You will never win
Seeing green with The Office and S2E3: ‘Party’
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.
Next on the list for Merchant and Gervais is depicting birthdays at work, the group gifts and mid-afternoon booze at your desk and continual cake. (The birthday girl of the episode, Trudy, said last episode that the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg got away with murder: they sure throw a lot of parties anyway.) The real theme, though, isn’t birthdays but what they make a certain kind of kid feel: jealousy — in the literal sense of possessiveness and in the vernacular sense of envy.
For the first time, however, these feelings come with a different inflection. The episode might seem typically ‘middle’: characters in it reiterate conflicts rather than undergo any dramatic changes; the episode comes in the middle of the series. But really it’s a hinge-point: a show-defining shift in our perspective on David Brent.
The most conventional jealousy of the episode, romantic, we see coming from Dawn towards Rachel and Tim, and see it has grounds. The two of them are running through the steps of flirtation: they ‘inadvertently’ keep touching each other, as accents to their chat, as gimme-tens and celebratory bum-bumps. They refer to one another’s sexual characteristics: she asks whether Trudy’s birthday gift of a dildo looks like his penis; he points out she’s spilled wine on her [whistles]. They close the deal not with a handshake but The Reciprocated Touch, caught on peeping camera: him stroking her back and her stroking his hand.
Having watched all but the last, Dawn tries forcing fun with Tim such as playing a prank together. As deftly performed by Lucy Davis, Dawn is so anxious to intercept him from Rachel she hasn’t thought of what prank or on whom, and flounders for candidates. Tim suggests the prankee, Gareth; but, when it comes off even better than expected, Rachel intercepts Tim from Dawn with a congratulatory cock-block.
In the last episode Rachel had asked Tim out in safe-mode: inviting him to join a night-out with her and her friends. Not so safe for Dawn, who was in the room at the time and so witnessed first-hand how Tim wasn’t going to wait around forever. He himself doesn’t need any more motivation towards Dawn; but on her side of the furtive romance, the requisite catalyst is Rachel.
While Dawn’s jealousy is of Rachel, Gareth’s is for her. Trying to persuade Tim to hide Trudy’s dildo in David’s office mid-meeting, Rachel says he should do it to make her laugh. Gareth leaps at the opportunity so Tim wards him back and does the dare himself, pulling it off with the handy use of a folder (he’d have made a great pickpocket). Rachel awards Tim such a laugh that Gareth grumbles unimpressed and gives his rival a 3 out of 10.
And so he’s fatally eager to do another prank that might make Rachel laugh. It runs aground on another joke implying he’s gay.¹ She dares him to phone David during a meeting and say what she writes: that he likes his little beard, that he should wear tighter trousers. Embarrassment aside, Gareth goes in for a share of the celebrations with Rachel, but Tim gets the lot. Gareth just rests an arm on her shoulder from afar.
Maybe he’ll muscle in better when Tim’s literally absent. Having noticed him play Top Trumps with Rachel, Gareth trumps Tim with his expertise. Sketching it for Rachel, he inadvertently draws a tragic picture of his childhood, when he’d play the game by and with himself, using dummy hands to memorise every card combination “for three, four hours.” Although he assures her playing with him would still be fun, he warns: “You will never win.”
No surprise she doesn’t want to play. At least he’s canny enough to play the numbers: Rachel’s not the sole target of his attentions. Watching Trudy unwrap a gift of a leather bust he pipes in she should “try it on properly.” After Chris Finch tells her he “does it from behind if I don’t like the face”, Oliver says he loves her face to which she responds he can do her from behind. So Gareth throws his hat into the taking-from-behind ring, telling her he would too, “no strings attached.” (Trudy deflects with a “That’s really sweet…”) Later she picks the winner: caught on camera in the car park with a dogging Chris, in a previously scrapped scene Ralph Ineson asked to be included in this series.)
Sexual jealousy might be more conventional in stories but in life it’s less prevalent than the more diffuse, emulative kind. David’s jealousy — his envy and possessiveness — centre on his boss.
