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Awkward and unexpected comedy

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David Brent at his finest. The Office [UK] - Series 1, Episode 4. I do not own this video and all credits go to BBC. Copyright BBC.

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'Learn Guitar With David Brent' The youtube series where David teaches you guitar, and performs a different song each lesson. The lesson specifically linked in this padlet is the lesson where he performs a song about the town in which he works 'Slough'.

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David Brent responds to more questions from the fans, and gives a guitar tutorial for the song 'Slough'. SUBSCRIBE for more Brent tutorials! ► http://is.gd/RickyGervais Follow Ricky on Twitter ► http://www.twitter.com/RickyGervais Official Ricky Gervais Website ► http://www.RickyGervais.com

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Charity song 'Equality Street' released for Comic Relief 2013.

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Brent and Johnson - Equality Street [Official Music Video]

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A fan made twitter account. @ReplyLikeBrent replies to tweets by online users in the fashion of David Brent.

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Example of an online fan club for The Office.

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The Office (UK) Fan Club | Fansite with photos, videos, and more

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Fanpop community fan club for The Office (UK) fans to share, discover content and connect with other fans of The Office (UK). Find The Office (UK) videos, photos, wallpapers, forums, polls, news and more.

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Specifically looking at the first 3 paragraphs. This Vice article describes how Gervais in one of the last few British Auteurs.

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Not long ago, when I was home alone and without a lot of money, I stuck an oven pizza in and put The Office on the telly. The whole thing, including the two Christmas specials, was on Netflix. Six episodes a series, two series in total, wouldn't take long. I sat and watched something I hadn't seen in nearly a decade and was mesmerised by how much it had changed. When I was younger, I had thought it was an #awks 'cringe-fest', but what I saw this time was a painful, incisive documentation of total banality and trying to escape it through any means necessary. It was a picture of a forgotten part of our society, the one away from any limelight, a hundred thousand beige prisons up and down the country facilitating not lives but existences, especially in the case of its agonisingly sad protagonist David Brent.

Ricky Gervais is one of the last great British comedy auteurs. Since The Office and, to a lesser extent, Extras, no one else has really seen their original vision come true in such a way. There have been popular formats and programmes: Mrs Brown's Boys, the endless sneering panel shows that clog up the daily Dave viewing schedule... Even the best BBC comedy in years, BBC3's (or BBC ii-upside-down-'i' as it's now referred to) People Just Do Nothing, borrows heavily from Gervais's themes, as does Channel 4's Phoneshop, also good and clearly indebted to Gervais (who acted as script editor on it) too.

But that particular comedy of embarrassment will always belong to him. He will always be a reference point for other shows using that style. And David Brent, the sap who started it all, will go down as one of the greats. Or, perhaps, he would have, had Gervais not decided to eke every tired wheeze out of this heavily flogged dead horse. In August, a feature-length film called Life On The Road will be released. It's another Brent vehicle, in which the character tours with his old band Foregone Conclusion. Of the story, Gervais has said: "This film delves much more into his private life than The Office ever did and we really get to peel back the layers of this extraordinary, ordinary man."

But Brent isn't an extraordinary man. That's the point of him. He's a schmuck, a norm, an idiot, a whatever, but that doesn't make him a bad character. Gervais is taking his creation and potentially turning it into shit, and for what?

The controversy surrounding Gervais's most recent TV comedy, Derek, brought out that staunch destructiveness in him. Many viewers were upset at his portrayal of an apparently disabled man working in an old people's home, which he then countered by saying that Derek wasn't disabled, and he would know, as he created him. It was a facile argument - you could go to a fancy dress party as a plane crashing into a building and say it's not meant to be 9/11, even though everyone can see it - but it alls feels as if Gervais is out to destroy his own medium because he's the only one who can. He wields the knife, and he can do with his intellectual property whatever he wants, even if that means running it into the ground and ignoring what made it special in the first place.

