Rolling a one
S2E6: ‘Interview’ and the perils of being viewed
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 first time The Office ended I was texting with a friend before and after the series closer, both of us hoping then glad the show didn’t lose its nerve. Even at that age we had the notion a happy ending would’ve somehow spoiled what’d come before, like a gymnastic display of flawless backflips that finishes on a bellyflop. We might not have articulated it like this at the time, but I guess we thought a happy ending for The Office could only have been contrived, unrealistic — jarring. In the words of two friends the same age and mindset of us back then from the film Metropolitan (1990):
-He’s less pessimistic than you.
-I know! It doesn’t ring true.
During the New Hollywood era downbeat endings to films became, in a chicken-and-egg way, both more popular with audiences and less disapproved of by studios. Without wishing to give away the endings of particular films, their deliberate draw was that the heroes died, or the boy lost the girl, or the villains won. Some of this had to do with the pessimism of 1970s politics, some to do with how refreshing it felt for films not to have a phony ‘Hollywood ending’. Since then that ‘phony vs authentic’ opposition has persisted as what differentiates a good ending from the compromised.
But in art all values are relational; there are no absolutes — happy endings always being a cop-out, commercial art being an oxymoron, and other adolescent hills on which to die. The idea I think my friend and I were groping towards was not that the last series of The Office had to end on a downbeat because that’d be ‘more a reflection of the real world.’ Neither that there was no way to contrive a happy ending that wouldn’t be clumsy. Only that greatness in artworks has to do with their unity. That while they shouldn’t remain static and instead develop a theme, the ending, however up-or-downbeat, has to harmonise with the rest, to reflect the whole.¹ As the episode called ‘Interview’ ended - at the time, the ‘last’ of The Office - its impact on an emotional, human-interest level was gutting. But on the aesthetic, that is sensual-cerebral level, we were both elated. They’d done it! The crazy sons of bitches had actually done it.
This is the end, beautiful friend
It’s never clear how much time falls between each episode of the office documentary. However long since the previous episode, it’s been plenty of time for Tim to dwell on Dawn’s passionate kiss of him.
Its immediate aftermath was that he skipped to the last phase of his office romance with Rachel. When she drifted to his desk bored, he hadn’t the energy to entertain her. Meanwhile Gareth griped at her for sitting on his desk, so she sniped back he must be jealous of Tim’s view; he countered that he was fine with a view of her arse and he’d only want the front-view had she been wearing a skirt and he could “look up there, at it”. Where Tim had once bristled at Chris Finch’s objectification of Dawn, he doesn’t, in Rachel’s words, defend her honour, instead sides with Gareth: she should get off his desk. The opposite of love isn’t hate, and it’s not apathy — it’s annoyance.
So when, in this episode, she presumptuously includes him in her family cottage-break to the New Forest, he’s quick to turn her down, too quick in fact, getting his terms the wrong way round: “I can’t. When is it?” He justifies himself with the vocab of work, that he needs two weeks notice (as when leaving a job, on-theme for an episode that involves David’s last day and Dawn resigning). Tim then flips Rachel’s correct detection that something is up: after she says she’s already told her parents he’d come, he grumbles, “Wish you’d asked me first,” as if she’s the one being difficult.
To restabilise herself Rachel lays claim on Tim twice over when she sees him laughing with Dawn, first to ask what’s so funny and second to reference in front of Dawn their private life, pretending to ask after a pub they went to, The Jolly Farmer. Luckily for all, they’re interrupted by Gareth taking a call on speaker-phone.
He’d left it on that setting when, to Tim’s long suffering, he’d taken a call from Oggy, who was checking whether Gareth was coming to Gobbler’s birthday at Chasers, the Slough nightclub as seen in the last series (narrative economy combined with small-town sameyness). Recovered from his crying jag in the last episode, Oggy emphasises to the audience they’re on speaker-phone by taking the chance to yell “Tits!” and “Go-nads!”² So it’s not contrived when Gareth takes another call that he’d still be on speaker, this time with an unknown woman, who spills that she’s having some kind of romance with Gareth by reminding him to bring “the toys”, at which Gareth clatters the phone into private mode. Tim teases him about what toys she might’ve meant with a roll-call of 80s childhood hits - Buckaroo, Boggle, Kerplunk, Hungry Hippos - cracking up Rachel and Dawn.
