The Office exploded the sitcom format and made stars of complete unknowns. On its 10th birthday, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant remember the “terrible fight” to get it right. Paul Whitelaw investigates.

At 9.30pm on Monday 9 July 2001, BBC2 quietly unveiled a new sitcom set in the unpromising environs of a Slough paper merchants.

Scroll on a decade and The Office is one of the most critically acclaimed sitcoms of all time, recipient of numerous major awards and a seemingly never-ending slew of foreign adaptations, including the hit US version starring Steve Carell, and branches as far afield as Israel and Quebec (where the regional manager at Les Papiers Jennings is one David Gervais).

But more important than The Office’s remarkable success is the content and style of the show itself, which although not quite as revolutionary as some overzealous critics have claimed, advanced an unflinching “realist” approach to British sitcom first explored by the likes of People Like Us and The Royle Family. Its novice writer/directors Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant didn’t invent the mockumentary format – they’ve always been open about their debt to This Is Spinal Tap – but they honed it in The Office to a ruthless degree.

Filtering their own experiences and anxieties into rounded characters such as overbearingly delusional boss and self-styled “chilled out entertainer” David Brent (an extraordinary performance from Gervais in his first acting role) and frustrated everyman Tim Canterbury, they delivered, over just 14 episodes, an excruciatingly funny, acutely observed and emotionally resonant hymn to the foibles of human nature.

“It was more than just a sitcom,” says Gervais, almost as an afterthought, when I meet him and Merchant in their modest Hampstead office. Ironic self-aggrandisement is part of Gervais’ comic artillery, but he’s patently sincere when he says this, and I’m inclined to agree.

Everyone remembers the obvious comic highlights such as Brent, echoing Gervais’s own past as a failed musician, hijacking a training-day exercise to perform songs by his defunct rock band (the perfectly named Foregone Conclusion), or his demented dance fusing “Flashdance and MC Hammer shit” in what has since become The Office’s own “Del Boy falls through the bar” moment.

But it was the desperation of the pitiable Brent, and the stolen-glance yearning between Tim and receptionist Dawn, that elevated the series and gave it its heart. The chance of these characters attaining any kind of happiness seemed remote, since failure felt embedded within the show’s muted fibres, until the final Christmas episode when its creators sought to remind us that life doesn’t always disappoint.

Beneath the unrelenting embarrassment, the insurmountable drudge, The Office had soul. Its impact was such that, for several years afterwards, an attitude prevailed that the traditional sitcom was obsolete (happily, it wasn’t). But it remains one of the defining 455 minutes in British TV comedy, an achievement of which its creators are justifiably proud. “It was the first thing I tried my hardest at,” admits Gervais, “and I’ve been addicted ever since – between the hours of eleven and three.”

The prototype for The Office was a short comedy that Stephen directed for a BBC training course in 1998, in which Ricky played Brent in all but name. How did that lead you to getting your own series three years later?

Ricky Gervais: Steve gave it to Paul Jackson, who was the BBC’s head of comedy, and he loved it. He then handed it to [legendary comedy producer] Jon Plowman – now these were all names that were new to us, I literally didn’t know anyone, I wasn’t in the biz. And we were called in for a meeting with Jon Plowman, who said, “Do you think this could be a sitcom?” Luckily I said yes. It was one of those things that you’d always dreamed of, but I’d have never got around to it unless an external force fell in my lap. I was just the least ambitious person in the world.

And how did two relative unknowns end up getting complete creative control over a BBC sitcom?

RG: There was a hairy meeting early on where we decided that I was going to be in it, and we were going to write and direct it. I remember saying to Jon Plowman, “It’s either that or nothing at all.” And after the meeting Steve went, “Rick, in future can I do the talking?” He thought he’d be living in a car, because of my bravado. But although I meant it, it wasn’t bravado, it was naivety. I look back now and think, wow. But the other thing was that in the meantime I’d shown that tape around, and Channel 4 wanted it if the BBC said no. So it wasn’t blind bravery. We knew we had the choice to do it our way or not at all.

Stephen Merchant: Also it was cheap to make, so they didn’t really care.

So you went from being quite unambitious to extremely single-minded in terms of quality and control?

RG: I want either no responsibility or one hundred per cent, I don’t want this middle shit. If I’m in charge, I’m in charge. I never fear that.

Given that you had no acting experience, were you at all daunted about taking on a central role, especially one as emotionally demanding as David Brent?

RG: I didn’t find it daunting at all. You can either do it or you can’t, and I just felt very comfortable with it. If someone had said to me, “Direct The Matrix”, I wouldn’t have slept. If someone had asked me to do somebody else’s lines, I wouldn’t have slept, because I’m scared of letting someone else down. I can’t stand the thought of that.

SM: I don’t think you realised how epic the job was, in a way. If we sat down and said you’re going to have to get to a point where you’re crying, that probably would’ve seemed more daunting. But it wasn’t that, because every day was spent just trying to nail each gag.

Was there ever any doubt that it should be shot as a documentary?

