I know this much is true
A series of The Office ends, a legend begins
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.
Hirings become firings, resignations handed in then withdrawn, redundancies confirmed then cancelled, promotions accepted and scuppered on purpose or otherwise… The Office was never a sitcom exactly nor a miniseries but it wasn’t not them either; and at the end of its first series it has its comedy-format cake and eats it: restored status quo and great changes in the offing both.
Episode 6, ‘Judgement’ starts with David Brent firing the man he hired at the start of the show: Alex (now in shot, played by Neil Fitzmaurice, who always makes his mark however brief, from DJ Ray Von in Phoenix Nights to Geoff’s-Doing-a-Joke Geoff in Peep Show). Incrementally the scene reveals that, as well as the two of them, there’s an IT guy at the computer; “How long you gonna be?” David asks but secretly he wants him there. Then the camera pans to show Gareth sitting on the windowsill. David’s brought back-up; this cowardice informs the rest of the episode.
It’s one of the best directed in the show, most of all for how it inserts talking-head sections to elide escalations of drama. From the mere cutaway to a janitor staring at the camera (Merchant Senior in the first of his per series cameos) we return to the now gone-sour firing — a nifty piece of narrative concision. This is what David needed back-up for: Alex is understandably angry, getting sarcastic about David’s immediate contradictions like “I’m not passing the buck, this is someone else’s decision”, and less sympathetically blaming political correctness over disability quotas, as Gareth will do by episode’s end.
As luck would have it Gareth, David and the IT guy inadvertently derail Alex’s anger by turning what should’ve been a private meeting into a colloquy with him on little people: those “in real life”, as David calls it, with dwarfism (“Bloody hormones”) but also elves, fairies, pixies. Defeated by their combined twaddle, Alex exits with his reason for “how come he knows so much”: “It’s called an education.”
Tim’s still planning to further his; he’s not thinking about leaving, he is leaving, as he insists a second time, in order to go to university (that classic New Labour metonym for all-purpose bettering yourself aspirations). With assistant Karen, who’s survived for one more episode, David penguin-walks over to Tim to show how to cheer staff up. The three take a meeting premised on David’s faux-concern: reassured by Tim that he’s not the reason for leaving but a good boss, a great boss, David tells Karen to put down “good” and “great” (and to note Tim’s confirmation that paper anecdotes can be “hilarious”: a short-hand for The Office itself).
A second elision, this time via an insert of a talking-head Tim, who gives the actual reason he’s leaving by quoting a John Lennon lyric from ‘Beautiful Boy’ (though tempering it with a sillier lyric from ‘I Am the Walrus’). From this we cut back to some point after David’s cheering up has frayed into a telling off. (Again a crafty way for the writers and actors to skip over what might’ve been an awkward transition to depict.) There’s the bizarre in media res of David saying Tim’s name with air-quotes before telling him and a sympathetic Karen that they’re time-wasters whom he’d rather worked and not whinged or spread their bad vibes around the office. It’s almost like he’s deflecting something…
He is of course. While he tours Karen around the office like he’d done Ricky, they’re intercepted by Malcolm, who wants news on the downsize. At first David hides behind wankerisms like specifying the “Greenwich mean time” when they’ll find out. And as the dwarf chat fortuitously derailed angry Alex, now David purposefully gets facetious to change the subject from redundancies to Malcolm’s baldness: he quotes Kojak, wonders after other “weird-looking bald people” then pushes it too far by rapping Malcolm’s slap-head like Benny Hill, and getting his wrist slapped for it.
The stated GMT arrives, along with Jennifer Taylor Clarke, David’s boss — for now. She’s had news of her own and been made a company partner. David’s as nonplussed at this promotion as his own staff will be at his, merely nitpicking with her that they’ll have to amend the company branding (he’s only impressed to be reminded they’ll get a discount on any new stationery — “40% sometimes”). In consequence of her promotion, though, she’ll need replacing; the board have voted 5/2 in favour of him.
So pleased is he by that score that he works out its percentage; and he’s unruffled when Jennifer reminds him that if he goes then Swindon will have to swallow his branch, which she knows he’s so loyal to. He brushes off the concern— “You’re not looking at the whole pie, Jenny” — then swiftly accepts the promotion, already too smug to take her congrats and wish of good luck. “You don’t need luck when you’ve got 71% of the population behind you.”
A poor choice of words. The staff — more ‘the population’ than the board are — gather like mutineers outside his office to find out in Malcolm’s words, “What’s the damage”. David gives the bad news first, which dismays his staff, who’ll now either lose their jobs or have to move to Swindon. (From Slough, that’s 70–90 minutes by car or train, so just out of a doable commute by British standards anyway.) David claims he’s gutted, the news is gutting, then hairpin-turns from his oofing wince at his apparent combativeness with Jennifer to a smile and “more positive note.”