This sets up the scene in the break-room where a group of staff are listening to Tim read out a romance quiz from a magazine. While Gareth affirms he has all the desired good smile, eyes, buttocks, Trudy claims she prefers “shite men”, to which Dawn, sitting by her fiancé Lee, agrees. Tim kindly deflects from this close-to-the-bone dig, and at the same time digs for info himself by asking what she looks for in a man. Dawn now false-compliments Lee by replying, “Rugged good looks.” But Lee ruins it by revealing she most values “a good sense of humour”. He thinks she meant his, which she pretends to agree with, though we’ve seen no sign of it for the whole show. Tim, who’s forever cracking Dawn up, goes quiet at this reminder of their unfulfilled compatibility.
What are his and Dawn’s way out of their tangle? Every episode starts with a montage of office blocks, multi-storey car parks then a roundabout: a symbol of being stuck? No, it’s what people circle then spin off from on separate routes.
Dawn’s route is to leave Wernham Hogg, and go with Lee to the United States as set up last episode. When she hands in her notice to David Brent during his interview with trade magazine Inside Paper he assumes she’s leaving in protest against his redundancy. She denies this, so David denies her denial. It takes the interviewer Helena (Olivia Colman in pre-National Treasure period) to ask her reason for leaving. Before Dawn can give it (or give a fake one for the cameras) David interrupts, saving her from the real reason: she’s running away from her love for Tim, what later she’ll euphemise to him as “starting again.”³
Tim’s route off the roundabout is a kind of sinking into misery. Its nadir comes via the gift Gareth’s gotten for Gobbler, whose birthday he discussed with Oggy on their call. Topping his talking cookie jar from the first episode of this series, Gareth has brought in ‘Dirty Bertie’. This is a doll of a leery old man in boxer shorts that at the sound of a clap will wolf-whistle then, to the tune of William Tell’s Overture, air-hump (like Chris Finch and David in the last episode) before prematurely ejaculating with a cry of “No! No! Oh noooo!” —all to Gareth’s breathless giggles. Like he did with the cookie jar before it, he triggers Dirty Bertie three times during its debut, at the last of which Tim throws in the pen and walks off-camera.
Fate offers Tim some kind of change at least in the form of Neil offering him David’s job — temporarily as care-taker manager with acting-up pay. Tim makes sense as a candidate; he’s good at his job. He paid back Gareth’s pedantry over paper prices in S1E4 by correcting him over the same in S1E5. But as I wrote before, he must suspect that he’s just David ten years ago. So he points out to Neil he has nothing to spend extra pay on, then suggests the job go to Gareth.⁴ In the show’s best off-camera joke, he outlines Gareth’s seriousness as we hear the man in the background clap and so set off the wolf-whistle and William Tell humping of Dirty Bertie. Its “No! No! Oh noooo!” resounds over a shot of Tim’s shade gloomier face.
After Dawn’s break-room admittance of what she most values in a man - what he has in spades - Tim sits and stares. The photocopier chugs louder and louder, like the train during Michael Corleone’s indecision to kill Sollozzo in The Godfather. Tim makes the decision to kill his romance with Rachel. In a beautifully minimal scene we see the awkward intro - “Oh this is so hard” Tim says with a knuckle on the door jamb - then the outro - Rachel in tears being comforted by a female colleague - but not the dumping in between.
Gareth chides Tim for it, saying he’ll have to clean up his mess. Although he over-rules Tim begging that he leave Rachel alone, he gives in to not taking Dirty Bertie with him to cheer her up. Fortunately Rachel caps her role in the show with her conclusive response to Gareth, the rage-toned “Fuck off?”
