Did you get the double meanings?
S2E2: ‘Appraisals’ by, for and of David Brent
This piece is part of a series on The Office (UK), running up to the 20th anniversary of its finale this Christmas. Don’t miss out by following me on Medium.
The HR make-work of staff appraisals structures this episode, a neat device for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to show where characters have got to in their story-arcs. But the episode is also about appraisal in a figurative sense: getting the measure, eyeing up, taking stock.
David Brent downplays the hostility of making your staff account for themselves — he tells the camera they’re not “putting their head on the block” — while Gareth plays it up: appraisals “separate the wheat from the chaff.” Their perspectives merge when Gareth points out they already know who the worst staff are, showing names on paper to David, who gives a wry “Yeah.” (Oddly we never see Gareth’s appraisal, though perhaps because he’d have aced his.)
The best appraisal of the episode is Keith’s, not in the sense he’s the best staff but that his is the best depiction of the essence of appraisals. He’s left out a page in the form he was meant to complete, so David has to take him through it, getting more and more galled the more Keith asks what the answer options are, and the more he keeps picking “Don’t know” for each one. All throughout Keith chews gum like cud; in Episode 4 of the last series he did call his job “pretty brainless.” Whether he’s being obtuse now on purpose or as part of his personality, it shows up the inaneness of the whole process.¹
From the literal to the figurative: Tim this episode gets appraised not just by his boss but new Swindon intake, Rachel. In the smoking room (! another time-capsuling of the show) she tells Dawn he seems nice then gently corroborates he doesn’t have a girlfriend. She even asks whether Dawn “would”. Dawn avoids answering by opting out: she’s spoken for, she insists, with a superstitious touch of her engagement ring. When Rachel offers the counterfactual, “But if you weren’t” Dawn squirms at having to consider it. Rachel, in putting out feelers to Tim, further match-makes him with Dawn.
Good thing Gareth’s “got her covered” as he reassures Lee. After the man’s shoving of Tim last episode he’s come to apologise with a gift (at Dawn’s behest as we can guess by her chaperoning presence). For his part Tim is diverting attentions to Rachel. While staff dawdle at the car park assembly-point during a fire drill he uses what Dawn observes are his best lines on a tickled-pink Rachel: “More than friendly.”
Their convergence has a pleasing pattern: first, Lee (or Dawn?) gifts Tim a wrapped “bottle of something” as ‘Invetigator’ Gareth astutely works out. Then just before Rachel gets her low-down on Tim, she gives Dawn her verdict on last episode’s welcome party: “that wine was something else!” And when she returns to the smoking room, she asks Tim out to Yates’s Wine Lodge (he pouts “classy”, which is funny because said chain venue is quintessentially tacky-suburban, like the UK version of Olive Garden). Perhaps the wine pattern is there to hint their attraction is never clear-headed from the start.
When Gareth tells the camera his own stance on office relationships, he leads with “not shitting on your own doorstep”, but then admits he knows how to attend to a woman’s “needs”. One such woman might also be Rachel. He corners her in the kitchen for an ad-hoc pre-romance appraisal. He confirms she doesn’t have a boyfriend or kids, but also that she doesn’t want to go out with him, though is doing so with Tim, to which he can’t tag along. (Note that Rachel asking Tim to join a group trip to a wine bar has the same cover he used protesting him asking out Dawn: it’s “as a friend.”)
She tries to judo-flip his lurching advances by feigning a romantic interest in him anyway. And so Gareth graciously offers to break his rule against “sloppy seconds” (a rule we know is pretty flexible what with his threesome in the last series) on one condition: if she expects him to “go in there” [pointing at her crotch] then Tim’ll have had to have worn a condom first: “Sort of a rule.” A bystander overhears, and in his fumbling embarrassment shifts the chat from one white emulsion to another: “Is there any milk?”
A colleague of Rachel who accompanied her from Swindon is Oliver, used as a racism-gauge in the last episode by David. In this episode David continues his performance of being racially with-it, dropping mention to Oliver how he thinks Denzel Washington is an “amazing actor.” Though not his favourite; that would be “Mister Sidney Pwatee-eh”. (David’s like the evangelical pastor swearing in President Obama, who pronounced the names of the man’s daughters in such a syllable-savouring way.)
