On the pull with The Office
S1E5 — ‘New Girl’ at the boys’ club
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.
This episode is the first where we get to see what The Office staff are like in the outside world — not the real outside, but that mutation of social life known as work drinks. It ends with David Brent’s commentary on the poem ‘Slough’ he’s reading out for the cameras:
‘In labour-saving homes with care / Their wives frizz out peroxide hair, / and dry it in synthetic air, and paint their nails’ — To look nice! Why’s he got a, doesn’t he like girls? — ‘And talk of sports and makes of cars in various bogus Tudor bars, / and daren’t look up and see the stars, but belch instead’ — What’s he on about?! Has he never burped?
Getting gassily drunk and girls: the goals of David Brent and his men on their night out.
David’s pulling tactic is to flit between the not-so-opposite guises of chivalry and Smoove B over-suggestiveness.
To Donna, coming to work at midday from a mystery location, he gives the example of how he could stay at Dawn’s if he himself was caught out late as there’d be “no funny business”. Dawn tells him he couldn’t, so he waits to catch the eye of the always-looking camera before telling everyone he’d let her stay at his.
Bearing the force of his flirting meanwhile is Karen Roper (Nicola Cotter), David’s new secretary¹. Her job interview had been a formality, notwithstanding his claim it wasn’t “a foregone conclusion”, incidentally the name of his band. In any case the interview is another audition for himself. There’s his presentation: he rubs aftershave on his face from a ‘lads’ mag², and awaits her on his desk with legs wide (first example of the gross desk poses we’ll see in the next series). Then his demeanour: he alternates flattery — her “lovely smile would “brighten up the place” — with abruptness, saying she’d do well to impress him, and that her first interview answer is boring. He affects eloquence, unabbreviating her C.V. to “Curriculum Vitae”, and at the same time uses words to fondle, not asking her to sit but to “pop it down”, or guessing she went travelling to explore herself (“and Asia,” she corrects). Yet he makes out like he’s the one at a disadvantage, telling her “you’ve charmed me” while representing himself with a weird snake mime.
If that wasn’t warning enough there’s one of the best bits of slapstick in The Office, which comes out the other side as jolting violence. Cotter as Karen does a perfect spinning stumble to dodge David’s mimed volley of a football (a game he “bloody loves”). And no sooner has she confirmed for a second time that she’s single then he slips on the football and head-butts her. Talk about hitting on someone.
As David used a job interview for alone time with Karen, so Gareth contrives, or tries to, the same with Donna: a “compulsory” health-and-safety session. David had leapt on Karen’s mention she went to Slough nightclub Chasers to insist she come that night; Gareth invites Donna there too but she tells him to “crack on”. Neither does the teacher-student dynamic he’s rigged up have the desired effect. She gets her first glance at the camera in response to his lesson that you shouldn’t use a computer to rest a cup of coffee (or “any liquids”). When he goes for the classic office-creep elbow-cup she flinches as if singed. His last resort is to ask whether her getting with someone at work was a mistake or she was “gonna be spreading it around”.
That someone is most likely Ricky. Gareth’s payback is to make the man stand and wait — “Silence! Genius At Work!” warns a sign on his desk — for an answer to a question before telling him he doesn’t know. Meanwhile he feels out David for his own disappointment in lodger Donna for not “showing respect” by “obeying the law” when living under his roof. David’s more flustered by him, not least for suggesting she might’ve gotten with a woman: “She’s not a lesbian,” he tells Gareth, who falls into a reverie — in the last episode he’d accidentally admitted his ultimate fantasy was “lesbians. Two of ’em. Sisters. I’m just watching.” He reels off a rhyme about when “girls are ready for f-” and opens a conversation with women in Chasers by listing flavours of condoms. Those same women he tells the camera are “loose” with “venereal disease”, which is “disabilitating” (his solemn example is of a platoon out of penicillin because one soldier “got knob-rot off some tart”). Gareth is the prig who’s secretly a perv as in Measure for Measure or Marquis De Sade.