Tim’s not doing great either. “Am I fine?” he says to Dawn, more emotional with her than we’ve ever seen. For he’s learnt she’s leaving Wernham Hogg. It’s gutting enough when someone you like leaves a job you both hate; how much worse if you’re in love with them as Tim is with Dawn. On top of that she’s also leaving the country. He’s openly hurt at the question of whether she was gonna tell him first. Her line insisting that she was - “God yes” - is delivered by Lucy Davis as convincingly unconvincing. That Dawn plans to go to the US for six months might not sound like a lot, but half a year is still too big a fraction to take from time spent with your beloved. Tim can’t bear the prospect, but Lee intervenes, joining them in the break-room and providing the financial motive for their move: cheap rent, cash-in-hand work.
In the last episode of the first series, Dawn passing Tim’s desk had scratched his shoulder, a moment that rhymes in this episode with her plucking at a hair from his head as she walks by. Back then he’d suffered in silence; this time he’ll act. His final address to camera this series starts in denial like Dawn’s, with him repeating for one more time the claim that he’d only asked her out “as a friend.” But on him admitting that “under different circumstances something might’ve happened” his facade breaks.
David in his camera address at the start of the episode had talked about how “these four walls” couldn’t contain him. Suitably Tim breaks the fourth wall in the kind of exciting camera-chase that’s become a cliché now for reality TV, assisted-reality TV and mockumentaries. But when The Office did it, it was inspired: Tim leaving the diary room instead of letting the documentary do the cutting away; him marching down the corridor without giving the camera time to catch up; and most dramatic of all, being himself the agent of narrative elision: he asks Dawn for a word then removes his mike from under his shirt (and in doing so reveals its prior secret strings) then closes the door on the crew, who are stuck snooping through the blinds.
He’d told the cameras earlier that if he tried to re-roll the dice of circumstance, he might well get a six. As we wait to see what he has rolled the pause is excruciating, both for being the first long silence in the show, and at the same time, in terms of what Tim and Dawn could’ve communicated during it, worryingly short. They embrace in a way that could be read as either glad or a let-down. Sitting back at his desk, Tim fuzzily resumes his mike then says the off-hand, devastating words: “She said no by the way.”
Internet killed the TV star
In a 20th anniversary retrospective on The Office, Alex Owen, creator of web series Petrichor and Shane Allen, former head of comedy at the BBC spoke to Rachel Aroesti for The Guardian about the appeal of the mockumentary format to writers and directors:
Owen: “It’s very convenient if you have a format where they can say: ‘This is what I think of myself’, and then immediately show the way in which it’s disconnected from reality.” Characters’ ability to directly address the camera means they can introduce themselves — and plots, too, so “you haven’t got to bother with a more traditional story setup”. Allen, meanwhile, cites the fact that mockumentaries are “the cheapest thing to film”.
But Tim’s efforts to make a last gambit for Dawn in private stands out for going against the grain of the rest of the format of The Office and also against the ostensible allure of the office documentary. The moment wasn’t a performance; it resisted co-option by TV and its hungry eyes (unlike the way calling out racism or helping the homeless now are just more video content to be monetized). Privacy is what gives human drama its value, not exposure or an audience.
By having one of their characters buck against the documentary format he’s caught in, Gervais and Merchant further exploited the mockumentary format they were working in. The episode’s climax summarises how they were never not conscious of their show’s defining constraint, nor of what it allowed them to explore in a fresh way: work and love in the dawning age of mass surveillance and social media celebrity.
What makes The Office the perfect mockumentary is that this format wasn’t only a convenience or the cheapest way to film. It was crucial to the point of the story. The conceit that we’re watching a real fly-on-wall documentary never strains logic, nor is it smudged or discarded if it gets in the way of easier gags or audience appeal. Hence why Gareth’s mobile number appearing on screen-saver is conscientiously pixellated away. Or why we’re given to believe the gap between series one and two of The Office is only two weeks in in-story time (some actors weathering this fast-forward better than others). There’s actually only one original series of the office documentary before the follow-up specials. A subtle but necessary touch: none of its subjects get a chance in the original run to watch how they’re appearing and adjust accordingly; neither is there time for Lee to catch on properly to what’s going down between his fiancée and Tim.
