Twenty-five years ago, one guy put another guy’s stapler in jelly.
As practical jokes go, it’s a good one, even if one doesn’t expect it to change the very face of television storytelling. The first episode of The Office, by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, was broadcast a quarter of a century ago, and the show—streaming in India on the BBC Player section of Amazon Prime—brought about a quiet revolution. Here we had characters in a desperately dreary office set in a lifeless township, but, for some inexplicable reason, they were being filmed. Suddenly, as they sold paper stock and indulged in office backbiting and told inadvisable jokes behind each other’s backs, they had to contend with all-seeing cameras.
This approach has forbears in This is Spinal Tap, the immortal mockumentary about a rock band, or even the comedies of Christopher Guest like Best in Show, about a dog show, or Waiting for Guffman, about a theatre production in a small town, but the way The Office was immediately—and thrillingly—different was that there was no reason for these characters to be made into a documentary. They weren’t substantial. They weren’t interesting. They weren’t working towards anything of lasting significance. They were just, in the words of Pink Floyd, “hanging on in quiet desperation,” as is the English way.
They were unimportant and yet they were being filmed. That doesn’t seem remarkable now—with incessant reels and posts about what someone ate and what someone thinks about a movie everyone else likes—but made at a time when phone cameras couldn’t shoot video, the characters working at Wernham Hogg in Slough were thrown off by the filming. Their relationship with the carnivorous cameras is an awkward one, making them feel self-conscious and—like people on a Zoom meeting who have nothing to say but chime in anyway—giving them performative anxiety. The branch manager David Brent, played by Gervais, is an irredeemable oaf, certainly, but he is also mugging for the cameras, trying desperately to prove how funny he is.
His colleagues also behave in performative ways. Martin Freeman’s Tim Canterbury has a certain restless need to prove to the people watching that he’s better than the place he’s in, which makes him act more angry at dweeby colleagues or roll his eyes harder at bad jokes in order to distance himself from them. The aforementioned colleague Gareth Keenan, played by Mackenzie Crook, also feels the need to impress the cameras on him. At one point, when Tim has pranked him by letting him prattle on from the other side of a wall made of files and boxes, Gareth, realising that Tim might not be there, says with self-justification, “I’m not talking to myself because… they’re filming.”
Stephen Merchant, looking back, recently described how the first episode initially looked awful on the editing table because the editors were trying to cut it like a sitcom. It was after they started editing it like a documentary that it clicked, once the awkward pauses were embraced and nobody was hunting for punchlines. There was no point if Brent told a genuinely strong joke. On the other hand, when he told the same joke (about the Royal Family at Christmas dinner) three times within the same episode, to varying levels of disapproval, the unease became magnificent. The laugh was hidden in the lack of a laugh.
The Office, therefore, overhauled comedy’s spine in two significant ways. First, the camera became an accomplice instead of an observer, forever waiting for someone to incriminate themselves with a side-eyed glance, a shrug, or a telltale sigh. That impact is visible on everything from Modern Family to Abbott Elementary as the direct-to-camera storytelling approach has become part of television punctuation.
The show’s greater revolution, however, may be temporal. Before it, sitcoms sought punchlines. After it, they began to trust silence. The awkward pause became modern comedy’s greatest instrument, with embarrassment stretching—and stretching—until it curdled into laughter. You can spot The Office’s fingerprints on obvious heirs like What We Do in the Shadows, but also shows that didn’t use the documentary facade. Veep weaponised discomfort like a machinegun. Succession found corporate tragedy in conversational hesitation. Even Fleabag’s conspiratorial glances at the audience feel like distant cousins of Tim’s exhausted looks into the lens.
The Office still feels revolutionary. The American remake is a barrel of laughs but, if anything, those are too many laughs, too many great gags, too many outlandish characters, too many edges softened to make characters likeable and worth rooting for. Watching the original feels like eavesdropping on a bleak and dry workplace, on people we have worked with, on colleagues we’d rather not go drinking with and those who make the day more bearable.
The writing is flawless. The first thing we see David Brent do is lie (complete with a Pinocchio gesture he makes for the cameras) and his journey of self-glorification is as plausible as it is pathetic. He talks a big game, rubs a perfume sample from an old GQ on his cheeks before interviewing a pretty girl he wants to hire, and reads out John Betjeman’s poem about Slough with contempt. All he wants is adulation, as he blames the public for not laughing at his jokes. He clearly hopes, however, that the people watching on the other side of the camera will get his genius. A truly immortal character.
(Also, watching Brent struggle to tell—and justify—a joke with a racist stereotype around a black co-worker, I feel like Gervais himself may need to watch The Office again in order to reappraise what not to do.)
In the first episode, Dawn, the receptionist, is reading a novel by Ben Elton. In another episode she’s still at it, clutching the same red paperback while going about her dreary day. It’s a detail I love. Sometimes life only works as background to what we’d rather be doing. That’s what The Office manages to catch. A bottle without lightning.
Streaming Tip Of The Week:
The Extras (BBC Player on Amazon Prime) is another excellent Gervais and Merchant series about background actors trying hard to make it big. Featuring stars like Kate Winslet and David Bowie in delightful and self-caricaturing cameos, the show offers fine insights into the capricious nature of celebrity.
Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.