Neil is possessive in his own way. He still refers to the Swindon intake as “my lot” when reminding Tim (and David) they’ve still not been shown the warehouse. David reacts subconsciously, flouncing his phallic tie, then corrects Neil with the intimate nickname “Tell Taffy”, where Neil had used the more formal “Tell Glyn.”
As well as reclaiming his workers David tries to claim what Neil has. He’s started dressing like him — talk about the mimetic theory of desire — though his shinier leather jacket isn’t Armani but “Sergio Georgini” (an off-shoot perhaps of the “nice tie” Chris got from label “Ciro Citterio”). Shoddy mimicry leaves spite in its wake: when Neil brings Trudy a cake David says “it’s a bit OTT” to have splashed out. When Neil says he baked it himself while everyone else tucks in, David says it’s too sweet and rich and the immortal line, “I prefer a flan.”
Jealousy sours even his own success. A pair of business training reps, Ray and Jude, have come to headhunt David; having mistakenly turned down what he thought was their sales pitch to him, he preens over them wanting to hire him to train others.
Before they’d made him the offer David resorted to power-moves to make himself feel like a big deal. He interrupted Dawn announcing them by checking his post; he sat first in his office while they found their own chairs; feigned checking his voicemail and email before speaking. And when Gareth interrupts them with his prank call, David’s sure to relay that one of his staff is telling him what a “superb job” he’s doing (Gareth in fact said “good”). For my post on Series 1 Episode 3 I wrote that David loves trivia because for him “cleverness is as quantifiable as wealth: it’s simply a case of who has the most facts at their fingertips.” Which is why David loves wealth itself. After learning what “buntz” Ray and Jude are offering (= Bunsen Burner = earner) he calculates that the £300 for 15 minutes is £1200 per hour pro rata. He then spends the rest of the episode bragging to various staff about this lucrative fee.
His pride in it curdles the moment he sees Neil being offered the same. “Bit rude innit,” David scolds his new employers. And though Neil turns their offer down, David still feels the need to secure his territory: “If he goes back on it he’s weak”. Neil will never win: once Ray and Jude have left, David accuses him of trying to worm his way in and when he denies it accuses him of snobbery for not wanting to.
He’s already wormed his way in somewhere else: David introduces his “best” mate to Neil who replies, “I know Chris [Finch]” then proceeds to go through the stages of their corny personal handshake. As with so much else, Neil with Chris is what David only thinks he is: an equal friend. The two have a rally of dirty jokes, well matched, with reciprocal laughs, unlike David’s attempt one series ago, where he couldn’t get a word past Chris’s barrage. He’s left sniping from the sidelines that Neil’s jokes are “rubbish”, Chris’s “better”: “his work.”
For his part, Neil’s already taken David back down a peg. He doesn’t envy him the training gig because he doesn’t “think you can teach people that sorta thing, either you have it or you don’t” (in this he’s a natural rights elitist). “Depends on the guru,” David avers. And though he’d ordinarily quantify success with money, he confuses Neil’s sanctimonious response, “Beware of False Prophets” as being “all about profits”. When Neil tries to clear up what he meant David snaps for the first of three times this episode. “I meant! I meant! If my auntie had bollocks she’d be me uncle.”
The only sexual jealousy David feels in the episode is for someone he doesn’t even like, let alone is attracted to.
Geordie Trudy is enjoying her birthday getting drunk and saucy at work; an insert shot has her on the phone yelling “No! Get Lost! You cheeky bastard!” followed by what they call in the UK a filthy laugh. She insists on birthday kisses from her colleagues, including Oliver and Chris (who sizes her up) but excluding David. He dissimulates, “Knows I’d say no. Didn’t cross a boundary and that’s. Good girl.” His seething grin betrays him, betrays his envy of others’ acceptance and his humiliation.