It’s this way that The Office, even when its being inventive and subversive, keeps within its constraints as a ‘real’ documentary that gives it its form, that makes it an artwork, according to Nick Brown in his book Autonomy:
This is the point of the fiction of the documentary frame, which becomes a formal principle, an internal limit to what can happen and how, thereby introducing an internal criterion. By means of the inclusion of the camera as a character, The Office in effect overcomes the transparency of the televisual eye, introducing a criterion of plausibility and reactivating the “inescapable claim of every work, however negligible, within its limits to reflect the whole.”
However, since The Office was a hit, mockumentaries have gotten less conscientious as they’ve gotten more popular, in other words lazy and even absurd.⁵ Not least with The Office’s direct descendants. Here’s Nick Brown again:
Think, for example, of the BBC television show The Office, and its American remake, which would most obviously seem to operate in the same medium. The second, however, systematically writes out, from the initial episode on, uncomfortable possibilities in the first. Decisions that confront characters in The Office tend to demand… a mutually exclusive choice between advancement and self-respect. In the American remake, the damage inflicted by such choices is domesticated to quirkiness, and ultimately every quirk is a point of relatability. In short, the American Office is Cheers, where everybody knows your name.
But Brown’s not pitching the shows against each other on familiar cultural terms:
The temptation… is to make cultural comparisons between the United States and the United Kingdom, or between humor and humour. One’s materialist instincts might suggest, on the contrary, that the difference between The Office and its remake is not the difference between bitter British office workers and quirky but better-adjusted American office workers, or that between aggressive British humor and a milder American variety, but that between a cultural field supported by a national television license tax, which allows at the margins a certain autonomy from the market, and a cultural field whose one unavoidable function is to sell airtime to advertisers.
Before we suspect a rose-tinted view of the BBC from the manic TV culture of the US, Brown points out:
The former arrangement guarantees nothing – it is not as though every comedy on the BBC was bearable, let alone internally coherent – and is bought at the expense of a relationship both to the state, and to a potentially even more stultifying demand for abstract "quality" as an external end in itself. Meanwhile, are we prepared to say a priori that no pop commodity can be art? The Office overcomes its commodity character – which is built into the sitcom as a form – not because its conditions of production automatically save its contents from the logic of the commodity, but by means of its formal constitution. The Office produces its autonomy from the spectator – without which, whatever its conditions of production, it would turn into a collection of comedic effects – by including her proxy, the camera, in the representation in a way that directly influences what is represented… The American remake, however, immediately turns the roving camera and other techniques into meaningless conventions; the structuring fiction turns into a decorative frame. In both series, for example, characters occasionally reveal their awareness of the apparatus, breaking the fourth wall by looking directly at the camera. In the original series, this tends to happen at moments of high tension, when the camera is invoked by such glances as both a witness and a discomfiting, triggering presence… In the remake, such moments are subordinated to comic timing, one step shy of the Skipper reacting to whatever kooky thing Gilligan has done this time.
The two versions’ variant run-times are a case in point. The original Office is set over a matter of weeks for the first twelve episodes, plus a return in a couple of years for the where-are-they-now? follow-ups. The conceit that we’re watching a real documentary show is maintained by it running for just under eight hours. (The show’s final shot is David asking the crew “Got everything you need?) Meanwhile The Office (US) is set over eight years, even longer than those Seven-up! documentaries that’d track a generation of kids in seven-year blocks. So much did this strain credibility that it inspired a headline in The Onion (and at a point that the show still had two years to go):
In fact, this ejection of the show’s constraint had for Nick Brown begun almost immediately:
By the fourth episode, narrative coherence, and even plausible camera placement, have been thrown to the wind, and sitcom sentimentality has already begun to take over…. It is not that the BBC show is “better” in an abstract sense. The American version was funny, and its identificatory effects were masterfully produced. Nor is it the case that the conditions of production that characterize network television are in principle impossible to overcome by formal means, though in practice they may be nearly so. But the remake makes no attempt to overcome the fact that its end — selling airtime to advertisers — is immediately an external one that is achieved by being more ingratiating than its competitors in that time-slot.
