The battle with the BBC to make The Office

When producers Anil Gupta and Ash Atalla went to Jon Plowman, the BBC’s former head of comedy, about making a pilot of a little-known show called The Office – which was based on a demo tape that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant had made in 1998 – Plowman was among the many people who didn’t quite get it at first.

Having already declined to make it once, Plowman relented but with a caveat. “He said, ‘OK, we could maybe make a pilot, but I don’t think he’sthe lead,” recalls Gupta, meaning Ricky Gervais as David Brent. “He was saying, ‘It can’t be about that terrible boss, it can’t be about Brent.’ I said, ‘What? You’re mad, he’s the show!’” Plowman wasn’t “viewing the whole pie”, as Brent, the boss of Slough paper merchants Wernham Hogg, might say.

Gervais and Merchant’s mockumentary was of course made, debuting 25 years ago on BBC Two, an anniversary marked by a BBC special, which reunites Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook. Gervais, though, has snubbed the Beeb’s show, having opted to make his own anniversary special on YouTube.

In the wake of trigger warnings being added to some episodes of The Office, Gervais previously criticised the BBC, saying: “I wish it was braver. I wish it wouldn’t bow down to pressure from media or from one complaint. That has got worse, and the days are gone when people say, ‘We’re leaving it as it is.’ Commissioning editors are scared of being fired.”

The Office would win stacks of awards, change the face of TV comedy, and become one of Britain’s biggest comedy exports. It was made partly as a matter of frugality – “It was cheap, we were low risk,” Gervais told me in 2023 – and to fill the summer schedules in lieu of established, more expensive comedy names such as Steve Coogan and Victoria Wood.

“None of the famous comedians wanted their shows to go out in summer,” says Jane Root, controller of BBC Two at the time. “They had this mistaken idea that the whole of Britain had moved to Tuscany for the summer, which we thought was kind of nonsense. It was very hard to persuade anybody to launch a comedy in the summer. We thought this could be a summer show!”

The magic of The Office is in the easily identifiable characters, its infectious heart, and the Brentisms that are not just quotable but that have actually changed the way British people talk. Just a bit. It’s also down to the stubbornness of Gervais and Merchant, who stuck to their vision for it, insisting that Gervais not only star in it but that they should also direct it, despite being relative nobodies and certainly not Coogan-level (“two chancers”, as Merchant later said).

From filming their demo in 1998, it took three years to reach BBC Two. But Atalla says the only resistance in getting it made was “low-level resistance. Because it wasn’t important enough!”

Long before David Brent was a friend first, boss second (probably an entertainer third), he was a character named Seedy Boss, a keenly observed impersonation of odious, lecherous middle managers. Gervais had worked in an office when he was entertainments manager for the University of London student union. He later did Seedy Boss to amuse colleagues at London radio station XFM, including his assistant Stephen Merchant.

Gervais had landed a vaguely titled “head of speech” gig at XFM (now Radio X) and realised that he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He hired Merchant and confessed he was blagging it, telling Merchant that if he did all the filing and admin, “I’ll let you get away with murder”.

Merchant sensed that Gervais’s lackadaisical approach would be likely to get them fired so accepted a place on a BBC assistant producers training course. Part of the course included making a short video project. While other trainees shot serious documentaries about inner-city living, Merchant suggested to Gervais that they should make something funny with Seedy Boss.

Filmed at Gervais’s old student union office, the 20-minute demo cast the character as David Brent, a manager at Entech, a Staffordshire-based firm in the “wood pulp bleach and dye business”. Watched now, it’s appropriately raw, and the Brentmeister General isn’t yet the finished article – still more Seedy Boss than David Brent. But it includes scenes that made it into the final show, including Brent’s excruciating flirty interview with a new PA (“You’ve charmed me”) and much-repeated Brentisms (“El vino did flow”).

Though Gervais has often said he was influenced by This is Spinal Tap, the fake documentary format was conceived for practical reasons as much as a creative choice. “We only had the crew for a day and it seemed the quickest way of doing it,” Merchant recalled in 2002. The demo tape became a cult hit within the corridors of the BBC, even landing Gervais a gig on Channel 4’s zeitgeisty comedy The 11 O’Clock Show.

Junior producer Ash Atalla first took it to Jon Plowman, suggesting a pilot. Plowman turned it down at first but Atalla went back to him with Anil Gupta, who had a bit more influence after co-creating Goodness Gracious Me.

Plowman called Gervais and Merchant in. Gupta recalls that the duo were “very wary” at the meeting. When Plowman asked whether they thought there was a sitcom in it, they replied that there was indeed – if they could do it their way. “He looked at us like, ‘who the f--- do you think you are?’” said Gervais on Comedy Connections.

The demo video was of course crucial in getting it made. “If I’d have sent off a script to The Office it would still be in someone’s drawer,” Gervais told me in 2023. “It doesn’t jump off the page. It was about David Brent, it was about being seen, it was about body language, it was about a man who said unfunny things and looked at the camera. You can’t really put that in the script.”

By the time Jane Root heard about it, Plowman was fully on board. Indeed, Gupta credits him with fighting to get the show made. They showed Root a clip during a comedy meeting. Gupta and Atalla remember that after they showed a clip, Root turned to her scheduler and asked, “Is that funny?” to which he replied, “Yes, I think so.”

