The Day of Laughter
S2E5: ‘Charity’ begins at work
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.
When you think about it, naming a charity associated with famine ‘Comic Relief’ is, as puns go, pretty close-to-the-bone. In drama the comic relief is the interlude or character whose humour eases up the general tragedy lest the audience get too bummed out or that lightens the tone to bring out better the darker parts. Since 1985, Comic Relief’s work has built every year towards Red Nose Day, the UK’s biggest telethon, a multimedia fundraising event and all-round luvvie-fest hosted by celebrities, and lurching from VTs of hunger-bloated kids to gunge tanks and novelty songs. Or in the game-giving-away words of David Brent: “Who says famine has to be depressing?!”¹
Now that telethons have been diluted by donation sites like JustGiving and all the sterling philanthropy content from YouTube millionaires, it’s easy to forget what an event Red Nose Day used to be. Aired as it was by the nation’s public broadcaster it saturated the culture for a few days every year. Red clown noses of the kind David slips on at the start of this episode were sold in petrol stations and church halls, supermarkets and tuck shops, millions upon millions of plastic noses which presumably still lurk in landfills across the country like subterranean nests of scarlet eggs. Sponsored activities and charity sales would take over schools, even workplaces, to such an extent that Red Nose Day was, at its height, an unofficial public holiday. So it seems at Wernham Hogg.
It’s all just a bloody swizz
My potted history might make it sound as if Comic Relief and Red Nose Day are beloved institutions. Not quite. There have always been three lines of attack on them. David raises the first, with another of his ‘Oi Brent!’ rhetorical dialogues (he sure does think he’s more name-brand-recognisable than he is): “‘They’re always doing [Comic Relief] and there’s still people starving!’ That’s why I’m still doing it.” Often this cynicism about the efficacy of charity takes a xeno-envious tone²; David continues: “I hear people go, ‘The money just goes to hungry foreigners’” — people like Dawn’s fiancé Lee, who asks whether any of it goes to English kids or all abroad.³ (Once Lee goes abroad to the US after the end of Series 2, he and Dawn will be outstaying their visa and taking work as illegal immigrants.)
The other attack lines are more legit, if more subtle. David, answering back the cynics, says some of the money goes to “the disableds” such as Brenda, wheeled from her desk without permission. In the next few moments he and Gareth have conceived a test to catch fraudulent disability benefit claimants: failing pins in the legs (Brenda points out she has feeling in hers, she just can’t walk) Gareth suggests a fire alarm might trick people malingering in wheelchairs to get up and run. Brenda’s unimpressed, not least because these men are the same who abandoned her on the stairs during the fire drill two episodes ago, and because their kind of charity at once sentimentalises and patronises her, as David has for the whole show. He suggests she might spend donations on “a little blue car” and offers a red nose, which she smartly refuses, staring down the screen in devil horns. Mutual resentment and magnanimousness are both inherent to private philanthropy. ‘Beggar thy neighbour’ degrading into ‘cut thy neighbour’s benefits’.⁴
The last line of attack is Tim’s. His colleagues are dressed for Red Nose Day as Wonder Woman in Sheila’s case, and in Keith’s case Ali G (or “Ali Geek” as David has it). Keith’s deadpan “booyakashak” only goes to show how co-optable Sacha Baron’s Cohen’s shtick was by the hard-of-laughing. Such as Gareth, whose zany idea for a sponsored activity is to hop everywhere, earning from David an elated, “What are you doing?!”
Tim isn’t like Lee; he believes in the cause and will donate, he just prefers those who raise money for an issue that’s affected them or “an old bloke selling poppies”: there’s a “quiet dignity” to that. He then quotes the Muppets’ “Always Dignity” line as we watch his colleagues forcibly strip Ben, who protests his kids are watching, the same Ben caught on camera at the end of the last series groping a colleague, and also the same who began this series prophetically singing the Muppets’ ‘Manahmanah’.
Such forced wackiness doesn’t keep Tim churlish for long. He draws on the prize tactic of the clerical class: malicious compliance. With Red Nose Day he has even more licence than usual to mess with Gareth; his own sponsored activity is to hide Gareth’s things. He refuses to say where with a series of comedy grunts. When Gareth asks off-camera with particular incredulity, “How do you hide a chair?” Tim twinkles his hands like a naughty magician — a grace note of physical comedy in an episode replete with it. And when Tim gives in and talks it’s only to make brilliant cracks like telling Gareth to “hop to it” and that he should rest: “You’ve been on your foot all day!”