The American version of the show was a franchise seeking syndication; if its mockumentary format had to be bent, even ignored, to achieve that, so be it. Ironically, the BBC show, by having at once a “certain autonomy from the market” and at the same time fewer financial resources at its disposal gave it its very freedom to obey nothing more than its own artistic logic.
For The Office, then, the format wasn’t a convenience but the conceit. This conceit, its “structuring fiction”, is what gets pointedly rejected by Dawn and Tim, the show’s most sympathetic characters, the former by her leaving the office and hence the show, the latter by him, however briefly, denying the tendrils of TV access to his private life. And it’s what destroys the most tragic character, David Brent, who thought he could climb the same tendrils to public acclaim.
If I could turn back time
The episode is titled ‘Interview’, and is named for two: One is David’s with Helena, a journalist from Inside Paper. The other is an informal exit interview that goes wrong but in a fresh way for the show.
David starts by at least making a performance of not being bothered by redundancy, handing out business cards, claiming the show’s end is not his. How convincing his bluster is gets undermined by the new horizons he boasts of, “Aldershot, Bracknel, Yately, Taplow”, a roll-call of small towns and small-town mentality (the kinds of towns whose highlights would be a pub called The Jolly Farmer).
It’s also undermined by everyone else’s apathy. David patronisingly lets off Jamie from any attempt to “fall on his sword” in protest at his redundancy, only for Jamie to interrupt him with a work call, and then just nod without looking at David’s proffered business card. “Clusmy” Keith meanwhile literally steps on David without noticing.
David’s interview with Helena is one last performance inside his existing performance for the cameras. He’s still openly contradicting himself, dismissing Dawn after learning she’s not leaving because of him, an incident book-ended by his claims that “my professionalism is only as important as my humanism” and that other “strings to Brent’s bow: a) philanthropy.” He hasn’t changed, even after being sacked; he’s still fixated on how he presents, reality be damned. To the point that he keeps trying to alter Helena’s questions and answering in the third person: “Brent mused before answering.”
When she tries getting human interest info on him he also stays in faux-modest denial about his love life. He staggers through a series of risqué euphemisms about “why buy a book when you can join the library”; that he “plays the field” but not in the sense of “using chicks”and at the same time neither confirming nor denying whether there is a chick with his standard squirm that he doesn’t “kiss and tell”. As with his grilling by Malcolm during the last series closer David avoids lying or admitting the truth by making comments which insinuate the opposite answer without ever openly stating it.
He convinces even less with his claim that he’s so happy to be leaving. Soon we learn the real reason for him not being in total despair. Having compared himself to Jesus (“of Nazareth”) with a gospel to spread, he references his work giving motivational speeches, a more consistent financial fall-back for him, with its now pointfully lucrative fee, than his redundancy package.
It’s this prospect that makes him lower his guard. And fate sees its chance. His motivational speech clients, Ray and Jude, arrive during his interview with Helena. Notably, he explains to her they hire “celebrity speakers” to help people “rise to the top.” But they’re actually there, pre-internet style, to tell him face-to-face they won’t need his services again.
It’s his second firing. (Turns out the meal or pub outing he forced with Ray two episodes ago was a bad idea.) He attempts to say that he’ll, as ever, adjust his presentation to please - “I’ll fit to you” — but it doesn’t last long.
On the words “Oh fucking hell” he finally drops the performance. He even mocks Ray and Jude’s polite let-downs — “Yeah yeah yeah. Yadda-yadda”, calling out his own sort of mutual bullshitting. He throws everyone out, including Helena. A confident interviewer for a trade journalist, who’d stayed firm on his attempted rewordings, she won’t leave without getting a photo of David for her piece. He makes his most half-arsed photo pose yet, and we might now appreciate the significance of this repeated motif: David posing for a camera. (There is though one more photo to come…)
Following Keith’s acidental stamp of his foot, David bangs his knee then does a Jerry Lundegaard / Basil Fawlty / Malcolm Tucker-style hissy-fit, tellingly kicking his office desk. With Ray and Jude having withdrawn their offer of work, he has no more fall back, no silver lining. No rainbow that brightens the rain, as in the Dolly Parton quote he’ll make at the end of the episode.
