Tim and Dawn in The Office |
I'm vaguely ashamed to admit this to anyone connected to the world of television, but several years ago, feeling defeated by the sheer number of channel options, my wife and I decided to get rid of cable. We had felt ourselves yielding too often to the temptations of channel surfing, an activity of self-imposed torture quite unique to this era.
This lack of self-discipline doesn't mean I'm anti-TV, just that my television watching sensibilities are from an earlier age, when there were either three or four channels to choose from. The household is certainly less cluttered and more serene without cable, but we do find ourselves out of touch sometimes with the cultural motifs and references around us.
Recently I found myself lost in conversations about a TV show called The Office. It seemed difficult for people to believe I hadn't seen this program so central to the cultural life around me. Amazingly, for a low-budget, celebrity-free British TV show with only 12 episodes in total, this enigma of a production ended up not only doing well in the U.K., but became world famous, winning two Golden Globe awards and kick-starting production on a U.S. equivalent.
Finally, a friend loaned me the DVD on the U.K. series and I holed up for awhile to find out what it was all about. From the opening titles during which the camera roams around a damp, depressing industrial estate in Slough --a town just west of London-- to the lengthy scenes of office personnel staring blankly at computer screens, it was obvious The Office was different.
Harnessing the vogue for reality TV, the premise is that the workers of Wernham-Hogg, paper merchants, are being filmed for a documentary. The technique captures the tedium and annoyance of a typical office environment in which people with nothing in common are forced to spend a good deal of their lives together.
Sales representative Tim (Martin Freeman) is driven mad by colleague Gareth (Mackenzie Crook) who is fixated on all things military. Gareth is in turn tormented by Tim who regularly hides Gareth's office equipment and encases Gareth's stapler in jelly (Gareth has a phobia about jelly).
The viewer soon picks up the fact that there are strong, though unexpressed, feelings between Tim and receptionist Dawn (Lucy Davis). But Dawn is engaged and therefore unavailable. In the sterile white-collar atmosphere, the language of their emotions is understated, hinted at by the merest glance or moment of awkwardness. Writer-directors Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant describe this as the Jane Austen factor, and the viewer adjusts quickly to be awake to every nuance of the characters' behaviour.
Gervais himself plays office manager David Brent, one of the most memorable creations in the history of British TV.
David believes himself to be a natural-born entertainer and has a fatal tendency to pontificate on camera about subjects as diverse as his managerial philosophy, race, gender, and world hunger. Through David's idiocies, the viewer sees a magnified version of an all-too-common experience in the modern world.
David tries to incorporate into his language all the current notions of feminism, racial tolerance, compassion and understanding. But he is a man totally lost in a world of concepts he doesn't begin to understand. Confidently preaching to the documentary camera, he will suddenly change his mind in mid-sentence and say something appalling without even realizing it.
While the beautifully acted romance between Dawn and Tim certainly keeps viewers watching, it is David himself who remains in the centre. The viewer can't dislike David, no matter how oafish his behaviour. His blunders keep us urgently questioning whether there are any of his clumsy, self-righteous character traits in ourselves.
And there are rare, tantalizing moments when David becomes almost human, as in the Christmas special when he responds to a blind date who --against all odds-- takes a liking to him. Rather than descending into the patronizing bravado he usually reserves for women he is with, he instead quietly opens up and reveals something close to the truth about himself.
It's difficult to define the precise genre of comedy to which The Office belongs. American audiences associated the series with the "mockumentary" films of Christopher Guest (Best in Show, 2000) and (A Mighty Wind, 2003). While valid, the comparison misses a vein of British TV and film drama exemplified by Mike Leigh (Abigail's Party, 1977) and (Secrets and Lies, 1996) which exploits the dramatic potential of squirm-inducing social situations.
Whatever their influences, the Gervais-Merchant partnership knows how to straddle the dividing line between comedy and drama without teetering into pathos. The writers also know that epiphanies, when called for, must be subtle and consistent with character.
When self-knowledge arrives for David Brent, it comes in a simple moment of defiance and honesty. And it leaves the viewer quite exhilarated.
Paul Butler is the author of Easton's Gold (2005) and the upcoming NaGeira (2006). There is a forum about writing on his website www.paulbutlernovelist.com
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