Trudy’s role in this series is Malcom’s in the last: the member of David’s staff who won’t humour him. Having in the last two episodes told him off for racist jokes and given a frank assessment of his branch, she scrapes against him this episode over her birthday gift. David discovers in front of Ray and Jude what Tim had secreted in his office and so guilelessly asks his staff, like Moe from The Simpsons, “What am I doing in there with a dildo?” Trudy cops to possession but not to the prank, yet David makes her say what lesson she’s learnt: “Not to leave your dildo lying around.”
That David blames her and not the real culprit sets up his sexual shaming of her. While the party music in the background is appropriately ‘Groovejet: If this ain’t love’, Brent goes to repay his humiliation, asking Trudy for a word. His concern-trolling about her flirting — “I know you wouldn’t take it further” — only goads her on — “I would!” — at which he fakes appreciation — “Why not? It’s all equal” — before concern-trolling her more: “You’re not gonna find what you want here.”
Their whole back-and-forth has the perfect awkward pallyness of people who despise each other. Encoring her filthy laugh, she says she wants a man “hung like a shire horse” (outstripped David, stumped for how react to bawdiness from a woman, babbles, “Oh. Big, magnificent animals”). He then says the classic passive-aggressive line of the secretly repulsed: “You say what you mean, don’t you!” But then Trudy says what she means too far.
Earlier, David had joined staff playing darts in the break room, and after he flubbed his throw he styled it out by calling the game a bit “fuddy-duddy” for young men like them. (And this despite having heralded it a moment ago with “You can’t beat a bit o’ Bully” — a quote from fuddy-duddy darts TV show Bullseye.) When they scoff at his claim that people think he’s a young man too, namely 30, he insists they’re all in the 30–40 range, the same he fretted over during his appraisal of Tim in the last episode. And age is the final flashpoint for him and Trudy. She reacts to his passive-aggression by saying she would hit on him but he’s too old; he gripes he’s still in his 30s so she says, “Born in the 30s more like”. David snaps for the second time, and now with plain aggressive-aggression: “You’re an embarrassment, love.”
Even with him sinking to these new lows, our sympathies drift towards David in this episode, all to set up his climactic scene in the last episode of the series, and all thanks to Neil.
Fair enough it’s fun to see him, like Jennifer Taylor-Clarke before, not suffer David’s corporate nonsense. During their catch-up David says he’s been “re-assimilating” so Neil makes a point of asking what; he forces such wankerisms from David as talking about vibes (now that everything’s a vibe it’s good to remember what sort of people used to use that word); forces such oxymorons from him as “team individuality.” And fair enough Neil is rightly annoyed to see David arrive to work at “ten to ten”.
But when he sees him arrive wearing that ersatz jacket he says what we’re thinking, and for the cameras: “It’s a bit like mine.” Neither can he resist commenting on David’s other new item of clothing: shoes with “quite a heel on them.” (David wants to be taller, younger, Neiler.) Turns out their shake and make-up at the end of the last episode didn’t stick.
Neil’s sympathetic annoyance with David is turning vindictive. That’s the point of Tim’s role in the episode: to act as a counter-example, to show the difference between ribbing someone annoying for laughs and bullying them.
When Gareth flinches from the dildo Tim’s waving around, he explains it might’ve been used by the women in the factory, at which Tim hails, “Your amazing mind!” (It’s the kind of dynamic Gervais/Merchant would go on to have with producer and collaborator Karl Pilkington.) Asked by Dawn for another prank, Tim glues Gareth’s phone together; once Gareth’s clattered the ringing phone in trying to pick it up then has prised it apart, he still answers the fake call, so Tim leaps in on the other line with an improvised, “Cock!” His laugh here is so genuine. He delights in Gareth.
Tim’s also happy to mock himself (and not just so he can brag about how blottoed he gets like Gareth and David). Addressing the camera about his love-life he claims, “I’m a heck of a catch… I live in Slough in a lovely house: with my parents” (what David Brent intonation!); he also reminds us he dropped out of uni so he’s a quitter too. (Except with Dawn…) And of Rachel comparing his penis to the dildo he says, “Mine’s very tiny. But it is made of plastic.” Gareth, not getting how self-deprecation is flirtation, butts in, “Mine’s massive and it’s not made of plastic.” Gareth was never humourless — he’ll snicker along to David and Chris Finch’s dirty jokes — but he doesn’t do irony.