It’s with that in mind that he has his final chat with bosses Neil and Jennifer. (The loss of his fall-back complicates the coming pathos with self-interest.) He’s in free-fall. He starts sarcastic, cutting short their greetings by saying, “Now the small talks over”, saying of Neil’s appreciation for what he’s done, “Do ya?” Though he admits the redundancy package is generous as Neil described, he then wobbles on the meaningless words “Ba-da-bing” (a second Godfather reference). A last sulky teenage “Whatever” fails to steady him.
His eyes brim. But its Neil’s handshake —a human touch — the way that it mirrors the pose a medieval petitioner might’ve taken grabbing the hand of their lord — that cues him asking, “Don’t make me redundant.”
Gervais has never done his stumbly choked-up dialogue better. The way he asks them to turn back time makes his desperation all the more poignant. (It’s like that tragic moment in Adaptation when Meryl Streep begs to “be a baby again.”) David then literally pleads: “Please don’t make me redundant.” Heartbreakingly he nicknames Jennifer to ‘Jenny’, then ends on just wanting the hope that this is not the end: “Starting from today.”
In wanting a reset (what Dawn called “Starting again”) while at the same time claiming he’ll do better, it’s as though David wants to be in a sitcom: he wants restored status quo with the appearance of change. But his comedy geekery has ill-served him. He never realised he was in the wrong kind of show.
Life, oh life
In his final camera address - one that was shot, we can infer, before his begging - David appears sanguine, describing life in relativist terms as “peaks and troughs”.
In whichever of those directions, life is always bigger than work, than art. During the break-room chat about romantic preferences, Sheila kills with her first and last line of dialogue in the show, that she “likes blacks”, in front of an alarmed Olly. (It’s followed by a sustained, freighted musical pause then Tim’s Dr Evil-style, “…cool.”) But later she gets a pining glance at Olly like Tim and Dawn do at each other. For the two of them aren’t the only lovebirds, they’re not the main characters of life. So too a firing of one manager isn’t the end of the work. The last shot of the series is Dawn answering the phone with “Hello, Werhnam Hogg.” The toad work lives on. It’s like how sports film Bull Durham kept going after the drama had concluded, not with any main character speaking, but another player off-camera saying, “Let’s play ball.”
But The Office has one last play to make before life really does go on. It made sure not to betray itself with a cop-out ending. But its genius was to do that and then also give its audience something else…
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[1] The imperative isn’t that the ending be consistent with reality but with what’s come before in the work while at the time being unexpected.
[2] That David aspires, at least, to a life bigger than the likes of Oggy and Gareth is shown by the fact that, while acknowledging Dolly Parton had “a big pair of tits”, her homegrown philosophy made her so much more.
[3] Dawn justifies herself in her last address to camera of this series, reasonably pointing out that in a relationship the “glow” and “electricity” can’t last forever. But she then makes the cliché case for reliability, “paying the mortgage, never being out of work.” This ‘Case for Settling’ is supposed to be taken ironically; we’re supposed to get that she’s rationalising — but this slant is itself a cliché. Why did factors once deemed necessary if not sufficient for a long-term relationship — reliability, stability — become active negatives? Or to put it another way, wouldn’t their absence be negatives, or do people want unreliability and instability as well as a spark?
[4] After Neil’s passed the caretaker manager role from Tim to Gareth, an oblivious Gareth threatens Tim about the coming changes, peremptorily ordering him to smarten up what he referred to before as his “Playmobil man” appearance. No good deed…
[5] There are exceptions; in the show The Comeback the reality TV crew following Lisa Kudrow’s character are never not obtrusively present.