Where do Gareth and David get the idea any of their moves work? Because of Chris Finch.
Finch sounds like he’s all talk. His story about a threesome with a “spare bird” who’s “aged 19, Ferrari chassis,” and a “mate’s bird” seems constructed for the punchline about bumping into said mate: “He says to me, ‘You look knackered.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, and you like you’ve had a Pot Noodle and a wank.’” Gareth and David giggle in awe; when Chris refers to a “pump-action yoghurt rifle” David provides the exegesis: “His knob.” Like David, Chris talks in borrowed bozo-phrases like “I shit you not” and “definately”. He repeats jokes, telling a woman who bends down in Chasers “While you’re down there, love” like he did to Dawn in episode 3; and gets a filthy laugh from David for “One up the bum, no harm done”, though David admits he’s heard it before.
These lines coming from Chris don’t get a diametrically opposed reaction to David and Gareth; a trio of women are a little taken aback when Chris announces himself at the bar with “Who wants a Finch pinch?”, but Lorna, the third he greets, doesn’t seem to mind his knuckle smooch. Perhaps the threesome story was true: he ends up sexy-dancing with Lorna and a friend. Ironically, the person who ends up recoiling from Chris’s moves is David himself when Chris tries them on lodger Donna: “Her dad’ll kill me,” David begs, “Do it to other girls.”
But even Donna’s not repelled by Chris, laughing along in the club to his chatting-up. (Gareth in the office might gross her out but she smiles at another colleague’s paper-clip whip.) Then again Chris is the king of the club. Or would be, was he not cock-blocked by Ricky.
Pick-up-artistry, no matter how dogged, comes a cropper on looks and youth. Ricky is sure to make eye contact with Chris before giving Donna a prolonged hello snog. Scowling at first, Chris rallies and makes do: a seasoned cad, he knows it’s a numbers game, and ends the episode giving Lorna an OTT porn-taught snog of his own.
“So now you know,” Donna tells landlord and boss David about Ricky. David might’ve made a show earlier of permissiveness about her sex life — “Who cares?… Go free, come on” — but, as he’d told Gareth, he wouldn’t look favourably on whoever got with his “most valuable possession” [bit lip and gun point]: AKA Donna. She flips this on him seated with Lorna’s friend Linsdey, saying she hopes he “won’t be sleeping with someone if sex is so disgusting.” And to be fair, as much as he’s looked for sex he’s resisted it in others — between Donna and Chris, between her and Ricky. (Maybe he even tries so with Gareth, asking a woman he’s pulled in the club what bike she drives, inanely conflating her Matchless 500 with a Harley Davidson, till Gareth tells him to “Leave it.”)
If Gareth is the pervy prig, what’s “Sir David of Brent”, as Chris calls him? David talks in courtly language: he doesn’t ask for a lager but “a pint thereof”; in the previous episode he talked about the “Queen’s image, of the realm” while in this one he tells off John Betjeman for cruelty to Slough despite being a “knight of the realm”. This language gets eroded by booze into revealing denials, like telling a black-eyed Karen she’ll grow to love him, albeit “not anything sexual”; into admitting to prospective pulls that “Anyone’s fine”, and over-explaining Chris’s joke that the only knighthood he’s got is a condom (“Night — hood”). Chris answers Donna’s challenge by taunting that David couldn’t pull in a brothel. He can and he has, David says, pointing at Lindsey, who has other ideas. He snaps that he wasted an hour on her, and he’d have “shagged her from behind” because her “breath smells of onions.” His night’s venture concludes with her slap. What David Brent is in all is a jembling incel, though imagine using that term twenty years ago — people would’ve held your shoulder with a sad face like you were having a stroke.
Gareth’s ventures seemed to have concluded better with his coming-on-strong biker gal, till he notices a tank-topped man smiling and nodding at them: “me husband.” She asks would he mind if Gareth joins? Gareth, disgusted by this protopolyamory, claims he’s “not having another fella involved. Another girl maybe.” A case of ‘Tainted Love’ as goes the Soft Cell song the DJ drops.