This isn't just the curse of the auteur, though. It's also a by-product of success. Movie directors and producers ruin their franchises all the time, in ways that are distinct from clear grabs for money, but have the feeling of power-tripping, of ownership and control. Gervais's trans-Atlantic contemporary, albeit on a greater scale, would be Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, American Dad and Ted. MacFarlane created his brand of fourth-wall-breaking, pop-culture-referencing style of comedy in 1999. But since then, this style has drawn regular derision from people who have recognised the format he works in and think they're above it. They see it as repetitive, and that may be so, but the difference between MacFarlane and Gervais is that MacFarlane would never do things with his characters that go against the style in which they were created, even if, like Ted and its unwatchable sequel, it was terrible to begin with.

There's something fatalistic about watching Gervais continually do this to his characters. It's been going on since the infamous 'do the dance' period of charity appearances, but the process has been a slow, tumescent spread to the lymph nodes of his beloved creations. It's difficult to believe that someone capable of such greatness is also so blind to how far that greatness can fall. But that's what happens when you achieve something great and then try for the rest of your life to emulate it; you end up crushing and debasing your magnus opus, until it's unrecognisable in the face of your immense, newfound vanity.

I no longer believe that Gervais is capable of creating something good and real, not now that he's been some consumed by his own self-imposed comedy demi-god status. But how much can we blame him for it? He's fallen into the hole of others before him by thinking that a moment's genius can be replicated ad infinitum. You shouldn't watch Life On The Road, not because it will be crap, which it almost certainly will be, but because it's disrespectful to the memory of David Brent, who died a long time ago.

More from VICE:

Stories of Women Finding Love at the Office Christmas Party

Why Ricky Gervais Shouldn't Bring Back David Brent

The Slow Process of Admitting to Myself That 'Family Guy' Is Bad

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Ricky Gervais, David Brent and the Destruction of a Comedy Legacy

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Not long ago, when I was home alone and without a lot of money, I stuck an oven pizza in and put The Office on the telly. The whole thing, including the two Christmas specials, was on Netflix. Six episodes a series, two series in total, wouldn't take long.

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Article discussing Ricky Gervais' influence on modern television through The Office.

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The One to Watch For A Comedy Legacy: "The Office (UK)" S1E1 - "Downsize" | ScreenPrism

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ScreenPrism is the hub for film and TV analysis. Currently, we are building the largest digital library of film and television inquiry and related content by producing original articles, curating content from other esteemed sources and facilitating user generated comment and discussion.

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The New York Times article dating back to 2004, appearing to revel in the seemingly more intellectual comedy, heralding the lack of a laughing track and generally reviewing the forthcoming special.

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David sued the company when he was fired, then spent the money on a vanity music video, and that sketch is priceless: dressed all in white in a white loft, he sings, or more likely lip-syncs, the pop ballad "If You Don't Know Me by Now," in a vicious parody of Enrique Iglesias-style romantic music videos. His video did not sell, and he spends a lot of time dropping by the office, assuring his former employees that he is a big success and that they are delighted to see him again. "You are always welcome," Gareth tells him insufferably. "But you should phone ahead."

David has a bad case of unrequited self-esteem, and he silences a room with ghastly jokes and painful faux pas in a way that makes viewers wince as they laugh. There is not much relief from the relentless mockery, but a little lies in Tim's wistful, failed love for Dawn. He became the laughingstock of the office when he finally got up his nerve to ask her out in the last season, even though she already had a boyfriend.

In the special, Dawn returns to Slough from Florida with her boyfriend, courtesy of the BBC, which seems intent on drumming up a denouement on their platonic romance. Tim's co-workers tease him about his humiliating rejection, but Tim is not embarrassed to examine his heart. "People don't want to say how they feel" in front of their office mates lest they be teased, he tells the BBC interviewer. "But luckily, I have no mates."

"The Office" is far more cruel than kind, but when Tim sees Dawn again after her return from Florida, his shy, yearning look is as moving as Charlie Chaplin's smile at the end of "City Lights."