Meanwhile David acts dismissive about Tim’s ongoing if delayed plans to go (back) to university: “No point”, not even the chance of “casual sex” that Tim cites. What’s that compared to the chance he might one day be in David’s chair, at which he points with both hands while biting his lip? And yet he still wants to impress uni-aspirant Tim and the cameras with his learning (as he tried with graduate Ricky in the last series). He introduces him at his appraisal as “Tim Canterbury!” which takes him on the irrelevant chain of associations, “The Canterbury Tales. By Chaucer. And Shakespeare.” And though the appraisal features his usual corporate bollocks — like a tabloid headline he speaks in nouns: “Trust encouragement reward loyalty satisfaction” — he’s also brimming with such pearls as “our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising when we do” (who is he, Michael Caine talking to Batman?). Tim spots that he’s reading these off a print-out of quotes by Confucius, George Bernard Shaw. David wants people to judge him for his learning, not for faking it, so he orders Tim: “Don’t tell.”
When it comes to Dawn’s turn, he’s even more forced. Asking who her role model would be, he haggles her down from her mum, her dad (“Let’s take your parents as read”), Tim (“He’s your friend though” — Dawn, take note), Jennifer (“We said not a woman”) finally to him. He’s such a good role model that he refers to her ambition to be a children’s illustrator (first mentioned here but crucial for the show finale) as “pipe dreams”. And in telling her to “keep up the doodling” so that “When it doesn’t happen, you can go ‘At least I gave it a go’” he even manages to make sound advice sound dispiriting.
At least Tim and Dawn are experienced in humouring David. The new Swindon intake, having arrived only last episode and en masse, haven’t had the time or space.
During the fire drill, David acts level-headed for the cameras, unlike urgent Gareth (the presumptive fire warden) with whom he cross-talks, and with whom he muscles aside the normal helpers of wheelchair-user Brenda from Swindon to carry her down the stairs. After one flight they get knackered and abandon her there.
She’s with her fellow Swindoners when David checks in to see how they’re finding working at Slough (and by extension under him). Their silence speaks, as they say, densities. He tries to massage out more favourable information as he did with Dawn, but only gets a murmured assent that his management is more laidback than the “iron fist” of their old boss and his new one. (“Say yes then” he needles.) Leadingly he suggests he himself is “More fun”, then at their equivocation repeats last episode’s question-noise “Urgh?”
This provokes Trudy the Geordie to give her withering appraisal: they were used to being motivated in Swindon; there’s not much dynamism in Slough; they’d always thought of this branch as getting away with murder. Growing incredulous, David asks how many still prefer their old branch, had more laughs there. Not getting the answer he wants he scoffs, “You’re having a laugh.” Then he bites the bullet and asks how many of them had more laughs with old boss Neil.
At the end of the last series David had bested him for a promotion with “a landslide” vote from the board; now he unanimously loses the vote to him from the Swindon staff. Livid David: “That’s mental.” He might be the one giving staff their appraisals, but he’s the one most appraised: in his paranoid insecurity, in reality, and as a fate-tempting consequence of pressuring them to say what they think.
Time for David to appraise them back. He tries corralling the Slough staff to “show that lot” how fun they themselves are by going out for lunch at a pub. None come apart from stolid Keith. David shoulders the burden of entertaining the Swindon lot, presenting a round of drinks with “Welcome to Alcoholic Anonymous”, which he then walks back: “It’s no laughing matter.” Neither does his Brit bloke trivia — “That’s a lovely drop [of ale], that’s Courage. You get a lot of that round here because the main brewery’s in Reading” — manage to impress. He retaliates by telling them off for private jokes, telling them to “focus” and not discuss people he doesn’t know. He might be a soft touch as an actual manager, but he micro-manages ‘fun’.
A fruit machine’s burble amplifies the silence. The impasse ends with them watching Keith eat a pie one-handed with his fork held eye-wormingly under-arm. David’s last bid is to ask whether the pie was good (I’m surprised Keith said it was “alright” rather than his appraisals’ “Don’t know”) then to laud the pie at The Gardener’s Arms with a knowing wince. No dice; he gives in and declares their lunch “a wash out.” One of the Swindon staff pushes back, saying they “did make an effort” by coming, and David turns conciliatory for a moment, admitting it’s not their fault. He then re-escalates things by giving his appraisal that “the best people didn’t come.”
No wonder he gets back to the office under such a cloud. And right at that moment he sees how Neil is having fun with staff at lunch, playing French cricket (to my non-UK readers that’s a, well, actually it’s bollocks). Gareth is the first focus of David’s rage, told off for being “selfish” in not coming to the pub. Then he shifts it to Neil.