But the news of his promotion is, as Malcolm says, not good news but irrelevant news (“That’s not a phrase though,” David dissembles). Malcolm won’t be pacified: there is no good news, so David gets sarcy, doing the first of the episode’s chin-scratches: “Hmm I think a promotion is generally considered good news.” When this doesn’t work he cracks and points at who’ll not be made redundant, missing out Malcolm, whose chin drops to his chest Arrested Development-style. (Even David, though, knows to withdraw his almost-mention of his board-vote ratio).
A montage of reactions — “I can’t believe it” / “Sold us out”/ “Wanker” — leading to David’s talking-head and another elision: from his previous barely suppressed smugness we’ve gone to his ire: maybe it’s time to cut his staff’s apron strings, he cries; they’d have done the same to him.
David’s business realpolitik gives way to last-act redemptive heroism, or so it seems. He resurfaces for the office end-of-financial-year party no longer irate but jolly, trying to banter with the woman who called him a wanker, ignoring the glare of Joan the cleaner before taking the mike for a speech. Though he can’t resist pointing out that his promotion was “as UK manager”, he announces that he told the board to “shove their job up their arses,” giggling like a kid. The crowd’s confused non-reaction has to be hip-hip-hoorayed into appreciation, after which he pretends to tell them to stop.
Now the heroism has sunk in, Donna and Ricky go tell him what they think. Ricky’s leaving Wernham Hogg but doesn’t wanna go without telling David he and Donna are impressed. But it’s not taken David long to go from noble to knobhead: he haughtily dismisses their handshake.
Such haughtiness tempts fate to knock him back down. To the sound of ‘S-Club Party’ David’s cornered by Malcolm outside the office’s makeshift club. While David tries to keep in good spirits, giving a puppyish muss to a passing party-hat, Malcom is the ghost at the feast: Paula (? “Alan’s assistant”) told Malcolm that David didn’t turn down the promotion but failed its medical.
David claims he faked failing it, because “what’s worse? Cheating medical science of cheating your friends?” Pressed harder, he — in one of Gervais’s most complex performances — keeps denying Malcolm’s allegation by pretending to sarcastically deny but therefore technically admit it. With a scratched temple and a final, politician’s “I may or may not have done” he departs in pseudo-triumph, apish arms bowed, back into the party. Still, Malcom makes sure to register his ‘See!’ glance at the camera.
Contra Macolm’s branding of it as irrelevant news, there was someone in the office thunderstruck by David’s promotion, heartbroken not to have been personally informed: Gareth. In front of David he melts into pitiable, if snivelling tears. Bargaining with his bad luck, he proffers his services to David’s replacement, ever the Weylon Smithers. But his further humiliation is that he’s not needed: David’s replacement Neil has his own assistant — “bloody good guy, Terry something.” (Is this why David wanted to hire Karen, to keep-up-with-the-Neilses?) What’s worse, this Terry is also army, and not territorial, though at least only a Sergeant to Gareth’s Lieutenant. But even in asserting that, Gareth betrays his essential lackeydom, addressing David unguardedly as “sir.”
David flails about for a consolation, never as capable at making his staff feel good as he claims, as we saw with Tim. He tells Gareth to take a memento then denies his choice of the guitar from episode 4, since it can’t be reordered. He does let him have his hole punch, “a bloody good one”, as he mimes with a pinch. Gareth opens its base, leaking punched holes “like confetti”. David humours him: “Could be used as confetti”, concluding with the off-topic: “Check with vicar first. Always”. Then again, comedies traditionally end with weddings…
Though perhaps not yet for Gareth. Since the last episode, when Donna called him a weasel-faced arse to his, well, weasel-face he’s not recovered his self-respect. Tim does fail to prevent him noisily shredding paper even though he’d used a polite “mate” and got a polite “mate” back; yet the moment Donna tells him to stop he relents to shredding paper by hand, strip-by-strip.
Nevertheless Tim’s the one to try cheer up Gareth at the start of the party, praising him for memorialising the unsung “just people who toil and fight for worthy causes and the freedom of others”. He takes the praise back a moment later when Gareth reveals his Nice Guy mentality by complaining it’s foreigners, women and disabled who benefit instead. Maybe that’s why Tim and Ricky say a woman in braids whom he’s got his eye on is “out of his league.” Gareth tells off smug Ricky with the lie that he himself didn’t try it on with Donna because he was playing by the rules (the just toiler again). Besides he wouldn’t want Ricky’s “sloppy seconds”, a phrase which, as Tim points out, is exactly why braids-woman is out of his league.