The Office Special BBC America, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Jon Plowman and Anil Gupta, executive producers; Paul Lee, executive producer for BBC America; Ash Atalla, producer; written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

WITH: Ricky Gervais (David Brent), Martin Freeman (Tim), Mackenzie Crook (Gareth), Lucy Davis (Dawn), Patrick Baladi (Neil), Elizabeth Berrington (Anne), Ralph Ineson (Finchy), Joel Beckett (Lee), Ewen Macintosh (Keith), Steve Brody (Agent), Sandy Hendrickse (Carol).

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More Slices of Office Life, No Laugh Track Required

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David sued the company when he was fired, then spent the money on a vanity music video, and that sketch is priceless: dressed all in white in a white loft, he sings, or more likely lip-syncs, the pop ballad "If You Don't Know Me by Now," in a vicious parody of Enrique Iglesias-style romantic music videos.

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Specifically looking at the final 7 paragraphs, The Independent's interview with Ricky Gervais discusses realism through devices such as the pace of the show.

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Forty seems an advanced age for anyone to make their Edinburgh debut, yet Ricky Gervais, the star, writer and director of the acclaimed BBC2 sitcom The Office, has managed to sell out a week of shows on his fame alone.

Sharing a bill with his collaborator Steve Merchant, and fellow cohorts of the patchy 11 O'Clock Show, Jimmy Carr and Robin Ince, their Rubbernecker stand-up show ("a collection of idiots," he claims) has been packing them in at Edinburgh's less-impressive-than-it-sounds Café Royal. Not that this modest funny man - his short set is as tasteless and well-constructed a turn as you'll find on the Fringe, and he seems surprised to be told so - has a high self-opinion.

"I've done about eight stand-up gigs in my life. I was really worried," he admits. "I don't feel natural on stage. I don't feel I could control an audience if they weren't with me. I feel I've cheated slightly because I can deliver lines I've written and they'll listen because I've been on telly. I'm not the stand-up a hundred people are, and I feel guilty."

Don't put yourself down, man. You're an adult, for goodness sake. That must be an advantage.

"Am I too old for best newcomer? Fattest, oldest newcomer perhaps," he muses, though he understands the point about young comics sometimes displaying a worrying lack of knowledge of life's subtleties. "It's like Gomez singing these world-weary songs sounding like Tom Waits. I'm thinking 'Hold on! You're only 21!'"

Gervais is still learning. "I can't believe that comedians never have a drink before they go on. I had to find that out," he confides, quite shocked. Edinburgh does confuse him though.

"I'm not being cynical, I genuinely don't know why people spend a year writing an hour then coming to the Fringe to lose ten grand," he says. "I don't think you have to do it or otherwise only those who come would become successful and that's clearly not true." His own success is an obvious example.

He does have a past though. Once entertainment manager at the University of London Union, he booked plenty of comics there, before broadcasting on XFM and Radio 1 in a double act with Merchant. Then he appeared as a roving reporter on the 11 O'Clock Show who, straight-faced, asked members of the public the questions That's Life never dared use. (Such as, "How big an animal could you kick to death? A dog? How big a dog?"). His own spoof chatshow Meet Ricky Gervais followed to a mixed response last year, as his own personality was conflated with his on-screen role.

"The character I played was this confused, bigoted idiot," he explains. "I know there was some ambiguity because I used my own name, but I wasn't worried about people being offended, I was more worried about people agreeing with it. It was a piece of character comedy." So that's clear then.

His new character "Derek", debuted in Rubbernecker, a simple soul who attempts to entertain despite possessing no discernible ability, or even intelligence, seems guaranteed to wind some up.

"It's the innocence I like about him. He hasn't grown up. It's an excuse to see the world differently. It's not meant to be a piss take of the retarded or whatever," he pleads, instead comparing his creation to the millions of untalented Britons inspired by Sky 1's excellent Next! or The Spice Girls who believe that fame is inevitably around the corner for them. "He'll do anything to get somewhere," he says.