As solitarily as David’s night Gareth seems to end his, doing a wistful chin-bob on the back of a chair. To add insult to pride-injury, Gareth gets a final verdict from the object of his attention, Donna. David scorns her choice of Ricky - sarcastic about him having gone to university, as Tim plans to - saying he’d have preferred she got with Gareth, his “second-in-command” as he kindly calls him. But to Donna, Gareth is a “weasel-faced arse” or as David hears it an “arse-faced weasel.” Gareth’s left having to pick which he’d rather be.
At least he gets an epilogue, beautifully constructed by Gervais and Merchant. In the closing montage we get shots of the biker woman putting her helmet on, then her driving off, then a blink-and-you-miss-it shot of her motorbike’s side-car, in which the camera catches a glimpse of the weasel/arse face of Gareth — the covert kinkster off for the threesome after all.
The one man very much not up all night to get lucky is Tim. He and Dawn are still picking their way through the aftermath of his ill-judged asking out, their usual chemistry replaced with exchanges like, “A good morning or a bad morning?” / “Oh God, bit of a mad morning. See you later.” Not that their colleagues will let them style it out. Keith reminds Tim he embarrassed himself with Dawn; and when she and Tim play along with the conceit that he’d only asked her out as a friend, Tim feels so awkward he resorts to chumming up to “Gareth! Gareddio!” Gareth, the accidental cupid, asks Tim whether he was “trying to get off with her again.”
He wasn’t, not that he won’t pine for her from the kitchen doorway. Tim seems to be steeling himself for solitariness too: as he tells Keith, he stayed in the other night and “had a biiiig wank.” Most of the time at Chasers he has the same glum look as Michael Corleone at that big cock strip-show in the seedy Cuban bar in The Godfather Part II. When David gets slapped Tim watches aghast through the gunned fingers of a hand over his face. No wonder he leaves Chasers spurning David’s offer of one more drink. It’s easy watching them to think of that other ode to late-night lonely England:
🎵There’s a club if you’d like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you. But you go and you stand on your own; and you leave on your own; and you go home and you cry and you want to die.🎵
What else was there for Tim to do in Slough? He could have had another wank or stayed in with the telly “watching Peak Practice with your life” as Keith calls it: “Boring isn’t it?”³ Or the opera, the ballet, the RSC who are in town, as he sarcastically lists as possibilities for sophisticated Chris and culture vulture Gareth. So he ends up in the club with them.
In its portrayal of clubbing this episode is the dark half to the clubbing episode of Edgar Wright’s sitcom Spaced. In it, Wright used the trick of absenting any mention or depiction of drugs, and via that absence slipping past our defences his characters’ slide from normality to euphoria, and used montage to capture the sense of summarised time when clubbing high. (Iñárritu’s film Babel uses the same trick.)⁴
There’s no mention of drugs in The Office’s night-out because depressants are its abiding spirit. David defines his going-out crew by the alcohol that’ll be on him / in him. His “tipple” is “lager. Finchy: lager. Gareth: lager, sometimes cider.” The draw of Chasers, according to Tim, and barring wonder-bras getting in free, is it sells Hooch for a £1. Even Karen’s own tipple, a vodka and coke, feels quintessentially British. (Surely Russians can hand over the stereotype of drunkards to Brits.) The episode’s clubbing David refers to as “Wednesday night razz”, i.e. it’s only mid-week and they’re getting smashed. Everyone’s acting of that is impeccable: Tim’s beer bottle and finger-point dance, Gareth’s stunned bleariness. Best of all is when, following Lindsey’s slap and Chris’s repeat of his “One up the bum” line, David clarifies, “Not up the arse” then does a punch-drunk / real-drunk nod, almost like he’s nodding to sleep but kept afloat by the music beat, less nodding than trotting his chin.
