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events extra
office politics
When Ricky Gervais swapped Slough for Manhattan, he wowed BAFTA East Coast. Board member Jill Hawkins reports on the importance of retaining a unique voice.
In the perpetual conundrum of what will ‘fly’ in America there is often only frustration and incomprehension at the weird taste buds of Americans who so love Britain but can’t seem to stomach the food or watch its TV programmes.
Sometimes, though, a true original makes a break across the ocean. It finds a niche so perfect- ly suited to its nature that it just leaps across language and cul- tural divides.
Such is The Office, that sly wise child of a series that slid onto BBC America this year and has swiftly attained cult status. There is talk of an NBC series or an HBO pilot.
But why? Isn’t it like trying to capture English summer lightning in a bottle? Is the more urbane audience in cable any more like- ly to ‘get it’ than the broader, more fragmented, demographi- cally challenged broadcast net- works’ audiences whose taste buds are so hopelessly stale noth- ing can tempt them?
The answer is neither, because HBO and NBC are simply trying to capture their own American light- ning in a bottle, not showcase The (Slough) Office. As Couplings recent UK-scripted demise rein- forces, there’s no greater barrier between us than the language
we share and the cultures we don’t get.
It’s only right then, that land- ing on BBC America, as it did, a digital channel only seen by a minority of pro Brit/expatriate New Yorkers (though available right across the US), The Office plays out best against the subur- ban landscape of Ground Force and Changing Rooms. There it has found a grateful audience more attuned to the idiosyn- crasies of Ab Fab’s Patsy and Eddie than it ever could jostling for the narrow cultural spaces of PBS or A&E.
This series, which so painfully nails the stereotypic Brits lined up in its unblinking sights, works because it is so joyfully, cynically the soul child of a unique British point of view.
It should be banned from changing its accent or any part of its basic soul. Become a resi- dent by all means, but don’t change its citizenship. Like Ab Fab, Fawlty Towers, and Monty Python, it embraces a unique world of borderline cranks living in what passes for the real world.
Just as M*A*S*H before it took the painful post-Vietnam road to Korea with an acerbic point-of- view that concealed its true metaphor (it can ding you into
tears and make you squirm in one breath), this is a true original, a cultural phenomenon that trav- els because it is what it is.
Ricky Gervais’s appearances in Manhattan in October were the stuff of legend, flying from cultural pillars (David Letterman and the arts section of The New York Times) to a Tribeca outpost where a BAFTA audience greeted his arrival like the second coming.
A 45-minute improvisation only underscored his cult status. You know a cult when you see it because everyone asks deep and penetrating character ques- tions and plot queries, confusing as much as they enlighten the unenlightened.
Still the splendid BBC America- sponsored evening felt like the end of the affair. The show is over, the cult has arrived and the talk was about making it in America. Still the Holy Grail. But before the rush to Americanise The Office is done it is worth recalling that the most successful series that made the transition never left home.
Not one. All of them were remarkable in that every episode was the work of their creators, who knew their characters and who they were and whose expe- rience resonated with their made-for audiences.
NBC had better find its own unique voice and Ricky and Stephen Merchant should sit down and not interfere. If The Office is going to move homes to New York (or LA), that voice had better have a genuine grievance against cubicle world.
And it had better be located in a Staples in Astoria, or Newark, not nowhereland LA, and those losers in the back there had bet- ter be following the Mets! But then they won’t understand that in Slough.
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Photos l-r: BAFTA Board Member and organiser of the event, Gillian Rose with Ricky Gervais on stage and Ricky enjoying stardom in the US