. This is brilliantly done: the way they flirt, play with each other’s hair, gently touch each other’s arms. We are certain that Dawn will leave the likable but philistine Lee (blue-collar, likes Florida, anticipates a lifetime of children and drudgery for his wife-to-be) for the sensitive Tim. Tim and Dawn are the perfect couple; this dream must come true. But it doesn’t: in a superb scene played out in a small room behind glass so that we can hear nothing of what is said, Dawn ultimately rejects him. Viewer, she didn’t marry him. The degree to which I cared that Tim and Dawn should end up together confirmed to me that this was a “comedy” like no other I had ever seen.
Presumably, some work does get done at Wernham Hogg, but it is never clear how or when. In that it resembles all offices – to the outsider, this may as well be Mars. Occasionally, the staff take a call or send an email, but mostly they are arguing, playing practical jokes on each other or trying to get a colleague into bed. They worry about losing their jobs, but it is never clear what jobs they have to lose.
Most of the men in The Office are weak dreamers. Brent is forever harking back to his failed music career (here, as elsewhere, Brent’s CV mirrors that of Gervais, who made two singles with a band called Seona Dancing that just about made the top 200). Gareth is obsessed by the army – he had a brief stay in the territorials – and spends most of his time fantasising about killing the enemy with his bare hands. Tim wants Dawn; Chris Finch wants sex and lager (though probably not in that order); the mountainous Keith appears to have accepted that his life is destined to be unremittingly tedious, though he briefly comes to life when he DJs an office party (pop music as healer and energiser is a recurrent theme). The women are far stronger and hold all the cards. Donna’s sexual frankness is endlessly embarrassing to the seedy Brent and emotionally immature Gareth – men who are constantly alluding to sex but, like the blazered man in the Monty Python sketch, never actually try it out. Dawn has the strength to make the break with Tim. Jennifer Taylor-Clark, Brent’s no-nonsense, mini-skirted boss from head office, is a terrifyingly driven career woman; no idle dreams for her, she intends to win for real. The sexual politics are as vivid and perfectly realised as everything else at Wernham Hogg.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that some of the early critics took against The Office. It wears the trappings of a docusoap but is of course a spoof; it purports to be a comedy but sometimes you want to cry; by the end it has become a full-blown drama. It defies every genre and it is to the public’s credit that they found it and turned it into a word-of-mouth success. I and all the others who jumped on to the bandwagon later – via repeat showings on TV, video and DVD release, or even bizarre encounters at 35,000 feet – can claim no credit. If you saw that first episode back in July 2001 and got it straightaway, your taste is impeccable. It is far easier to recognise genius when you have been told where to look.
I hope Gervais is true to his word and doesn’t make another series (he hasn’t ruled out one-off specials, though even these might be otiose). Follow the example of Cleese and don’t damage your creation. A bad sitcom is endlessly extendable: it is just as bad at the end as it was at the beginning. The Office – with its precisely painted characters and surreal yet entirely logical, tautly written dialogue – is a perfectly realised world. It has the economy, precision and satisfying completeness of a good novel. The horse is alive, so don’t start flogging it.
We can, I think, have some confidence in Gervais. “I’ve done enough things when I’ve thought, ‘I wish I could give the money back, that was shit,’ ” he told one interviewer. “It’s better to just keep saying no.” Let the 11 episodes be endlessly replayed, like Dad’s Army and Fawlty Towers: testament to their quality; an ambiguous hommage to Slough; a fascinating portrait of the surrogate family office life provides; and a warning never to go to Chasers on a Wednesday night.
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