As for that music: the club scene features a positively desolating early 2000s playlist comprising Victoria Beckham and Dane Barrow’s ‘Out of Your Mind’, Kylie’s ‘I’m spinning around’, ‘The Macarena’, ‘Ebenezer good’, Bassment Jaxx, a dance remix of ‘Oops I did it again’, and house classic, ‘Don’t you want my love?’ For the episode is set in the millennial hangover of the happy raver 90s, when the super-clubs were heaving off the scene but small towns still had their dance nights, with spinning light balls and men with hair in curtains and shirts-and-ties (“Cheers! Ciro Citterio!”) mugging for the camera and at each other. (Donna’s hoop earrings as well! that chrome lilac top!) It was all pretty grim, as related well by a pre-entropy Charlie Brooker. At the fag-end of a night out in a club like Chasers, even Chris Finch looks worse for wear.
Tim named for the camera the few alternatives to Chasers in a brilliant list of Slough’s nightlife: New York New York, the nightclub that never sleeps that shuts at 1, and for a time, Henry the Eighths, the sort of “bogus Tudor bar” we hear Betjeman decry in his poem, ‘Slough’.
Gervais and Merchant didn’t pick Slough randomly but as a stand-in for suburban Britain. Were it not a real town ‘Slough’ would be a very on-the-nose Dickensian place-name, as in the slough of despond. Hence why this episode ends with the ‘Slough’ poem plus another text. David’s commentary on Betjeman — “‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough’… You don’t solve town-planning problems by dropping bombs… ‘The cabbages are coming now’… He’s the only cabbage around here!” — aren’t, as far as the show is concerned, defences of Slough or hits back at Betjeman but implicit agreements. No wonder Slough doesn’t have a monument to The Office like Norwich does for Alan Partridge.
The second text is by a David fave. Humouring his other secretary candidate, Stewart Foot (Robin Ince: friend o’ Alan Moore and hit podcaster), he’s asked about a quotation on his wall. Niftily drumming, he sings the verse: “Money don’t make my world go round/ I’m reaching out for a higher ground” (words which could be Tim’s, who’s “not thinking about leaving”, he’s “actually leaving.) “Is that a philosopher?” Stewart asks and Brent nods: it’s Des’ree. (Not the last time he’ll compare philosophers and songwriters like himself.) As though it’s some existentialist plaint David ends the episode looking up and seeing the stars while singing Des’ree’s “Life! Oh life! Ooooh liiife! Oh life.”
Trite pop lyrics put in the mouth of a buffoon are somehow elevated: didn’t the men on the pull in this episode all just want what Des’ree calls “a warm and special place,” where they could “rest their weary face”? Twice David interrupts Stewart, first with the lyric, “Coz we’re living, we’re living, in a crazy maze” and second with, “Why’d you wanna work here?” Why does anyone? What’s the way out of the maze? Will any of these characters manage to climb out of the Slough of Despond?
For more about The Office read parts 1, 2 , 3 and 4 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] Brent’s rationalisation for why he needs a secretary when there’s a downsize looming peaks on a petulant “It doesn’t mean I have to do my own filing!”
[2] You can tell a lot about someone by whether they thought GQ, Loaded etc. were for ‘alpha males’ [sic] and not, in fact, for aspirational geeks.
[3] Not for him though; he likes it. A quick song of praise for Keith (Ewen Macintosh), one-time MTV presenter, all-time weirdo.
[4] A runner-up would be the clubbing episode in Armstrong and Bain’s sitcom Peep Show. Its USP is to focus on the perspective of Mark, the covert outsider who’s only pretending to get high. Every line of the episode is golden: the DJ who’s “bringing it up! He’s taking it down…”; Olivia Coleman “doesn’t want any more of your drugs”; Mark’s “Urgh, the sweaty grip of the moron” — even if the episode also attests to the show-runners’ disdain for anyone a shade younger and less Sensible Left than them.
