The Office

"This book tells the story of how something with the most unlikely origins, something that started off with a tiny little mini-pilot made by the BBC, became something that is now in, I think, its eighth season in America, with different versions in India, Latin America, Japan, and all around the world. There were two really big, good ideas in the creation of The Office . The first was Stephen [Merchant] and Ricky [Gervais]’s original idea to examine incompetent bosses’ cooptation of management-speak, and the ridicule this subjects them to at the hands of their employees. Then there was the BBC’s decision to allow the guys who thought of this to direct it themselves; that was the second good idea. They had directed only one five-minute film in the past, but they were given a prime-time TV series to direct on their own. Their idea had found a soft landing place in the BBC’s comedy department. It was BBC2’s job to find new comedy. We had a very high tolerance for things that didn’t immediately stick, but that we thought were great. When we were proud of them, we were able to really promote them to a huge audience – that’s one of the wonders of the BBC’s position: it’s a soft landing place for new ideas. The Office took the whole of the first series to gain an audience. Whether in another system it would have been given a second series, given that the audience really did struggle with it the first time, I don’t know. That is the wonder of the BBC. In the American system, things have to gain traction very quickly for them to continue – if the audience figures are terrible, the financial imperative means the broadcaster just has to bail. On the other hand, one of the other things that Steven Johnson talks about in his book is the adjacent possible. The Office started at exactly the moment when people were starting to use computers at work – not only to work, but also to send messages and have fun. The Office became, for obvious reasons, the bored office worker’s weapon of choice against people they worked for whom they didn’t necessarily appreciate. I remember my husband coming home and telling me how in his office he’d seen little jpegs of David Brent being passed around by the assistants with the message, ‘Remind you of anybody?’ And I thought, ‘Yes! This means it’s going to work.’ Five years before, it probably wouldn’t have happened."