But it's The Office that has sealed his reputation, with its painfully familiar gloom and acute characterisations, such as his own role as the perpetually smiling but thwarted office manager Dave Brent.

"When I was at XFM I'd do sketches to make Steve [then his assistant] laugh. I had a character called Seedy Boss," he recalls. When Merchant became a BBC trainee, they arranged to film a sketch, which later turned up as the fifth episode's notorious job interview, as part of his course. A script was commissioned, and a mere three years later, the series hit our screens with the pair co-directing. The attention to drab detail was deliberate.

"We wanted it to look real, so we did it on film, bled the colour and filmed the title sequence on a grey day so people would see it and go 'Oh no, off to work again'," he proudly admits. (Strangely the Slough office building featured in the title sequence greatly resembles London's fashionable Sanderson Hotel. And my old school, still unfashionable.)

"Nothing's happening because it's real life," he says, alluding to the show's funereal pace. Their influences were a mixed bunch. Some are obvious - This Is Spinal Tap, The Larry Sanders Show. Some are more unexpected - Laurel and Hardy ("for their slowness"), Tony Hancock's The Rebel. There is something very Hancockian about Gervais, a short, disgruntled performer. (Away from the camera he's merely short.)

God is in the details, such as the cast's responses to office buffoon Gareth's foot-in-mouth moments. "So many sitcoms come up with amazing lines and characters, yet stop it where the joke starts," he explains, "For me it's not Gareth saying something ludicrous, it's [his colleague] Tim going" - he mimes an embarrassed tapping. You had to see it really.

Forthcoming projects include a sitcom about Seventies provincial types who completely missed out on the cultural explosion of the Sixties, and perhaps a documentary exploring "Derek" in more depth. Before that, Gervais and Merchant are back at XFM, filling the gaps between records with some entertaining banter.

"I make no pretence, I'm no John Peel. I can't stand the arrogance of DJs who think anything they say will be interesting," he says, "Why broadcast if you've nothing to say. It's easy doing the radio because if you run out of words you just go: "Here's Radiohead!" He shrugs. For him it's easy. But then, he's funny.

'Rubbernecker' is at the Café Royal, Venue 47, to Sat (0131-556 2549)

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Ricky Gervais: More than The Office comedian

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Forty seems an advanced age for anyone to make their Edinburgh debut, yet Ricky Gervais, the star, writer and director of the acclaimed BBC2 sitcom The Office, has managed to sell out a week of shows on his fame alone.

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The Guardian article from 2003 anticipating the final "Specials".

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Christmas Specials BBC1

Was it, as Alistair McGowan hoped, a Merry Posh and Becksmas for you, too? Out of several hundred programmes, including the BBC's Posh and Becks Big Impression, The Kumars Christmas Special, Michael Parkinson's Christmas Night With The Stars and ITV1's The Real Beckhams, only three Christmas shows didn't feature either a Beckham, an impression of a Beckham or a passing reference to a Beckham - and these were Celebrity Mastermind (EastEnders' Barry beats David Blunkett!), Polar Bear Battlefield and, of course, The Office.

In the current (though by now also defunct) issue of a popular celebrity gossip magazine which I namecheck so often I'm determined not to mention it again this year, there is an interview with Ricky Gervais about the very end of the second of the two final parts of The Office, RIP, god rest David Brent's soul. Knowing what we now know, this interview is practically an historical document and will, in future years, probably be the subject of painstaking analyses by the thousands of undergraduates in Gervais Studies with, basically, far too much time on their hands.

'Do you tie up all the loose ends?' begged the interviewer, the journalistic subtext to which is of course: 'What happens to Brent after losing his job at Wernham Hogg?', and 'Will Tim and Dawn ever cop-off together?'

'There's not complete closure, like a film ending, but it does give you a flavour of where they all might be now,' admitted Gervais, 'The ending couldn't be perfect and neat because that wouldn't fit in with the spirit of the show.'

