I’ll probably write a song about this

The Office goes musical with S1E4: ‘Training’

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.

Being at work while being unproductive; away from your desk but still wasting time; training without learning — if you wanted a synecdoche for office jobs that exposed their absurdity you could do worse than a training day.

The one in The Office is led by Rowan (Vincent Franklin in his breakout role, before he went on to play barefoot policy guru Stewart Pearson in The Thick of It.) He comes armed with teamwork exercises, “an MBA from Bradford” and that now obsolete contraption, the overhead projector. These aren’t enough to fend off David Brent.

David can’t pass up the opportunity of his staff seated in a ring like an audience and a whole day at work without the distraction of doing any. For him it’s not a training day, it’s a performing day.

As we read him do in the first part of this series, he spends episode 4 showing off his comedy geek stylings. A corporate video which Rowan admits “is a bit cheesy and a bit 80s” is for David a reference to spot: when Peter Purves gets confused for his Blue Peter co-host John Noakes, David squawks with laughter and commends, “Very good, very good.” He tries to hijack Rowan’s roleplay of a hotel manager since he’d be better at doing Basil Fawlty (as proven in S2E01). These comedy stylings are, as ever, a flop. Pointing out to Rowan one of those dead CEO portraits which haunt offices with more poignancy than aristocrats on manor house walls, David laughs, “Bald old git” before re-noticing that Rowan is bald. He also spends the episode acting the know-nothing know-it-all as we read him do in part 3 of this series. Either he’s nodding along to the video’s homilies or critiquing it for showing money on fire because “it’s illegal to burn anything with the Queen’s image, of the realm”.

But more than fatuous trivia and lead-ballooning comedy, what the training day offers David most is a stage for music. While dismissing the musical aspirations of Keith from Accounts, he reveals that he himself was once in band¹ with the terrible and telling name ‘Foregone Conclusion’ (of which sort of name I know something about). Show, don’t tell goes the writing dogma. In one of The Office’s best cuts and straight-to-camera addresses, Tim tells us, “He went home to get it” before David starts playing his acoustic guitar.

Spaceman

The first song he plays is in the wise troubadour style of Cat Stevens (a Gervais/Merchant fave who almost soundtracked The Office credits as he’d end up doing the credits for Extras.) “Who is wrong and who is right? / Yellow, brown, black or white? / Spaceman, he answered, You’ll no longer mind / I’ve opened your eyes, you’re now colour blind [his italics]. Which message David underlines with: “Racial.” As for his last song he doesn’t play but only describes it, a “political reggae” tune called ‘Equality Street’. Music is another avenue in which he can pose as PC, as a wise and good boss.

This pose collapses in contact with reality and his vanity. He incorrectly answers the video’s question, “What’s the single most important thing to your business?” with “Staff”; the correct answer is “The customer.” (I’ve always loved the grammatically correct but nonetheless genteel way the secretary on the video says, “I’ve a customer.”) David’s staff he treats to such proverbs as, “A good idea is a good idea forever,” like some corporate bullshit update of Keats’s “Truth is beauty, beauty truth”. On top of the video, he second-guesses Rowan’s methods. Banjaxed by the man’s roleplay of an unhelpful hotel manager David resorts to roleplaying that “there’s been a rape up there!” Switching roles, he denies to Rowan’s complaining customer that his room exists², teaching the questionably useful lesson that “sometimes the complaints will be false”.

So much for the wise boss. As for a good one, his reply to the video that staff are the most important thing repeats a claim he made at the end of show’s first episode, that the “single most important thing for a company is the people” (flagging that the show was going to be a character study, especially of him). And yet he’s quick to amend his bromide “I’ll help us clean our floor together” with “not literally.” And when Keith — whose monotone Out-Of-Office message sums up his attitude to training — calls his job “brainless”, David smarts, “At your level maybe.” Most fittingly though for the episode’s other strand, he doesn’t do much else than a yikes-grimace when Dawn walks out of the training in tears.

Paris Night

The reason she was in tears is because she and Lee are on the ropes, if not the rocks.

