There is an awkward moment during an episode of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Podcast when its host raises his antipathy towards the second series of Extras. His guest is the sitcom’s co-creator Stephen Merchant. Now, Herring may not have any Bafta statues to line the mantelpiece alongside his numerous chortle.co.uk internet awards, but the underdog podcaster raises a good point: the magic of earlier episodes was jeopardised when the show’s lead character became successful. Extras wasn’t about extras any more.
There had been a fresh feel to Extras’ first series. It broke from the mockumentary style of Merchant and Ricky Gervais’s previous triumph, The Office. Each episode featured at least one VIP willing to send themselves up in hilarious fashion. Kate Winslet, for example, had the mouth of a sailor. The tabloid image of Les Dennis was taken to new levels of comic tragedy. Patrick Stewart yearned to telepathically remove women’s clothes. Gervais’s Andy Millman and Ashley Jensen’s big-hearted fellow extra Maggie, meanwhile, just looked on in bafflement.
But having initially centred on these low-rung actors struggling to catch a break, Extras’ second series switched to documenting the woes faced by Millman as he is pressured into compromising his creative vision, the sitcom-within-a-sitcom When the Whistle Blows, while navigating the trappings of newfound fame. It was harder to identify with the latter setup unless you happened to be the spirit incarnate of Ben Elton’s suppressed conscience. And because Gervais and Merchant hadn’t relinquished creative control when working on Extras, or their previous opus (they were famously willing to walk were any BBC executives to meddle in The Office), this theme, and the show’s numerous jibes at rival comedians, came across as charmless gloating.
Relying on cheesy catchphrases, When the Whistle Blows acted as a vehicle to snobbishly mock the likes of Little Britain, Catherine Tate, Peter Kay and Dinnerladies. This seemed a bit rich given that Extras was itself highly derivative, albeit of postmodern American sources such as Seinfeld and Larry Sanders. What’s more, Extras’ own shtick had become rapidly reliant on its own formulaic equivalent of cheap gags: post-PC embarrassment and the parade of celebrity guests willing to send themselves up by saying things you wouldn’t expect them to say.
The moral to this sanctimonious meta comedy was that friendship and integrity were more important than fame and fortune. Did the writers heed their own advice? First came Life’s Too Short (Warwick Davies’s Extras cameo eked out to series length) then the post-split solo careers. After the nadir of Derek, Gervais resuscitated David Brent for the big screen. Merchant was last spotted voicing a character for Sherlock Gnomes, alongside ex-cast members of Little Britain and Dinnerladies, no less. You can picture Millman in the recording studio beside him, surrendering his last remnant of dignity to deliver the script’s weedy assortment of horticultural puns.