Audition tape
While Red Nose Day makes Tim even Timmer, it’s ultimately the opposite for David. In glee over Keith’s Ali G impersonation, he says, “That’s the accountant, and that’s the boss encouraging it! So what sorta day is it?” One of topsy-turvy reversals, like a festival was for medieval peasants or Saturnalia for Romans: slaves becoming masters, the solemn silly. Little though does David suspect that the day’s over-turnings will include his future.
This is all the sadder since he does have an eye on the future and what celebrating Red Nose Day on the documentary might mean for it. Mirroring Comic Relief’s own lurches in tone he goes from Ali G glee to “a serious note: we are raising money for people starving to death” before suggesting the doc puts a donation phone number across his shot, as if he’s already one of the light entertainers picked to host Red Nose Day.
He at last makes his aspirations explicit when he propositions TV through one of its reps, the camera he’s addressing. He tells it what he’d like to do for a living: “use my humour and my profile to both help and amuse people”. Or “if it’s ideas for TV shows — game shows or whatever” then he’s your man.
When writers draw on real events or simply those external to the story — a helicopter crashes into ER! — it’s not good drama in the strictest sense, it’s borrowed drama. But for Gervais and Merchant to put Comic Relief in the show fits just right because it serves as the crucible for David’s ambitions. All the show long we’ve watched him strain to be seen as both funny and good: to be a comic and a relief to others. And so getting to host his own mini-Red Nose Day in this episode is the cruel tease before the chop, Tantalus and Damocles in one.⁵ For what he calls ‘the day of laughter’ is the day of doom.
Paid and Stolen Kisses
Red Nose Day, and its license, makes it a crucible as well for Tim and Dawn, all because of her choice of sponsored activity: kisses for a pound.
This attracts more, and worse things, than money. Chris Finch tells her he’s not that desperate, while David assumes no female colleagues have donated, and in any case it wouldn’t be erotic for them to kiss Dawn. Even her fiancé has to be strong-armed to participate, though he does then pay a fiver but only for a filial kiss on the cheek and hair-scruffing hug.
But worst is when Gareth’s “crew” turn up: the long-time-mentioned, first-time-appearing Oggy (show co-creator/-writer Stephen Merchant) and the aptly named Jimmy the Perv. The latter exploits the charity offer by buying ever-more tongue-heavy kisses from a self-snookered Dawn. (The shakedown only ends thanks to David mocking Oggy’s “bulbous” eyes, doing to Oggy what Chris Finch did to him with an overwhelming barrage of insults, but in Oggy’s case making him storm off in tears. Self-described mad lad Jimmy looks on sadly like he’s lost his groove.)⁶ Insulted herself, Dawn’s ego is sufficiently bruised to set up the way she’ll bring her day of kisses to an end.
Tim, getting the idea from Dawn, steals a kiss from a gay-panicking Gareth ‘for charity’. Having been warded off at first, Tim counters Gareth’s offence with fake ‘calm down’ offence of his own before ambushing him once more; now successful, he gurns in disgust while Dawn laughs in joy, amused as ever by Tim and perhaps getting an idea back from him too.
Seated with Keith in the break-room, reading a holiday brochure, she introduces the plot-line that she might be off to the States (“the United States?” Keith double-checks⁷). This is for the best since, as Keith points out, Tim’s “found someone better” than her in Rachel. It’s his turn to play accidental cupid, his disdain reminding her of her old feelings. Dawn isn’t losing Tim, she’s lost him: he and Rachel are an item now. Watching Rachel embraced in a dance with Neil, Dawn checks to see whether it bothers Tim, but she needs a way to check properly. 🎵If you wanna know / if he loves you so…🎵
Their kiss, both paid and stolen, is performed by Lucy Davis and Martin Freeman with such a collaboration of deft acting: Dawn’s initial awkward offer of it for charity, Tim’s reluctant acceptance, the way she surprises herself as much as him turning the kiss real, his flurry of shock, confusion, hurt, hope. Certain moments in our lives have a down-slope tumbling feel to them; probably the most important ones.