And so before Christmas I confess that I read this and took Mr Gervais at his word, ignoring the leaked plots in the tabloids, resigning myself to watching an excruciatingly painful cliffhanger. More painful for the viewers, obviously, than the entirely fictional and yet somehow extraordinarily real employee characters of the most famous Slough-based paper merchant ever to become the subject of a masterfully brilliant comedy series masquerading as a faux-reality documentary.

But I should have known better than to trust that Ricky Gervais, because short of letting us know whether Anne will ever recover from that personal insult to her unborn child and return to work after maternity leave, or sending every single viewer invitations to Wernham Hogg boss Neil's wedding next September (yeah, Mr Brent, I hope it rains, too), then the ending couldn't have been neater or more perfect without Gervais having had to reveal to the nation, preferably on Christmas morning, that he is really Richard Curtis in disguise.

But while The Office's denouement exposed its creator as the teller of massive porkies - at least to Heat magazine (whoops, dear me, there I go again) - it was also enormously emotionally satisfying. Not that such a blessing doesn't mean we can't simultanously curse Gervais and co-writer Stephen Merchant, if only because the very neatness of the ending really does mean that it's all over.

In Boxing Day's Part One we found out that three years after his brush with TV vérité infamy, Brent was bitter, felt he'd been the victim of a 'stitch-up' and that inevitably it was all in the editing: for seven hours and fifty-five minutes of every working day DB had, by his own admission, been a great guy and an inspirational boss, but then the bloody BBC only went and used the five minutes of footage where he'd accidentally headbutted somebody. 'I'm not a plonker,' explained Brent, and by God you almost believed him.

Still, despite becoming a national laughing-stock (possibly for some, though not all, of the same reasons that he is laughed at in the real world), Brent lived through the public's insults ('you beardy twat', 'pug-nosed gimp' and 'lard boy'), learned nothing from them and eventually moved on. After, that is, he had sued Wernham Hogg over the redundancy package and spent the £42,000 settlement on his own label, the snappily titled Juxtaposition Records, which went on to release a heartfelt cover version of 'If You Don't Know Me By Now', plus an extra-special video starring Brent, a model, a sofa and some white doves in a warehouse. That this failed to bother the charts much, peaking at around number 114, came as no surprise to anybody other than David Brent.

Subsequently Brent made a career swerve into travelling salesmanship and acquired an agent called Steve who got him occasional gigs at nightclubs, appearing in 'Blind Date' quizzes (wearing a red velvet Austin Powers suit) alongside Bubble from Big Brother and Howard from the Halifax ads, where he often got booed by the audience for, frankly, not being very much of a sport when he didn't get picked. And there were occasional 'walks for Mencap' too.

By the end of Part One, then, things were not looking promising for the man whose career had effectively been Alan Partridged. And it didn't help that Brent had, tragically, taken to turning up at Wernham Hogg unannounced and stalking his old desk, presently occupied by the power-deranged Gareth (Mackenzie Crook).

Neil: 'What's your reason for being here? You don't work here and you can't keep on coming in for a natter.'

Brent: 'Can I come in for a meeting?'

Meanwhile, Wernham Hogg's former receptionist, the frustrated in oh-so-many-ways, would-be illustrator Dawn (the fabulous Lucy Davis) and her appalling fiancé Lee (played with consummate unlikeability by Joel Beckett), had decamped to build a new life in Florida, albeit by outstaying their allotted 90-day visa. This was a move which had, in turn, allowed sales manager Tim (Martin Freeman, never better) to try to reconcile himself with the past: 'I had feelings for Dawn, obviously... and I really wish I hadn't done what I did, but it's all cool.'