Their engagement had started unwell. Dawn tells the cameras how Lee proposed in the local paper with the “romantic and thrifty” notice “Lee love Dawn. Marriage?” (Really he could’ve saved on three more letters by substituting “Marry?”) And now the engagement looks like it might be off, as Gervais/Merchant portray authentically and plausibly with snapshots interspersed throughout the episode: in media res arguments, storm-out declarations like “Don’t phone my mum again”.

Where earlier he ignored her, David tries to console Dawn. In one of the show’s best directed jokes, the camera pans from his managerial concern to her face, which goggles, and over which we hear the first guitar strum before panning back to David and the indie ballad he wrote ‘for her’.

His strumming gives way to plucked strings for the chorus, “Good night my sweet princess”, which gives away the song’s true subject: the death of Princess Diana. Gareth, who’d been listening with eyes closed, doing the stank face, defends the song to Dawn: her relationship is a bit like a car wreck. “In Paris?” / “The city of love.” Reassured Brent bites his lip before making his encore ‘Every breath you take’ (“Yeah”)

Free Love Freeway

More colleagues than David fail to console Dawn. But the one success comes out of the episode’s showpiece: David’s country pop song about lost love.

While thorny Malcolm stares on in horror and Rowan in despair, the rest of the staff are happy to shelve training to hear their boss sing about “hot love on the hot love highway”. Keith the wannabe musician arhythmically claps along, and Gareth sings along or tries to. His “🎵She’s dead🎵” elicits from David: “She’s not dead”. During the song’s breakdown, in which David has a lovelorn dialogue with a cowboy, Tim double-checks whether it’s “a gay song”, but then he too joins in with harmonising.

Which brings some harmony back to Dawn. “What in the name of Jumping Jehosopha(t) was that?!” he asks as they laugh on their way to lunch. Despite his own unsung love for her, he reacts to her and Lee’s woes like a mensch: showing only sympathy, telling her “I’m so sorry”, and even with jokes like “I’d marry your snot” pitching for laughter and not so she’d take the hint.

This stands out all the more when Gareth makes Dawn cry by trying to set her up with short “Monkey Alan” (NB not Anton the actual dwarf from episodes 1 and 6) after which he opines “You can’t say anything to [‘]them[’] when they’re like that” [my scare quotes]. And it’s not just male colleagues who are tone-deaf. Mean girl Donna, whom we met in episode 2, tells Dawn if she comes out on the town with her (as the whole office will in the next episode) she’ll find her another fella. “Thanks” deadpans Dawn, “that’s nice.”

Could that other fella be Tim? For now she sublimates her desire to leave Lee into a desire for any change. Gareth’s reminder that if she stuck with her job she might end up with a Porsche at age 42 is not enough to chasten her from voicing her plans to leave.³

It’s bad enough when a favourite colleague leaves their job — part of the shitty work-giveth-and-work-taketh-away precarity of office life. So much worse, though, when you’re in love with that colleague. Dawn’s mere floating a plan to leave has Tim pining out of a window in dismay. He’s wearied even more than usual by getting paired with Gareth for a teamwork exercise in solving the grain/chicken/fox crossing a river riddle. Gareth’s quibbling over the constraints of a thought experiment has the kind of invincible density we read about in part 3 (and reach idiot-savant levels of fair point: “What’s a farmer doing with a fox?”) in counterpoint to Tim’s frustrated explanations. Giving up, Tim sighs, “It’s just a stupid puzzle… just a problem to be solved.”

His first solution is to match the prospect of Dawn leaving with his. When David says his ultimate wish would be “to know what it’s like to live forever,” Tim tells him he’s “starting to know what that’s like.” He can’t take “another boring call about index board at 230 a tonne” (“260” Gareth corrects, so Tim replies, “You’re a twat, shut up, shut up” in one of their most characteristic exchanges). His second solution is to jump into Lee’s grave so fast — that is to ask out Dawn.

She’s the serpent who guards the gates of hell

So goes the applauded outro to one of David’s song, all of it we hear. As well as setting up again his acrimonious relationship with women, it underscores the acrimony in Lee and Dawn’s at the peak of their row.

But, as she keeps trying to explain to dump-them-first Donna, she’s not actually split with Lee. Tim should’ve been warned by the way his friendly touch of Dawn’s hand while clowning around during training seemed to conjure up Lee for another word with her. We the audience get an insert shot of Lee and Dawn hugging it out. Tim doesn’t.

