A summer stinker; ‘A bore in homeopathic doses can be hilarious, but a bore in real time remains simply a bore’.

Victor Lewis-Smith

The Evening Standard, July 10 2001



BRITAIN has the best television in the world,“ we’re constantly being told, mostly by networks who specialise in stealing the very worst formats from America. From Double Your Money and The Price is Right to Wheel of Fortune and Trisha, the UK schedules have always been crammed with second-hand ideas from the States, so much so that I’ve recently written to the Government, suggesting that it should set up an official watchdog to monitor the trade. My proposal is that this watchdog should be called Offrip, that its board should consist of a wide cross section of society (Lady Howe, Lord Wakeham, a retired High Court judge, and perhaps a bishop or two), and that just like every other public regulatory body in the country, it should have no powers whatsoever, and exist purely to be alternately mocked and ignored behind its back.





If Offrip did exist, I’d have written them a strongly worded letter last night, drawing their attention to BBC2’s latest comedy series, The Office.



Formats from both sides of the Atlantic have been shamelessly plundered for this self-proclaimed "comic study of white-collar workers”, most notably the first-class pseudo-documentary People Like Us, with a soup?on of Larry Sanders (via Bob Martin), and even allusions to an execrable ITV sitcom from 1996, also called The Office.



IT aims to capture the tedium and monotony of a nine-to-five existence, and to lampoon the pompous imbecility of the office wag, but fails miserably because parodies of dullness only succeed when they’re shorter and more exaggerated than their original models. A bore in homeopathic doses can be hilarious, as demonstrated by The Fast Show’s Colin Hunt, but a bore in real time remains simply a bore.



In case the likes of Mike Leigh and Caroline Aherne have deluded you into thinking that it’s easy to capture naturalism on TV, then a few minutes in the dubious company of Ricky Gervais and his colleagues will soon set you straight.



Gervais may be a patchily amusing stand-up comic, but he’s clearly neither an actor (frequently garbling his lines, and barely modulating his performance) nor a dramatic writer (cramming too many words into the characters’ mouths, and leaving little breathing space), and before long I found myself shouting at the screen: “What did you do with the money?” (the money his mother presumably once gave him for acting lessons). With the exception of Martin Freeman, the rest of the cast were equally underwhelming, and conveyed the impression not simply of playing the roles of dull office workers, but of being actors who were bored with their characters. Let’s put it this way. While Leigh’s creations invariably have depth and complexity, these were so onedimensional that, if you rotated them through 90 degrees, they’d disappear.



Turning now to the structure, the intercutting of fly-on-the-wall sequences with monologue confessionals could not disguise the vacuity of both the dialogue and what passed for a plot. The threat of imminent redundancy hung heavy over the entire Slough office (as indeed it should over the actors), while inside, David Brent (Gervais) spent his time trying to prise weakly suggestive one-liners into his every mumbled speech.



His exchanges with his secretary were one prolonged trip down Mammary Lane, with lewd quips about her breasts and the age-old remark that “there’s hardly a man in this office who hasn’t woken up at the crack of Dawn” (the poor woman being named Dawn Tinsley, solely to expedite this one lame gag).



As for schoolboy pranks like putting a stapler inside a jelly and remarking “it’s a trifling matter”, what can one say, and by the time Mr Brent had made Dawn cry by pretending to sack her, I was also pretty close to tears. Of utter despair.



THIS is the time of year when you’re liable to find people sticking their stinking hairy oxters in your face if you venture onto the Tube, and it’s also the season when schedulers try to sneak their stinking disasters into the listings unnoticed, but even that doesn’t fully explain what’s happening to British TV comedy at the moment.



How this dross ever got beyond the pilot stage is a mystery, while over on C4 they’re showing five-year-old repeats of Brass Eye, starring a 40-year-old enfant terrible who’s still playing his schoolboy pranks in hopes of riling the ITC (and even more embarrassingly, he’s planning to do more). Strangely, last night’s programme didn’t pick up on the aspect of office work which I hated most during my two-year stint, namely the sheer horror of trying to think of something new to say to people who I’d pass in the corridor several times each day (the morning I found myself saying “we can’t go on meeting like this,” I knew it was time to quit). Looking back on that bleak period, the only real pleasure I had came from putting a dehumidifier and a humidifier on opposite sides of my desk, then sitting back and watching them fight it out to the death.