After The Office, comedy could never be the same again

This week marked 25 years since The Office, co-created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, was first broadcast. It has been celebrated by the BBC with a charming little interview on iPlayer between MacKenzie Crook (Gareth) and Martin Freeman (Tim), arguably the two actors – both relatively unknown at the time – whose careers were given the greatest boost by the series. This is peppered with short clips from classic scenes to whet viewers’ appetites for the whole 14 episodes – which are also back on iPlayer to be watched in their entirety.

Famously released to muted applause at first, The Office left many nonplussed viewers unsure whether the thing was meant to be a comedy at all. The opening titles featured a mournful, bittersweet piano ballad played over scenes of the drab urban brutalism of a Slough that had unaccountably escaped Betjeman’s friendly bombs. It all seemed to suggest a fly-on-the-wall documentary. This impression was reinforced by the establishing shots of an open-plan office – used by ‘Wernham Hogg Paper Company’ – that looked almost provocatively mundane.

Tim, Gareth and the other regulars all seemed highly plausible if somewhat heart-breaking figures, trapped like Gareth’s stapler in the merciless jelly of British white-collar life. Only gradually did it dawn on viewers that the grotesque, impossibly unself-aware David Brent, the manager of the paper company’s Slough branch, was a creation at all, let alone the creation of genius that he is now widely understood to be. When that clicked, however, everything fell into place.

Word of The Office’s brilliance began to spread. The show quickly became appointment viewing for initiates. I remember clearly the excitement of sharing one’s appreciation of it, as if it was a hipster band or new recreational high. It was for a few breathless weeks almost forbidden knowledge, like Adult Swim or something on the dark web, rather than a BBC2 sitcom.

Audience figures grew, and it was soon repeated, to greater and greater viewing figures and acclaim. It is now often neck and neck with Fawlty Towers in polls for the greatest British sitcom of all time.

Like Fawlty Towers, The Office benefits from a significant degree of rationing. It consists of just two near-perfect, six-episode series, and an extended two-part Christmas Special that emphatically resolved many of the narrative threads and made it clear that That Was It.

David Brent’s masochistic relationship with the boorish, boisterous sales-rep, Chris ‘Finchy’ Finch, who never failed to put David down, was a highlight. His humiliation at Finchy’s hands was terminated in the final episode with the immortal line: ‘Chris, why don’t you fuck off?’ I swear you could hear people cheering up and down the street as if England had scored in time added on. The realisation that we were suddenly rooting for Brent was astounding. This was then topped when the adorable Dawn and the stoic-but-hapless Tim’s long-smothered romantic yearning was finally fulfilled, just as we’d all lost hope.

Their kiss at the end of The Office Christmas Party was the sitcom equivalent of the final ‘Liebestod’ aria in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, that resolves a tension that has been simmering since the discordant Tristan chord in the very opening bars of the piece over three hours earlier.

Understandably, the 25th anniversary of this crown jewel in the BBC’s 21st-century comedy output is a chance for it to bathe in some self-congratulation. An opportunity for the Beeb to earn a bit of well-deserved credit for having the nerve to trust in such a relatively unknown team and radical approach to scripted comedy.

But it is hard, too, to avoid the sense that The Office, far from heralding a brave new comedy world, represented something else – the end to the BBC-led era of the sitcom as a viable vehicle for mass entertainment.

The switch to the deadpan acting and the single-camera, ‘mockumentary’-style comedy – already established by shows like The Royle Family and People Like Us, and Christopher Guest movies like This is Spinal Tap – reached its apotheosis with The Office. It was perfectly suited to an audience that was much more comfortable with the cynical, media-savvy shared joke about the ‘format’, than it was with traditional sitcoms like Only Fools and Horses and Porridge.

The comedy that arose from watching David Brent fail to read the room, or Gareth realise that he is being ridiculed for his territorial-army skills, rather than admired, is often described as ‘cringe’. But it remains much less cringe for the double-screen generation than anything that looks as if it is ‘trying’ too hard to make you laugh, with a cast of ‘funny’ characters and their ‘funny’ catchphrases and quips. This was the traditional sitcom mode that Gervais himself explicitly mocked in the fictional show, ‘When the Whistle Blows’, which features in his post-Office show, Extras.

Extras was itself a great sequel to The Office. It accepted the new rules and worked to constantly challenge and undermine expectations of what a sitcom is. As with postmodern literature, the focus is now less on the story and the characters and more on the delivery system. Then there’s Peep Show and, more recently, Fleabag, which were arguably even more radical deconstructions. A few brave campaigners like Not Going Out and Mrs Brown’s Boys have continued to fight for the continuation of the traditional studio format, but even those shows with more traditional sitcom set-ups, like The Inbetweeners and Friday Night Dinner, avoided the laughter track for fear of sounding dated. Meanwhile in the US, the likes of Modern Family were helped to feel, well, modern, by filming and straight-to-camera monologues that were clearly borrowed from the mockumentary approach of The Office. This despite there being no plausible suggestion that a documentary was really being made.

I loved the old sitcoms, and have written on here before about their golden age. They peopled the national imagination with archetypes that fed our souls and our understanding of who we were for decades. But there is no escaping the fact that creative destruction is both desirable and inevitable in any such field. We were at least lucky that when the old sitcom walls were finally razed to the ground, it was at the hands of the utterly brilliant, unanswerable and endlessly repeatable, The Office. Twenty-five years on, we are surely due another.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.