RG: No. Being a fake documentary was so important, because without that it was a bunch of people not doing much. But as soon as you turn that camera on you know that David Brent is trying to be famous, it explains everything. You know that he’s got this need, this insatiable desire to be loved, so it explains his behaviour. It came out of this big spate of documentaries in the 1990s, where normal people started to become famous just for being at work in a hotel or whatever. And that fascinated us. When we came out people wanted to go to Beckingham Palace more than Buckingham Palace, there was a new aspiration, a new class, which was celebrity. And Brent wanted to be a celebrity, a TV philosopher, a comedian.

The understated performances and pallid aesthetic of The Office were key to its success, not only as a comedy but as a convincing fake documentary. Did you work hard on getting that right?

SM: The realism became almost like a neurosis, we were so paranoid about it not seeming real. That can drive you insane after a while, because you’ve got to remember that this is still a comedy.

RG: But I think it felt real because we weren’t writers and directors, so all we did was emulate something. And what we emulated was real life more than things we’d seen on TV. So we deliberately made it stifling, we put the lights too bright, we turned down the colour, we put the green up on Gareth. We did all these subliminal things that no one’s noticed, but they might’ve felt it. I also knew that this thing of turning to the camera, hitting your marks: that’s not how I acted when I worked in an office. That’s how people on telly act. And we’ve sort of been slaves to realism ever since. It wasn’t just about being funny or crazy, we cut out an awful lot of gags that we thought were a bit too surreal or convenient or got in the way of the love story or undermined the realism.

So you set yourselves some strict rules?

RG: When you find out you’ve got to write a sitcom, your natural instinct is to make it a bit like something you’d seen on the telly. And you have to fight that, it has to come from real experience. It’s not that we were trying to be different for the sake of it, but we always had this thing of, why do you have to do it that way? Just because everyone else did? What we didn’t feel we had to do was give them a sitcom on a plate. Why do you have to do it in front of a live audience? Why do there have to be laughter tracks? I don’t care whether you laugh in the right places or not. Why does it have to be a vehicle for a well-known actor? And why couldn’t there be a 12-part trajectory, why does it have to begin and end in the same place? Why can’t it be more filmic, more like a soap opera with laughs and drama?

SM: Friends was doing that at the time, but over here the BBC were weirdly resistant to it. They were worried about it having a narrative across the series.

RG: The great thing about doing it as a documentary is that you don’t only take the characters through an emotional journey, you take the audience through it with them. It was really important to us that events and characters were seen to change. Brent couldn’t learn completely from his mistakes, the bomb must never go off, but within that you can find new sides of people.

The scene where Brent begs for his job back is surprisingly powerful. Did you feel confident writing those dramatic moments?

RG: There are some characters that you can’t really redeem. You could with Brent because he was always real – the fact that he was having this midlife crisis, there was always a darkness there. It doesn’t matter what the character is, if you can invest them with reality then you can have those moments.

SM: But there’s always got to be a trade-off. If you’re still making it as funny as it could be then you’re diffusing the drama and the tension of it, because if you’re laughing you’re in good spirits, you don’t want to be brought down. It’s like Woody Allen talking about his films in a sense getting less funny the better they became, because they’re striving for bigger emotions.

RG: Also, it’s like what Bruce Springsteen said about Darkness On The Edge Of Town, he was so naive he didn’t realise that if he made one thing louder, relatively everything else was quieter. He kept turning everything up until he realised, no, you need less to make everything louder.

Was it difficult finding actors who understood exactly what you were trying to do with The Office?

RG: It was terrifying. With a fake documentary it only takes one person letting the side down, being too broad or looking a bit sitcommy, and the whole thing is gone. It takes you out of the whole feel of the show.

SM: I remember us saying, “There are no actors capable of doing this, we’re going to have to get real people off the street.”

RG: We’ve said that about 20 times in our career. But you just keep looking, because there’s always someone out there. The problem is that casting directors have a little black book that they use all the time. And it’s terrible for an actor working with us, because if they’ve been in anything before, we don’t want them. We don’t want baggage, we want the person in our head, and it’s a terrible fight to get that across. We had this rule, we never said, “That’ll do.” Even if we thought someone had the part and we only had six weeks to go, we wouldn’t tell them they had it, we’d keep looking. And nine times out of ten we found someone better at the last moment. It was like with Mackenzie [Crook, who played jobsworth Gareth to unctuous perfection], someone else had that role until he walked through.

SM: But also Mackenzie was someone who looked completely different to how we’d envisaged the character.

RG: Gareth was going to be this sort of tough bloke who’d do press-ups at a party and be a bit tasty, but when this eight-stone man walked in saying that he could kill a guy, it was hilarious. It turns the character into a bit of a sad fantasist.

The Office probably contains more references to other comedies than any other sitcom, particularly since David Brent regards himself as a professional comic. It’s a comedy about comedy itself, isn’t it?

