ABSTRACT
The Office is set in Wernham Hogg, a paper mill in Slough, Berkshire. Before the programme was broadcast, the city’s only claim to fame was a mocking poem by Sir John Betjeman. Swindon is sophisticated in comparison. Like fingernails down a blackboard, The Office is an observational comedy that is so close to the ruthless boredom of contemporary labour that it is almost unwatchable. While some critics have termed it ‘a wry, dark comedy set in a dysfunctional workplace’,1 it has actually stitched together a mock-realist re-presentation of contemporary labour. Just as The Royle Family rewrites family life, revealing the comfortable silences and dinner-on-the-knees-before-the-television archetypes, so does The Office reinscribe the micro-traumas punctuating the open plan. The viewers hear echoes in the dialogue, setting and workplace relationships. The programme continues the British comedy tradition of appalling men directing the narrative: from Basil Fawlty in the 1970s through to Alan Partridge in the 1990s and David Brent in the 2000s. Brent and Fawlty have much in common: both are dreamers, aspirational men who use frustration, humiliation and sarcasm to understand a world where their lived experience does not match their hopes. Brent, unlike Fawlty, is unable to mask his embarrassment with anger. Ricky Gervais commented on his comedic creation:
We don’t despise him or hate him, we feel a bit sorry for him. He’s not a monster or the bastard some people think he is, he’s just a bit misguided, his only real crime is he’s not as cool as he thinks he is.2