So far, particularly in Brent's case, so scarily plausible, both as comedy and incisive comment on the living undead hell that is the reality TV micro-celebrity's afterlife. But despite his serial grotesqueries it wasn't going to be dramatically satisfying for Gervais and co-writer Stephen Merchant to leave us with their anti-hero floundering in the quicksands of self-loathing, however hilariously described - if only because, despite ourselves, we love Brent and care about him and, what with this being Christmas and all, we really needed the poor bastard to have some sort of a break, even if this amounted to (and please god let it be consensual) a meaningless flirt 'n' fumble by the photocopier.

And so it was fitting that, in the end, his inordinately lucky break came about thanks to his ex-boss, the suave, pleasant, handsome and yet still strangely loathsome Neil (a commendable lack of actorly vanity from Patrick Baladi) whose invitation to Brent to bring a Plus One to the office party forced him to save face by conjuring up a date from who knew where - or, failing that, the internet.

That David and his eventual blind date, Carol, ended up singing from the same hymn sheet was fabulous enough - this was a surprisingly generous and uncynical ending from Gervais and Merchant - but that she was also attractive and bright and still laughed at Brent's jokes was even better and, indeed, more plausible. And so, by the time the credits rolled, the love of a good woman was looking if not inevitable then far from impossible for David Brent and I'm sure I was not alone in hoping that he might soon find himself sufficiently empowered to start thinking outside of the box, careerwise.

The genius of The Office was its level of tortured truthfulness and, therefore, also the ability of its creators to ensure that every viewer will have had the same sort of galloping fantasies - fast-forwarding to images of Brent and Carol, married and bickering, probably childless but basically happy, in a nice house in a Slough cul-de-sac, with Brent back climbing the management ladder and attempting to fulfill his greatest dream, to make a difference, to be remembered.

And although this will probably be by accident rather than design, living a few doors away from Carol and David in the nice part, wherever that is, of Slough will, of course, be Tim and Dawn, whose blissfully satisfying union (thanks to 'Secret Santa', a box of Rowney oil paints and a tiny scene of awesome sweetness set in the back of a minicab) was everything we really wanted but hadn't dared hope for.

Christmas TV is invariably no better than it needs to be and so even The Office didn't need to be quite as wincemakingly hilarious, deliciously touching and, ultimately, as perfectly emotionally pitched as it turned out to be. But in these godless times let us thank a passing deity for just one small seasonal miracle: that last night Britain's very finest television comedy got the ending both it and we deserved.
Topics

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Christmas Specials BBC1 Was it, as Alistair McGowan hoped, a Merry Posh and Becksmas for you, too?

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BFI article summarising and placing The Office in the Zeitgeist.

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Fly-on-the-wall sitcom about life in a Slough paper merchants

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Telegraph article from 2002, anticipating the arrival of Series 2. The article embodies not only what the show was about, but also how it captured a nations attention, almost rebelling against television of its day.

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If there is a comedic equivalent of the alchemist's magic formula, it's the capacity to make an audience empathise with someone even as they behave in an indefensible manner. And as The Office went through a frenziedly acclaimed repeat screening and started to rack up well-deserved Baftas and British Comedy Awards, the bulk of the attention was naturally focused on Gervais.

Yet it's not so much as the lone star of the show but as the hub of a perfect ensemble - alongside heroically gormless acolyte Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), tortured Everyman Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis), the secretary for whom Tim's love must always remain a secret, even to himself - that he's earned his place in the light entertainment pantheon.

As I talk to the rest of the cast, conversations somehow keep coming back to Gervais. Martin Freeman (whose pivotal role as the sensitive cynic awash in a sea of mediocrity gives The Office's audience the vital luxury of someone to identify with) mentions a running joke he and Ricky share about the latter's lack of formal thespian qualifications. Endeavouring to capture the spirit of this friendly on-set banter, Freeman describes 'Waving my certificate from Central Drama school in his [Gervais's] big fat face'.

Lucy Davis (whose voice will be well known to some readers as that of good-natured Brummie Hayley in The Archers, and who also turns out, rather unexpectedly, to be the daughter of the comedian Jasper Carrott) is similarly forthcoming. 'The thing about Ricky,' she says fondly, 'is that there are so many tales you can tell, where if you know him you'll roar along, but if you don't you might go "Oh".' As if to underline the truth of this observation, the story that follows involves a fond reminiscence of the time Gervais tried to blind her on set with an aerosol deodorant.