Which leaves Gareth still fixated on unattainable Donna and her sex-life with Ricky, sloppy or otherwise. When the two try give their respect to David, he snaps that he’d have preferred it individually, i.e. had Ricky not “jumped on top of her”. She snaps back that actually she was on top, then after they leave Gareth adds bitterly - wistfully? - that they “probably did oral” too. (Derek from the warehouse gives a knowing nod).
The party that starts in bitterness will amp up into relief then mellow out into tenderness, thanks to Keith. Another way this episode is directed so well is with its needle drops, narratively warranted by Keith being, as we learnt in Episode 4, a wannabe musician and so the DJ for the party.
First he plays ‘Spirit in the Sky’, setting off everyone’s glumness “at the end of another financial year” when at that moment they think they’ve been sold down the river to Swindon. Then, as David’s sparring balloons, seemingly still pleased at his own luck and oblivious to his staff’s bad, the song is suitably enough ‘Walking on Sunshine’. At his hero moment, David expects a film-like music cue, and tries to force one while saying “Let’s rock” under the assumption Keith will have a record ready. Keith fumbles before finally putting on ‘Sex Bomb’ (to which Joan the middle-aged cleaner has the best moves). Once everybody else is back in high spirits, the song playing is ‘The Only Way is Up’ by Yazz, sort of mentioned by Brent in Episode 3 and, if Tim and Dawn but knew it, the same group that’ll soundtrack their climactic moment in the finale. Most poignantly and pointedly, when they and Lee have their love triangle showdown in this episode, Keith is playing the Steps cover of Abba’s ‘Tragedy’, the word itself sang at Tim’s most tragic point.
For Lee’s just done another of his Goodfellas-style threats at Tim for having asked out Dawn. Upon Tim’s frightened malapropism, that he’d only asked her out as a “soldier to cry on”, Lee asks Tim if he’s bent, revealing it’s a wind-up again (though joke hostility is usually a cover for real). Lee even concedes he gets it: Dawn’s a good-looking girl. Tim pathetically concurs.
Dawn was feeling the same as Tim, about work anyway, wanting to be picked for redundancy because then “I might actually get up off my arse and do something.” And in one of those lovely grace notes in the show, she tries to defuse the ongoing tension of Tim’s revealed crush by giving him a shoulder scratch, its sound high in the mix so we won’t miss. Its friendly reassurance must have been felt by Tim as a gut-wrenching pseudo-caress.
The end of the party finds him sitting alone while everyone else pairs off like at a school disco: Karen the new girl with a temporary man; Ricky and Donna snogging; a young woman being goosed by an old-enough-to-be-her-dad colleague. Worst of all Lee and Dawn loveydovily slow-dancing. Even Gareth’s done better than Tim: in montage we see him shoot his shot with the girl “out of his league”, then not repel her with his army combat moves, and even get away with flipping her to floor: he ends in her arms breaking the modern taboo of touching braids. The dance sequence concludes with the episode’s second-to-last perfect music choice: ‘I’m not in love’ by 10cc, those words sung over a very much so Tim.
Dawn joins him at last, with the tellingly blurred question “When are you leaving mate/me?” Clearly she didn’t see what we glanced in montage: David tempting Tim back. He tells her he’s deferring university and taking a promotion instead.
His mealymouthed excuse for doing so makes him sound like their boss. Good writers give their characters personalised dialogue tics; great ones show how people pick up each other’s and why. Tim starts to Davidify this episode. We saw it earlier during his cheer-up chat: just as David kept telling Karen what to put in her notes, Tim, asked by David whether he was leaving because he’d asked out Dawn, repeated that it was as a friend then told Karen to “Put down ‘as a friend’.” And though he wasn’t present for David’s pie-drop with Jennifer he picks up the same metaphor, telling doubtful Dawn she’s not thinking about “the whole pie vis-à-vis my current life situation” (the kind of jargon The Architect was mocked for saying in The Matrix Reloaded). Tim cites such crappy compensations as £500 more p/a and being in David’s place in three years time. Dawn is kerfuffled, even worried (for isn’t funny 30-year-old Tim just another no-longer-funny 40-year-old David if he sticks around for another decade, if not three years?).
Thank god Tim wakes out of his corporate bodysnatchedness by offering Dawn his old job. Lad-mobbed onto the dance-floor he leaves her with that gesture. And in the episode’s last great needle-drop we hear Spandau Ballet over a slow zoom on a sinking-in Dawn. She “knows this much is true”: Tim is staying at Wernham Hogg for her.