It’s with irony that Tim speaks when he gives Neil’s “lot” their warehouse tour. He does remark that they’ll be meeting the working class so expect “arse cleavage”, but it’s all part of him doing his teacher-on-a-school-trip bit (he tells them to hold hands, checks they’re not chewing gum).
Their reception, however, by Taffy/Glyn, Lee and the rest of the warehouse team is free of irony, self-deprecation, or ‘having a laugh.’ “The strippers have arrived” leers Taffy. Tim makes the error of riffing along, trying to disarm through self-deprecation: he mimes a strip-show. But as David said, “You can’t beat a bit of bully.” Taffy doesn’t play along, instead he sincerely sneers, “Always knew you were bent.” Dawn’s Lee joins in with the bullying jokes for his mates’ pleasure, saying of his fiancée, “She’ll get the old milkers out for a tenner.” It’s Tim who’s disarmed, just watching passively. He leads his group out, with Taffy yelling in their wake, as if to confirm that the insults were the point: “Bender!”
While Tim was gluing Gareth’s phone he emphasised in a silly voice that it was “in the name of fun”. Taffy’s goal isn’t the fun of laughter from pranks or put-downs but the putting down itself: jokes are a means to the end of hurting. Though Chris tells David a generic joke over the phone — one which confuses David before the punchline penny-drops and he awards Chris a sucking-up disproportionate laugh — he’s using the joke as a distraction. He’s actually creeping up behind David, whom he gooses with a “You fat twat!” (Exactly one series ago he arrived on a similar stream of fat jokes.)
The bullying of David culminates in an argument about music at the party by The Corrs, an Irish pop folk duo weirdly popular in the 2000s and comprising three sisters and their brother. Neil offers, “Good tunes” so David snarks that he prefers who wrote the original. Neil retaliates, in his posh drawl, that he prefers RnB. David explains the original artists were Fleetwood Mac but Neil won’t concede: “I know who I’d rather wake up with.” David calls him out as “Sexist, bawdy” but now Chris joins the pile on: “Like you could get anyone like The Corrs!”
David’s worst nightmare has come true: Chris and Neil are united against him. Beforehand Chris’s bullying made David seem merely a pathetic lackey. With two against one it’s natural to start feeling sorry for David. “Why are you laughing?” he protests, “Just coz I don’t kiss and tell” but Chris puts him down further: “What’s to tell!” It’s Neil though who gets in the last kick, and in the humiliating 3rd person, “He’d end up with the brother!”
David snaps a third and last time. He kills the party conversation by declaring he’d chuck the brother and then — pace Trudy — take each sister from behind, miming pelvic thrusts. The rest of the office gawps but David blames Neil: “Ooooh, see. Your fault.”
Their impasse might seem like a standard moment for The Office but it’s pathetic in the sad sense now as well. Look at what buffoon depths they’re bringing David too! And as the ratchets tighten it’ll only get worse.
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[1] Gay innuendo, humoured and recoiled from, pervades the show. During his rendition of ‘Free Love on the Free Love Freeway’ David has to emphasise its dialogue with a cowboy doesn’t make it a gay song. Addressing himself as David in an address to camera he has to confirm he doesn’t mean another David he’s in bed with. In the Charity episode his strange phrasing nails straight hypocrisy about homosexuality in his claim that “It’s different for girls, more lighthearted”. While in the last episode of Series 2, Tim reading a romance quiz and asking Gareth if he has nice buttocks earns him a “Gay” back. And the Christmas Specials kick off at the Friar’s Stile, with David and his greengrocer using fruit and veg to mime anal sex. As with The Sopranos’ final season turn to and turn on a same-sex plot-line, The Office knows the male insecurity is inherently gay-panicky.