Gervais's off-screen persona maintains an unusual and intriguing balance between unrepentant devilry and old-fashioned good manners, dedication and carelessness, insecurity and self-confidence. Eschewing the egotistical promiscuity which is the general run of comedians' private lives, he has lived with the same woman (Jane Fallon, producer of This Life), since he met her 20 years ago as a philosophy student at University College London.

On Room 101 - the 'celebrity dislikes' show traditionally used as a platform for saying unforgiveable things about the Welsh - he revealed that he couldn't bear to enter a pub or restaurant before the person he was meeting had arrived, and would rather circle that restaurant shiftily several times than go in and wait on his own.

'A clown running around in trifle is only so funny,' Gervais announces in the Fitzrovia editing suite where he and The Office's less instantly recognisable co-creator Stephen Merchant are putting the finishing touches to the second series. 'But a man whose wife has just left him, falling over in some trifle, that is absolutely hilarious... because that's where the darkness comes in.' His voice gets slightly louder, which is one of two signals Gervais tends to give when a comic extrapolation is under way. (The other is a mildly hysterical bared-teeth laugh in the manner of Carry-On star Sid James.)

'Oh, his wife's left him, and he's covered in custard, and there she comes with her new boyfriend,' Gervais laments. 'That's real bad luck, mind,' chips in Merchant, archly. 'And who left the custard there anyway - do you think it was the boyfriend? I never liked him.' 'Nerd!' barks Gervais damningly. 'Loser!' Merchant snaps back.

What initially seems like the ramblings of an impenetrable music hall double-act is actually a kind of character shorthand. Rather than obvious television comedy precedents such as Alan Partridge or Victoria Wood, The Office's inspirations are, Gervais claims, largely cinematic. The flashes of almost unbearable emotional acuity with which the show is illuminated have such unlikely starting points as the final scenes in The Bridges of Madison County - 'When you think she's going to maybe go and pursue this other life and then realise she isn't' - or the moment in Billy Wilder's The Apartment when Shirley MacLaine admits to having fallen in love with Jack Lemmon because he was 'the only man who ever takes his hat off in the elevator'. ('There's no exposition!' Gervais enthuses. 'Don't expose things completely!')

Of every eight hours he and Merchant spend working on The Office's scripts 'six will be spent talking about films, and what worked and what didn't'.

Lots of people manage to wile away their working days talking about films without coming up with ideas for award-winning sitcoms, though. So how did these two 'total chancers' - their own phrase: Merchant introduces himself in similarly unflattering terms as 'a lanky, bespectacled West Country oik', and Gervais's pre-Office employment record includes spells as a traffic warden and singer of a doomed 'new romantic' pop group - come to hit upon such a paragon of televisual perfection?

'The reason we set it in an office and not an oil-rig is because we wanted to get the minutiae right,' Gervais explains. 'We wanted everyone to recognise the setting from the outset - the boredom of it, the sense of the clock ticking on the wall - so we could go deeper. The facts of what people actually do in The Office are about as important as Dad's Army being soldiers; it's the characters and what they're saying that are interesting.'

Although Merchant doesn't appear in the show, Brent's delusional sidekick Gareth Keenan sounds so like him that Mackenzie Crook - the actor who plays him - often finds himself getting congratulated for his work on the radio show Gervais and Merchant co-host on the London indie music station XFM. At Crook's audition he was advised to try saying his lines in Merchant's Bristolian accent. 'We think there's nothing funnier than a man from Reading onwards towards Bristol trying to be taken seriously,' Gervais explains compassionately. Merchant's rarely seen stand-up act is also based on this premise. 'I hope we haven't used that card up, though,' he says anxiously, 'because as a performer it's all I've got.'