During David’s rant to sublimate his guilt at his staff’s anger, he mimicked them saying “Thanks for the great opportunity and all the laughs.” He repeats this in a more worldly-wise, peacemaking tone in the episode’s closing speech:
You grow up, you work half a century, you get a golden handshake, you rest a couple of years, and you’re dead. The only thing that makes that crazy ride worthwhile is ‘Did I enjoy it? What was the point?’ That’s where I come in. You’ve seen how I react to people, make them feel good, make them think that anything’s possible. If I make them laugh along the way, sue me.
I don’t do it so they say, ‘Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for the wisdom. Thank you for the laughs.’ I do it so one day, someone will go, ‘There goes David Brent… I must remember to thank him.’
What should we thank Gervais and Merchant for, and how? At the British Comedy Awards in 2001 the first series of The Office was awarded Best New TV Comedy. But beyond it being so admirably made there was something else about its moment in time and mood that made it an instant classic.
As well as capturing its characters in crux moments of their personal lives as with Tim and Dawn, and in their work-lives as with David, it also captured work life. Specifically office work, and more specifically office work at a hinge point in history (and I’d add, despite all the show’s international franchises, a very English point).
Gervais and Merchant can’t have predicted in 2001 that their attention to detail was time-capsuling a period of office culture in decline. (And I don’t mean the existence of a smoking room or references to the Mr Oizo puppet that bookend the first series; or ‘Time Sponsored by Acurist’ — how you used to get the exact time before the Cloud; or dated references like Tim leaving on his screensaver that “Gareth is a Benny.”) For the show was set, not that we knew it, in that period’s final years.
A corrective to post-Covid nostalgia for the office could be The Office. The show itself was never nostalgic — for one it was set in the present — but nonetheless it now stands as a social document about a dying workplace, albeit a fictional example, like Henry Green’s novels or Ken Loach’s mockumentary about a Yorkshire coal mine.
There’s its setting, seen in the title sequence: the multi-storey carparks and grey concrete buildings of a Slough trading estate, the sky behind always mud-white. And there’s the titular office— shot in a real one of Teddington Studios — with its gnarly feature tiling on the outside, and on the inside Venetian blinds, box files, adjoining desks, pipe screensavers, the graphic-design fake watercolours and Stone Henge corporate inspirational posters; coarse grey plastic chairs that stack like Pringles, Henry Hoovers, yawning morning first arrivals — god here we go again — a sandwich-and-crisps lunch over the day’s paper; the specificity of people like trade journanlist Helena who still uses short-hand; Pete Gibbons and his great leaving gift, visiting tie salesman Nobby Burton, and Phillip Norris from Mencap¹.
Then the people themselves, everyone from the main characters — David with his in-turned teeth and moled jowl and his So 90’s box-beard; Gareth’s skull in a bowl-cut; and Tim and Dawn, the love interests whose looks aren’t aspirational, their feelings are — to the extras: normal-looking, which means not normal but idiosyncratic.
Most precise and soul-panging of all was how the show caught what it felt like to work for a place like Wernham Hogg around the turn of the millennium. In the first episode David toured Ricky and us through the office; is there anything more desolate than your first day in a new job? As a young adult I caught the tail-end of jobs like his: working in offices either without internet or without easy access to it or in that early period when your boss might’ve said something like, “We’re all online here, to the World Wide Web,” as David does, before said Web became so effective about trapping your attention: “no shopping. We’ve all got email. Have you used email before?” The period before smart-phones too, far back enough that Gareth calls his mobile a “portable phone”. And long before flexitime, back when ‘working from home’ would’ve been a jokey obvious misnomer, like an Aussie shower. You don’t know boredom like it. (And of course the great joke of modern working life is that the advent of constant Web 2.0 internet made work even worse).
Franz Kafka’s genius had been to find the almost mystical side to the frustration and arbitrariness of bureaucracy. The Office was TV’s turn to do the same: workers mesmerised by their monitors and the hypnotic photocopier chug that Gervais and Merchant knew were so important to insert between scenes; days spent listening to different plastics being clacked. Look again at Brent’s closing speech: wisdom, laughs with a backdrop of a life wasted on work before death.
It’s there in the bleak beauty of offices on trading estates, more like control towers or barracks: ancillary, the domestic side of the real business of business. It’s there in the characters watching-the-clock, not just the one at work but in their lives. There in how dry everybody’s faces look. By the end of its first series The Office had emphasised itself beyond a comedy, what with its John Betjeman, Notes from the Underground, even its Des’ree: it was poetry.
One poem in particular I wonder whether Gervais and Merchant are fans of (not least since they named their first film Cemetery Junction): Larkin’s ‘Toads Revisted’ (the toad is work, and office work at that):
No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.
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[1] One of the worst aspects of modern TV and film screenwriting is how stark, spare, faux-mythically under-detailed they are.