RG: Exactly, and I think it was the first to do that – and, yes, there are echoes of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, Ali G, Enfield, Vic And Bob, Lenny Henry, Dawn French, The Two Ronnies and Sorry! – “Language, Timothy!”, Kenny Everett, Fawlty Towers, Spike Milligan. Everything in it is about what’s good, what’s funny, what’s acceptable, popularity versus respect. We’d seen sitcoms where characters made a joke and everyone laughed, it was a zinger. But how many times have you made a joke where they didn’t hear you properly, or they didn’t get it or you said it wrong? That aftermath is what we used on Brent, and that’s where the camera really came in, because it showed his pain. And all I had to do when I was embarrassed was look at the camera like this [does Brent’s caught-in-the-headlights stare], and for people sitting at home, that’s huge, it’s massive. They go, “Oh my God, I can’t help you.”

SM: And also the value of humour, being funny, being able to make jokes, everyone desires that. Good sense of humour is a dating prerequisite. So the idea of someone who thinks they’re funny but isn’t is an interesting source of comedy.

RG: Especially in Britain, our entire sociability is based on being a laugh. But when that’s mixed with desperation in Brent, he isn’t really having a laugh, he’s saying, “Do you love me?” He’s one of those people who doesn’t want to go through the rigmarole of getting to know you, he just wants a calling card that says: Funniest Bloke In The Room. And if you just said he was, he’d be fine, that’s all he needs.

As seen in the famous Training episode, Brent also regards himself as a gifted songwriter. The great thing about a song like Freelove Freeway is that it’s dreadful, but it’s not too dreadful. It’s believably bad. Again, was that about getting the balance right between comedy and realism?

RG: Yes, because they’re not spoof songs, they’re tasteless songs and they’re by a man who shouldn’t be playing them. Even if they were brilliant, you shouldn’t have a 40-year-old man interrupting a training scheme that he’s organised, just to show that he was in a pop band once.

SM: And Freelove Freeway is a catchy song! I feel like you could rework it slightly with better lyrics and a more obvious pop star singer and it could be a hit.

RG: It’s also that it’s fantasy. It’s David Brent who works in Slough singing about going across New Mexico picking up chicks. It’s so not his world! But the reason that episode’s my favourite, apart from some of my favourite lines – “I think there’s been a rape up there!” – is that we loved Tim putting his feelings for Dawn out there. And once that’s out there you can never take it back, and that was huge narratively. There was a lot happening in that episode, we’re very proud of the mix.

The romance between Tim and Dawn was one of the major emotional through-lines in The Office. Were you worried that it could have tipped over into schmaltz, particularly with the feel-good finale?

SM: We talked about that for such a long time, it was a hard, hard slog. But we always knew from the beginning that they were going to get together. That wasn’t a late decision, so from the moment we started writing we were always planting that outcome.

RG: And the cynicism that people thought we had for the show really worked in our favour. I think The Office is the least cynical show, same with Extras. I don’t think we’ve ever done anything cynical, it just looks like that. But I remember worrying about so many things about the final episode, like how does Brent suddenly become aware? We finally got it down to this one moment where [his date for the office Christmas party] told him he doesn’t need to try too hard. That’s all he needed. Because I’ve had bosses like that, they try too hard, and you want to say to them, “You’re alright, let’s go for a pint. You don’t need to be ‘on’ all the time. I like you anyway.”

SM: Doing it in a documentary style became a hindrance in some ways, but one of its benefits is small moments like that become huge. All the drama in The Office is small and insular. And the documentary style makes the touch of an arm between Dawn and Tim much more charged than it would in a regular show, where you could show them shagging secretly in a cupboard. Not being able to show that stuff heightens the more emotional moments.

Why do you think The Office clicked in the way it did?

RG: I like to think that all the intuitive moves we made were good decisions. We took care over the writing. No one takes three years to write a sitcom.

SM: The one thing I was most confident of was that we had accurately reflected the offices we’ve experienced. If you’d ever worked in an office you would watch this and recognise it. That was what we set out to do and that was what we achieved. Every office we’d seen in a comedy was just a backdrop to zany antics, but no one was really using the environment and what it does to people. People squabbling over chairs and hiding staplers seemed so rich to us.

Can you detect its influence in anything that’s followed in the last decade?

SM: I’m not sure, but I think some people maybe think that it’s easy to do a comedy without proper jokes. People might think that nothing seems to be happening here, so all we need to do is act really real and that will be sufficient. But I like to think there’s a lot of paddling beneath the water going on in that show. It’s not just about the naturalism.

Do you think the worldwide popularity of The Office, whether it’s your original or the umpteen adaptations, is partly because its themes are so universal?

RG: Absolutely. I think on the face of it, it looks like a very quintessentially parochial, English piece. But it’s not, the themes are the great themes: a decent job at work, a decent relationship and making a difference. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, those are the things that matter. Everything else is a backdrop. It doesn’t matter that they were selling paper, it doesn’t matter that it was in Slough. Slough is the least important thing about it. The reason it was in Slough is that it was slightly influenced by the poem by Betjeman [“Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!”] and that world of middleness, middle management, Middle England, middle-aged. You’re in the middle and then you die. It doesn’t matter where you go. There are people in NASA now going, “Why’s he got a bigger chair? Oh God, he chews with his fucking mouth open. Hello, Houston?”