The Office was originally developed from a 20-minute film of the David Brent character (once known, more generically, as 'Seedy Boss') which Gervais and Merchant had recorded for the latter's BBC training course in the summer of 1998.

In the three years it took to get it on to the screen with the painstaking attention to detail both felt was required, Gervais's career threatened to take off in other directions. He graduated from Channel 4's Eleven O'Clock Show - the same little-lamented launch pad which also gave the world Ali G - to presenting his own late-night chat show, Meet Ricky Gervais, in which he managed to offend more or less everyone by bombarding his guests with bigoted opinions (for example on Comic Relief's annual contribution to global charity: 'What did they do with last year's?') without letting anyone know that these were intended satirically.

One of the keys to success of The Office as opposed to the relative failure of Meet Ricky Gervais was the skilful way it employed the omnipresent docusoap format. The idea of having its central character followed around by a camera crew came about not so much as a response to what Gervais calls 'the zeitgeist of documentaries being made about everything', but because he insists 'doing it that way gives you more access to people's emotions and how they behave'.

'We liked the fact that David Brent is a normal person who when given his platform thinks, "This is it: I'm a philosopher! I'm the next Jane McDonald!" [the singing star of BBC TV's The Cruise], but he opens his mouth and he blows it.' Gervais pauses. 'When someone says, "You should meet Ted, he's the funniest bloke you'll ever meet", I can guarantee you that he won't be - he'll come up with one of those buzzer things in his hand and go [Gervais makes an irritating buzzer noise] and you'll go [he winces] "Isn't he great?"'

The feeling of embarrassment he describes has become ever more familiar over the past few years as traditions of British reserve have been washed away by the exhibitionist flood tide of reality TV. Earlier in the summer, The Office even spawned its own docusoap spin-off series - The Real Life of the Office - about a Swansea car hire firm whose boss made David Brent look like Albert Schweitzer. Needless to say, Gervais was delighted by this development, and quotes verbatim from a newspaper review of the profoundly disturbing programme that resulted: 'If Ricky Gervais was watching he'd probably have been flattered and saddened - flattered that he got everything right, and saddened that it changes nothing.'

Gervais pauses. 'But I love the fact that The Office changes nothing,' he insists. 'And all those people in offices who used to do impressions of Harry Enfield will now be doing impressions of David Brent.' It's often those who are most clearly the subject of satire who feel most compelled to embrace it. 'Of course the blind spot is dangerous,' Gervais nods sagely, 'and, by definition, you don't notice it.'

As to the exact nature of Gervais's own blind spot, it might be a kamikaze instinct for saying the worst thing imaginable in any situation, just to see what will happen (an unexpected trait, this, in a man who claims his only adrenaline surge comes from risks that involve excess consumption of dairy products).

Last autumn, going up to receive a British Comedy Award live on primetime ITV, Gervais decided it would be a good idea to 'run the risk of offending everyone in the country'. Accompanied to the podium by The Office's producer Ash Attalla, who is in a wheelchair, Gervais said Attalla 'wanted to make it clear that he is not a competition winner'. After an awkward pause, everybody laughed.

Did Attalla think this was funny? He seems to have done. 'I've worked with Ricky for four years,' the long-suffering producer says indulgently, 'and he's still more obsessed by my wheelchair than anyone else I know.'

But what about Gervais himself? Does he never worry about the moral impact getting away with this kind of thing might have on him? 'My mum,' he remembers fondly (his mother died two years ago), 'always used to say, "The worst thing that could happen to you when you go to the bookies, is that you win."' Ricky flashes his incisors. 'But I didn't really agree with her.'

'The Office' returns to BBC2 at the end of this month

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If there is a comedic equivalent of the alchemist's magic formula, it's the capacity to make an audience empathise with someone even as they behave in an indefensible manner. And as The Office went through a frenziedly acclaimed repeat screening and started to rack up well-deserved Baftas and British Comedy Awards, the bulk of the attention was naturally focused on Gervais.