“If he had said, ‘I don’t think so…!’” says Atalla. They commissioned a pilot with the eventual cast – Martin Freeman as permanently exasperated sales clerk Tim, Mackenzie Crook as assistant manager Gareth (assistant to the manager), and Lucy Davis as receptionist Dawn.

There was a sudden issue when Gervais and Merchant announced that they wanted to direct it. Plowman told them no. “This is a cheap pilot, but it’s not that cheap,” Gupta later recalled Plowman saying. “We don’t just give people access to large amounts of BBC money and tell them to go away and play.”

“We had a meeting that got quite feisty,” says Gupta now. “They were absolutely adamant. They said, ‘We’re not making it if we can’t direct it.’ It was a bit of a stand-off. It was one of those meetings where you’re thinking, ‘S---, this is going well!’ and everyone just digs in.”

As a compromise, Gupta directed it. It was very much like the first episode of the first series, though with a John Nettles voice-over, which made it feel more like the Airport-type docusoaps it was lampooning.

One scene, a farcical meeting in which Brent tells the staff about impending redundancies, felt too much like a sitcom and was scrapped in the final series. Gervais and Merchant were insistent that it should be more real, duller even. “I remember us fighting for this realism and this sort of anti-television way of doing things,” Gervais later explained.

Gupta remembers plenty of arguments in the pub later on about realism. There was, he says, “a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth” about how believable it needed to be as a documentary. “At one point, there was an epiphany where we thought, nobody cares about that,” says Gupta. He adds: “Ricky likes to fight. There were definitely a lot of big fights in the pub. But we were all arguing for the same thing.”

For Jane Root, there was no deliberation needed on a full series. “It was really cheap!” she says, laughing. “It now seems like we were rolling in money but in those days, we felt like we were hard up.”

Root also points to the success that they’d had with Rob Brydon’s breakthrough show, Marion and Geoff, with Brydon just talking to a camera in his taxi. “We were up for new people!” she says about emerging (and cheaper) talent. Still, it was six months before The Office was commissioned, during which time Gervais did his own chat show for Channel 4, Meet Ricky Gervais, and Gervais and Merchant wrote the first six episodes of The Office. By the time the full series was commissioned, they were ready to shoot. This time around, they were permitted to direct themselves.

The Office debuted at 9.30pm on Monday, July 9, 2001, an inconspicuous slot. Root insists that the BBC Two management team loved the show and were fully behind it, but expectations were modest.

“It was a summer show,” Root says. “We hoped it would wash its face in the ratings, that was all. We were kind of waiting for Steve Coogan… Ricky would enjoy that! We were waiting for the big guns, The Royle Family, Alan Partridge, The League of Gentlemen. But we all thought it was funny. At that point in time, we were able to indulge ourselves in things that we liked.”

The first series began with around 1.4 million viewers and almost doubled by the end, averaging 1.68 million viewers – respectable for BBC Two but not exactly world-beating. There were good reviews, at least, as Gupta pointed out to that fateful BBC Two scheduler when they met in a lift at Television Centre. “Shame about the figures,” the scheduler said as he stepped out of the lift and the doors closed between them.

Root says there was another battle behind it. “Where it became hard was the fact that nobody got it, nobody understood it for the whole first series,” she says. “I remember the BBC chairman of the governors, Gavyn Davies, whose wife, Sue Nye, worked with Tony Blair, said he tried to watch it and his wife had come in and said, ‘Oh, it’s another one of those documentaries about terrible bosses, I have enough with Gordon and Tony, turn it off.’”

Baroness Nye – at that time director of government relations for Gordon Brown – wasn’t alone. “There was clearly an enormous number of people across the country – and I think probably throughout the BBC – who just thought it was a weird documentary,” adds Root.

Root recalls that after the first episode, she held a celebratory dinner where she read out the audience appreciation index, which was like a focus-group approval score. “I read the list to Ricky,” Root says. “They weren’t in the top 10, which was fair enough. It was a new show, we weren’t expecting that. But I went further and further down the list and I got to the very bottom 10. There was only one thing that did worse than the premiere episode of The Office: a ladies bowls tournament that got rained off.”

There was no chance of it being pulled from the BBC, but Root admits that the show “would have been dead within five minutes on an American network”.

After the slow burn of the first series, The Office won awards – including Baftas and later Golden Globes – and returned for a second series in 2002. It wrapped up with a pair of cockles-warming Christmas specials in 2003, though Root had tried hard to persuade Gervais and Merchant to do a third series – and they’d sort of agree when el vino did flow.

“Every few months, I would go out to lunch with Ricky and Stephen and we’d go to the newest, nicest restaurant. Being that era, we’d drink at least one bottle of wine or more. I’d plead with them, I’d suggest storylines – ‘You could do this, you could that.’ We’d all drink and eat and make jokes and I’d go back into the BBC Two office and say, ‘I’ve done it!’ They’d ring me and say, ‘We’ve changed our minds, we’re not doing another series’… I don’t know if they were actually just winding me up!”

Looking back now at some of the show’s edgier, less-than-PC gags – largely through Brent’s blundering attempts at political correctness – Ash Atalla regrets nothing. “There’s some stuff in there that you wouldn’t do now,” he says. “It was a product of its time, that’s all. I don’t regret the show we made in that moment at all. But the world progresses… I love the fact that the show touched the boundaries of the day.”

So, 25 years since Brent first announced “I don’t give s----y jobs”, does The Office hold up as one of the greatest British comedies of all time? Just a bit.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]