As the news emerged on Tuesday that Ricky Gervais’ baggy-suited TV icon David Brent is set for a cinematic revamp, the instinctive response was surely to add Life on the Road to a list of needless tampering with perfection that includes The Wire’s fifth season, The Godfather Part III and Speed 2: Cruise Control.
Leaving aside the fact that the silver screen itself seems a medium desperately at odds with the themes of thwarted ambition and low-key tragedy that always lay at the heart of Brent’s story, it is not premature to conclude that Gervais’ decision to let loose the goatee, dust off the Cuban heels and set the TV cameras back on the nation’s favourite chilled out entertainer is surely as doomed as the gigging tour our hero is set to embark on.
There is certainly a heavy irony to the fact that the last time Brent graced our screens in an official capacity – 12 years ago this Christmas, in fact – he did so with a poignant, brutal depiction of the inelegance of outstaying one’s welcome. To seasoned aficionados of The Office, Tuesday’s news felt like being warned of another of Brent’s post-redundancy drop-ins to Wernham Hogg: a forlorn and unsolicited attempt at rekindling former glories.
Great to be back in the office. A new dawn pic.twitter.com/JWivoeogBR
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) December 8, 2015
The key difference, though, is that while Brent’s glories were imagined, Gervais’ are very real – as his trophy cabinet’s worth of Baftas will testify. When Brent traipsed back to his old workplace trying to arrange regime-defying meetings, another hard day’s tampon sales behind him, the only thing he was putting on the line was a few shreds of self-worth. He had no legacy to taint, merely a hole to deepen. His creator, though, is meddling with a bona fide masterpiece.
As shown by the character’s various guest appearances in the years since, anything Brent does from hereon in can only lower the quality of his overall oeuvre.
Taken in isolation, The Office Revisited, filmed for Comic Relief 2013, would have been a decent enough standalone sketch. Perhaps even a very good one. But its association with its peerless forbearer lent it the inescapable stench of mediocrity. Such is the price of genius: the near-perfection of Gervais’ debut work set the bar very high.
But there’s a secondary problem, too. Namely, that the very thing that made the original so great has in the intervening years become old hat. The Office may not have invented the mockumentary (as Christopher Guest and Chris Morris, among others, will attest), but it certainly did bring it shuffling into the mainstream. Nowadays, the faux-amateur look is as much a defining feature of the sitcom genre as canned laughter once was (indeed, it’s almost become the default way to declare a zeitgeisty cleverness). The lineage of Parks and Recreation, Summer Heights High, Modern Family, Arrested Development and, of course, the US version of The Office can all be traced directly to the wobbly camerawork and Brechtian glances of Wernham Hogg’s finest.
Which is all well and good – it’s a legacy that was hard earned and well deserved –but it does means that the cutting edge that defined The Office in 2001 has been softened to the point of nonexistence. In the wake of the show’s initial explosive success, it became commonplace to hear anecdotes of Monday night channel-hoppers spending protracted spells of viewing time, even entire episodes, engrossed in what they thought to be straight-faced documentary before finally cottoning on, such was its novelty.
Gervais has always cited Fawlty Towers and its 12-episode run as the inspiration for The Office. So he at least appreciates that, where critically lauded master works are concerned, less is generally more. Quite where a Hollywood spin-off fits into that disciplined blueprint is unclear, but the fact of the matter is when it comes to fly-on-the-wall sitcoms, he’s done it. He should move on, he should better himself.
.jpg?w=600)
