Ben Walters,
The Office.
London: BFI, 2005.
ISBN: 1 84457 091 6
184pp
£12 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI publications)

The Office has already proved itself a significant sitcom, which like Whatever happened to the likely lads? (BBC 1973-4) and Fawlty Towers (BBC 1975-1979) is often excruciating to watch. Ben Walters’ timely, engaging, and highly sophisticated reading of The Office is a promising start for the BFI’s new TV Classics series. Like their range of Film Classics, the book is sumptuously designed and illustrated, and moves beyond televisual analysis into areas as diverse as the history of British comedy, office interior design, sociology, and power structures. Instructive but never dry, the book’s impact comes from its ability to deconstruct the comedy that lies at the heart of virtually every scene of The Office.

By now a global phenomenon – remade in America (Walters’ print deadline gave him just enough time to analyse the first few Stateside episodes), The Office has recently found a new life in Germany and France. The spin-offs have cemented its zeitgeist potential – Wernham Hogg stationery, mobile phone ring tones, David Brent’s faux management training videos, shelf loads of DVDs – and Walters’ book is a welcome addition to discussions and debates about the importance of The Office.

The structure of the book is especially strong. Before engaging in any textual or televisual analysis, Walters opens the book with “Origins”. Here, he traces The Office‘s journey from unpromising pilot to the series premiere in 2001 through interviews with the main players – BBC controllers, commissioning editors, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Walters implicitly makes the point throughout this opening section that very few people ever believed that the programme would reach the level of critical and commercial acclaim that it has.

The second section, “Welcome to Wernham Hogg”, is the strongest – a sustained reading of the series that treats many of the elements of the series with a rigour and a technique that characterises the very best of the BFI Film Classics approaches. Walters sets out his theoretical stall early, analysing the programme’s docusoap antecedents, and exploring the artifice and art behind mockumentary. Although many of the show’s attributes – the pompous central character, and the workplace milieu – are stock sitcom motifs, Walters also suggests that by adopting the docusoap aesthetic, much of the show’s comedy is mined from the characters’ attempts to analyse themselves, hence making their self-awareness deficiencies painfully clear. He argues that docusoap offers “the added bonus of characters being able to express their fears and aspirations directly to the camera [leading to] the wholesale embrace of the camera” (64). And in The Office, no-none embraces that camera more wholeheartedly than David Brent, played by co-writer/director Ricky Gervais.

Indeed, the camera is an important device in The Office, breaking through the fourth wall on a number of occasions to bring the pathos, the disappointment and the misunderstandings of the narrative into sharp focus. Walters suggests that the camera’s framing of Venetian blinds and wire-mesh grids in The Office are extensions of this sense of claustrophobia and constriction that run through the series, and also provides examples of how different characters interact with the camera in different ways – Finchy, for example, “look[s] confidently to the camera after telling jokes”, while Brent’s eyes “stay fixed on it, daring us to look away, as if from a beggar on the street” (70).

Walters is also skilled at analysing the highly institutionalised configurations inherent in the programme’s mise en scène and structure. Writing that the layout of The Office setting suggests an innocuous watered-down version of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Walters deftly introduces the notions of surveillance and eavesdropping which define the show’s characters and their actions.

Brent is frequently labelled “The Boss From Hell”, and while Walters is quick to point out his self-serving, monstrous hyperactivity as well as his almost sociopathic desire to prove to others that he is considerate, urbane and droll, the author is also at pains to point out that Brent and the rest of Wernham Hogg might well be Blairite Britain in microcosm. Although he doubts that “late-capitalist economic practice [is] responsible for David Brent being a prat” (140), Walters does quote at length sociologist Richard Sennett’s compelling argument that “power is present in the superficial sense of teamwork, but authority is absent” (141). In other words, Walters suggests, the humour derived from bickering over staplers or nonsensical corporate double-speak is inextricably bound up with issues of power, aspiration and a need for approval: issues that have traditionally defined British sitcom characters from Perrin to Fawlty to Bucket.

Other sidetracks include a discussion about characters’ awareness of the camera which segues nicely into a sequence examining the relationship between subject and camera in groundbreaking British television comedy. Tracing these discussions via Candid Camera (1976), Mrs. Merton Show (1995-1998), Trigger Happy (2000-1), Walters also refers to Brass Eye (1997, 2001), a show in which famous subjects “willingly approached the camera with the assumption of mastery […] the mere fact of being filmed seemed to offer sufficient reassurance of the legitimacy of their causes espoused” (98). And so when Brent, during the “Comic Relief” episode, suggests that a donations phone number runs across the screen, he is unwittingly subscribing to the very faux-earnestness that Morris seeks to demolish.
Overall, then, a nearly flawless achievement. Walters’ end product reads like a guidebook; a useful accompaniment to a generation-defining programme that continues to be watched on DVD and cable repeats. With his encyclopaedic knowledge and jaunty writing style, Walters’ key achievement is to reject theoretical pomposity (there’s scarcely an -ism to be found) and nerdish triviality, and focus instead on the underlying concepts and pleasures of this remarkable series.

Benjamin McCann
University of Adelaide, Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 23 November 2006