Dance and Deliverance
As shocking as their kiss is (their first) its subtle weave of micro-gestures and -expressions was nevertheless inevitably gonna be overshadowed by this episode’s centrepiece.
Yes the dance (dances) but before we get to it, it has a precursor in the physical comedy department. Chris Finch gives Dawn £1 for a kiss “on the nose” then puts his red nose on his crotch, which prompts from him an impression of the male rape scene from the film Deliverance. (Not only is it the kind of scene Chris Finch would have in his repertoire of ‘bits’, but it forms a pattern with the coerced kisses and Ben’s violent pantsing.) He continues his impression to the transcendent absurd lengths I wrote about here, all the while David aping his humping through delirious laughter. So what will it take to top this grotesque masterpiece?
The bosses arrive to join in the silliness of the day’s carnival-reversals (though Jennifer Taylor-Clarke is too posh to have dressed up). In telling contrast to David’s giant stereo from the last episode Neil brings a more modest one, on which Jennifer hits play on a medley of songs from Saturday Night Fever.⁸
First Neil and Rachel share a sponsored romantic dance; it has just the right amount of impressive choreography to be plausible and, with Gervais/Merchant’s editing and music cues, to be poetic too, the sort of organic poetry that reality TV producers, like the office documentary crew, would crave. Neil, the show-off, then hoards the second dance to himself. Although David remarks it “looks gay”, it too is a pretty nifty disco number. (Neil’s one touching moment is his celebration with Rachel post-dance, the relieved hug of the public performer.)
David can’t stand the applause, or give in and donate, or avoid mentioning how he raised more last year (i.e. when Neil hadn’t arrived on the scene yet). Neil hasn’t got out his “Do you dance-” when David replies “Big time” before even the question mark. It’s Rachel, however, who is the real provocation, asking David to put his charity money where his big mouth is.
David’s ensuing MC Hammer/Flashdance fusion — forerunner to everything from the Freestyle Teacher vine to the Benny Hill ravers — is near indescribable, so continuously surprising and wonky it is (though I do wanna note before it starts Gervais’s camp little hip wiggle to limber up for the coming contortions). I wanna note as well the choice matches of background acting: Neil stops clapping the rhythm to cover his mouth; Tim forcedly gawps; Rachel, or should that be actress Stacey Roca, corpses. Et tu Gareth, who sounds genuinely aggrieved at the idea he’ll have to donate money for that. David calls both dances excellent “in a way”; he knows though he was making a mess but, like Dawn, couldn’t stop: his improvised musical hook (“durdur DURdur durDUR”) gets forced ever more aggressively through gritted teeth, while it and the dance end on an off-beat.
The day the clown cried
What a dance, and “what a day” as David sighs to Neil and Jennifer before they catch him out for not having written a promised report. Comic Relief, what was meant to be a practice run for David the TV personality, or so he imagined, is what has distracted him from the job at hand.
Worse still, his TV ambitions, put above the parapets this episode, are seized on by Neil, who’s snooped in his office to find an idea for a gameshow David’s had, ‘Upstairs Downstairs’. Neil is baffled, not by the show-concept, he clarifies but by David’s negligence.
But the answer to Neil’s bafflement is right there in the room with them: the cameras, their lure… He bollocks David in front of Jennifer anyway. When David tries his usual tactics — first corporate gobbledegook about jigsaws and keyholes, then stupidity like he once tried on Ricky the temp, trying to catch out Neil with the non-sequitur “I think actions speak louder than words” with a wink for Jennifer — but to no avail. Neil gives him his first strike of three, albeit as a verbal warning.
David’s reaction scuppers him for later: he says he’ll take all three warnings in one, warning them there’ll be a mutiny on their hands if they try run the place without him. His bravado becomes a sulk; to Neil’s latest phony “onwards and upwards”, David gives a slight moue and a head-shake: the minimal acquiescence.
He lets his anger out more when he’s alone with the cameras. Comparing his and Neil’s conflict to comedian Dawn French nagging her husband, fellow comedian and Comic Relief stalwart Lenny Henry about the washing up, he flips off Neil via the camera and yells about having to “save some Africans” through a jaw-clenched underbite: the signature facial expression of the enraged.