She responds to his offer by telling him she and Lee are still together. (It’s like when Jonathan Safran Foer left his wife for Natalie Portman without telling Natalie Portman.) Tim goofily backpedals that he was just asking her out “as a friend”, an excuse that he voids by fleeing the scene before she can respond to his secular offer.

Nevertheless Tim making his move has set in motion the show’s ending. Humiliated for now he should take solace in the words of the corporate video’s title: Who Cares Wins.

Handbags and Gladrags

Brent’s response to Tim’s social car-crash is to say “Go and get the guitar” because “he’ll probably write a song about this one day.” Said song might be the cover of ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ we hear him sing over the end credits, seeing as they cut back to him doing a concluding strum.

One of the many ways he frustrated Rowan was with his answer to a visual riddle the man showed on a slide. It depicts two dogs leashed together chasing separate bones and so holding each other back. While Gareth says what he sees à la Roy Walker from the gameshow ‘Catchphrase’ - “Dogs” - David offers his own fable about a dog that loses the bone in its mouth when it goes for the bone in a pond reflection. Rowan snaps at this non sequitur, “What does that mean?” While Gareth again says-what-he-sees with his bemused clarification “Bones”, David defends himself with the childish rhetorical question “Oh don’t you know?”

But does he know? He should’ve heeded his fable’s bird-in-the-hand > one-in-the-bush moral. As I wrote in part 1 ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ is “a song addressed to a teenage girl, asking what’ll be left of her when she stops trying to be cool. What will be left of Brent?”

Nothing encapsulates David Brent’s celebrity dreams, his sense that he could be famous if he wanted, than his erstwhile musicianship. He tells a story about the band Texas supporting Foregone Conclusion as if he were the kingmaker, not an also-ran. The polite applause from staff rekindles his musical aspirations, contrary to his quashing of Keith. He goes almost spoken-word for the seemingly heartfelt lyric, “You helped the sick but who helped you?” but then leans in and gurns the next lyric: “Then rushing through the Paris night”. It’s all just a performance. He talks ‘youth’ with Gareth about “laying down” some new “tracks” with “drum’n’bass and samples and shit” while flouncing his necktie. Gareth underlines the sterility of his aspiration: when he offers to be Brent’s musical manager, he’s haggled down from “assistant manager” to “assistant to the manager”, i.e. back to his current job. Nothing will change.

It was telling that Brent’s ultimate fantasy was to prolong himself with everlasting life. Not to be another guy online quoting The Culture of Narcissim (though, you know, some of us had read Lasch before his era of podcast-popularity) but:

the dread of age originates not in a “cult of youth” but in a cult of the self. Not only in its narcissistic indifference to future generations but in its grandiose vision of a technological utopia without old age, the prolongevity movement exemplifies the fantasy of “absolute, sadistic power” which, according to Kohut, so deeply colors the narcissistic outlook…

The psychology of growth, development, and “self-actualization” presents survival as spiritual progress, resignation as renewal. In a society in which most people find it difficult to store up experience and knowledge (let alone money) against old age, or to pass on accumulated experience to their descendants, the growth experts compound the problem by urging people past forty to cut their ties to the past, embark on new careers and new marriages (“creative divorce”), take up new hobbies, travel light, and keep moving. This is a recipe not for growth but planned obsolescence.

Brent, aged forty, with his hobbyist guitar and belief that the Office documentary will be, at last, his call from the Showbiz Police presenting him with the fame he thinks he deserves: how could this story not end in disaster? Narcissus, like the dog with the bone, lost what he had by staring at his reflection in a pond.

Many thanks to Tom for his help with this piece.

For more about The Office read parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series. And for similar posts follow me here on Medium or subscribe to my Substack, Artless. You can also buy my novel The Prick and its limited edition tie-in The Pricklet.

[1] As was Ricky Gervais! Behold him all dangly-earringed and Flock-of-Seagull-quiffed with 80s group Seaona Dancing:

[2] Hotel rooms do have a tendency to not exist.

[3] “And talk of sports and makes of cars” goes the Betjeman poem Brent reads out in the next episode. There is something sad about the Top Gear consistency with which British men in pointless jobs cling to what they drive.