He tells his boss in front of their staff that they’re over-running lunch-time. When Neil doesn’t respond in kind, David lets loose on him: “Just wanna be popular as the new boss, oh love me! Pathetic.” As I wrote about the last episode, Neil is David’s nemesis because he’s his ego-ideal; and at the same time David projects onto him inapplicably what he deep-down fears about himself: he’s needy and pathetic.
Inapplicable or not Neil won’t stand for such an appraisal, accosting David with that gut-jolting phrase “Can I have a word?” The confronter is confronted. David tries to smart-talk his way out: when Neil calls him a petulant child, David shrugs he’s “Young at heart.” But now Neil really gets into his stride. The scene is such a natty demonstration of how losing control of your anger can so often pivot into overwhelming retaliation, into the hot shame of knowing you took it too far. Neil tells David: “I don’t let anyone talk to me like that. Not my staff. Not my boss. And certainly not you.” Once he’s got all his licks in, there’s the magnanimous relent: “You’re a good bloke, Dave. Shake on it?” (Neil would make a great teacher.)
David is never cowed by Neil for long. Though he’d shied a little in shame, he now spins the force of it back out as spiteful rage, the usual comeback of the exposed narcissist. It’s another dangerous loss of control: he checks Tim and Gareth didn’t hear what’d passed between him and Neil then makes up a flattering version. It’s not him but Neil who just showed his true colours by slagging them off. David makes out he defended them, though stopping at hitting Neil: “Had I done he’d have gone through the wall.” While Tim appraises Neil as “pretty trim”, David pretends he himself knows karate before declining, in a macho way, Gareth’s suggestion of a death-punch because [over-enunciating]: “I’d want to keep the little twat alive.” Most revealing of all, he lets slip through gritted teeth his own feelings for the Swindon lot who keep not admiring him: “They’re little slugs with no personality… jealous coz we’re better than them at everything.”
David slanders and lies even though everyone will find out via the watching cameras. The urge to restore pride comes at any cost, is always irrational. Ressentiment hasn’t been so well-written since Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, which book Gervais/Merchant were sure to mention in Series 1.
David’s bluster is not enough to keep off his self-appraisal. As it did last episode, Neil’s mirror on him has left him sadly pondering alone in his office.
While Tim and Rachel leave for wine at Yates’s, Dawn has to have a beer with her boss from his secret stash. First he fake-delegates some tasks to her to give himself time and courage to confess “Dawn, I’m fed up!” He then confesses his appraisal of Wernham Hogg: “Sometimes I think it’s a right shit-hole.” This builds to his request that she appraise him, in a give-it-to-me-straight tone: “Do you think I’m funny?”³ She can’t squirm out of answering as she did with Rachel because he makes her sit down. He pushes further, asking whether Neil is funnier. “Definitely not,” she kindly lies.
A mistake, because now he wants more reassurance. What’s her favourite stuff of his he does? She flaps about that there’s “Too much!” so he throws her a line: “Impressions?” He shows off his Muppet ones, calling back to the ‘Mahna Mahna’ song that opened the series, and calling forward to Gervais’s cameo roles in the Muppet Movies and Sesame Street. But what David most wants to show off is his soul. He makes Dawn listen to his poetry.⁴
Either side of the reading he swigs from his stubby beer, appropriately labelled ‘Pride’. He swallows it fine as he struggles to in real life. Post-credits, he blows across the bottle neck to make a hoot then motions for Dawn to do the same (her hoot is higher-pitched because she hasn’t/doesn’t drink as much as him). This meaningless exchange has him wisely nodding. He’s not nodding in acknowledgment of reality, only at his hurt pride, his victimhood. Had he actually been wise he’d have known a victim complex is a self-fulfilling prophecy…
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[1] Maybe Keith gets away with whichever’s the case because of his power at Wernham Hogg; his strength, as David reads out from his form, is Accounts. (Keith nods with shut eyes.) Along with people in IT, whose representative we’ll meet in the next episode, those in Accounts are among the few key-workers of work.
[2] Oliver’s seated next to Sheila, who during this series will shift favour from Gareth to her black neighbour (race very relevant).
[3] I’ve referenced the Goodfellas ‘You think I’m funny?’ scene before, but it makes me laugh to think of Vinny (Joe Pesci) doing the same speech but not from faked psycho rage but genuine whiny hurt.
[4] Before this scene it would’ve been a fair point to demur that in Series 1 a clown like Brent having a copy of Betjeman’s Collected Poems to hand in his office was a bit implausible. But in this episode he does name-drop Chaucer and Shakespeare, and in the last series he did reveal he was once a song-writer. And now that he’s revealed he’s a poet too, the presence of Betjeman retrospectively, snugly fits.