Rage won’t save him. Neil returns to his office, checking the camera crew behind — just noticing that they’re following or making sure that they do? David tells him he’s busy prepping for a photo shoot with the Slough Gazette, although, a little burnt by Neil’s previous scold, he makes sure to justify it as free advertising for the company.
But Neil forces him to take redundancy. (A great wrong-footing by Gervais/Merchant; the audience would’ve assumed that Neil’s verbal warning was the climactic low-point of the episode.) David asks for corroboration from Jennifer, with whom he also used to misbehave but never hated like he does Neil, and her nod is so sad. It’s smart, too, of Gervias and Merchant to frame the redundancy as something she and Neil have been thinking about, so that it doesn’t seem abrupt they’d put it on him now and so it finally answers the question of how long Wernham Hogg would let David get away with his unprofessionalism.
David tries switching to ressentiment: redundancy is the best thing that’s ever happened to him. He then throws them out with the implication that he’s not a company-man like them: he’s got “money to raise, mouths to feed”, that is he clings to his do-goodery. But without status it means nothing. I should point out this all happens after David’s revealed he’s wearing an emu jockey costume, popularised by 1980s British comic Rod Hull.
It’s dressed like this that David announces to staff his forced redundancy, to a muted response. (Once more he makes his question noise “urgh?” But nobody asked anything.) He’s the victim of ingratitude or at least irony: he reminds them he’d saved them last series from the same fate, a lie. He’d been the one who, accepting a promotion at the cost of some of their jobs, had insisted this was a business, like the management trainer from the previous episode. In fact, back then, he’d defended himself by suggesting they focus more on his charity work, producing a novelty giant cheque for a donation to Mencap. Turns out he tempted fate; another giant cheque caps his day of doom.
Pitiful volunteers, Tim and Dawn, hold it for the photographer from the Slough Gazette in the car park, a cheque for £120, not even half the £300 David claimed to Neil they’d raised last year. The photographer presses a depressed David, still in costume, to peck at the cheque like Rod Hull used to at celebs and civilians (another kind of forced interference with others, this time with the excuse of a ‘wild animal’). The sound of a plane flying to or from Heathrow, the late afternoon light in the car park are especially bleak. The lighting sets up the joke of the photographer confessing that he probably won’t use the pictures he’s taken. But the final sting is the way Gareth, still hopping, ignores David’s prior refusal to let him worm his way into the photo opp, but is too late anyway. It’s all too late.
Follow me on Medium for similar posts or subscribe to my substack, Artless. You can also buy my novel The Prick and its limited edition tie-in The Pricklet.
[1] Despite this episode being at the very least a sideways glance at the excesses of Red Nose Day, Gervais and Merchant couldn’t resist the BBC call to join the tradition of each era’s comedy darlings performing topical sketches for the telethon. Theirs had Gervais in the faux-arrogant persona on which he was to build a stand-up career segwaying into a dress rehearsal of a musical adaptation of The Office and giving notes on the rendition of the song, ‘There’s been a rape up there.’
[2] See Jim Davidson’s Union-Jacking-off ‘Red White and Blue Nose Day’.
[3] I dunno why we in the West pride ourselves as being relatively commonsensical non-ideologues. Who’s more of an ideologue than someone not persuaded by dying kids?
[4] Few injustices lather the tabloid British brain more than the folk demon of benefit fraud, one of the less costlier frauds upon the state, and yet inflaming that itch to resent those one rung below and above you rather than the most exploitative.
[5] David Brent name-dropped classical references before me, so back off.
[6] Gareth’s crew are the epitome of what Tim outlined and what we saw with Ben: aggressive wackiness. I once went to a fancy dress party where a woman in a bear suit and a colander on her head kept telling anybody who’d not come in costume that she loved their costume but she herself had forgotten hers. (Patrick Bateman voice: suffice to say she did not survive the first semester.)
[7] In one of his many ‘Scotch Eggs of Wisom’ Keith gives Dawn his eyes-shut head-shaking “word of working”: a fanny pack in the States is a bum bag because fanny there doesn’t mean “minge.”
[8] A touchstone for Gervais and Merchant, who cite it as an inspiration for their debut feature film with its own rebel youths at a dead-end, Cemetery Junction.
