Ricky Gervais

12/06/2009

The comedian reveals why he's planning a blue collar film version of The Office

Jane Graham

"I love the fact that stand-up is the last bastion of self censorship. There’s no filter, it’s your own morality in charge of that edit and nothing is lost in translation. But the main reason I do stand-up is it’s the best chance across all mediums of being as funny as you are in a pub with your mates.”

This statement, in response to a polite query about his new  tour, Science, kicking off in Glasgow in August, is typical of Ricky Gervais. Firstly, it’s two steps removed from the question I asked him, which was what ground Science would cover. Secondly, as a lifelong student of Marx (Groucho), Tony Hancock, Woody Allen and Larry David, he needs little encouragement to launch into one of his many theories of comedy. Thirdly, when all is said and done, for Ricky it’s all about being as funny as you can possibly be.

In his case, this is pretty damn funny. Unlike a lot of comedians, 48-year-old Gervais is a natural comic, with casual one-liners and needle-sharp observations flowing like free champagne through his conversation. Wit isn’t something he just turns on when he’s on duty. I knew him before 2001, when The Office turned him from a skint, work-shy radio producer at a small independent London radio station (Xfm) into an international star, and he was just as funny over a beer then as he is talking to me in a professional capacity now.

Despite his lack of any real success back in 1998 – his career had included brief stints as manager of Britpop casualties Suede and a close brush with rock stardom (his band of modern romantic Bowie-copyists Seona Dancing peaked at number 70 in the charts) – Gervais was one of the most sunny-natured people I had ever met.

He seemed entirely happy in his pokey flat with his long-term girlfriend Jane Fallon (who had produced the smash-hit TV show This Life) and was having fun at Xfm with his new friend and assistant Stephen Merchant, with whom he had started writing sketches and a sitcom based in Slough.

I remind him that in those days Merchant worked hard to discipline him when they wrote together, sometimes reining in his wildest ideas. “Oh yeah,” laughs Gervais, talking in the £3.5m Hampstead home he now shares with Fallon. “In the early days he’d have to say to me, ‘Rick, don’t have three sausages, you’ll fall asleep after lunch’.

"But now, unbelievably,  I’m the workaholic. I think it’s because I don’t want to die before I get all my ideas out. I started so late. And it takes me ages to get the ideas out because we write and produce and act and we worry about the font on the end of the DVD. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

It’s this attention to detail that marks Gervais out. As an observer of people – particularly socially inept, frustrated English people (and he would say that’s a hell of a lot of them) – both The Office and its 2005 follow-up Extras have shown him to be peerless within the world of the British sitcom.
Almost uniquely for a British TV comedy writer, he has always shied away from stereotypes and hyperbole as well as standard sitcom fallbacks like misunderstandings and double entendre, aiming instead to present nitpickingly-authentic portrayals of average folk, more akin to an Alan Bennett play than Fawlty Towers or even Alan Partridge.

“People ask me why I always go for the comedy of embarrassment,” he says. “Well, it’s because I haven’t got an ‘ism’. I’m not fighting against prejudice of any kind. When you’re in a nice safe society where you’re not being shot at and your firstborn isn’t dying, the worst thing that happens to you is rudeness or embarrassment.

“I feel sorry of people who make a fool of themselves. I don’t get embarrassed myself but if someone goes red I can’t bear it, I don’t know what to do.”

He is fascinated by middle-class morality and “the line between what we can and can’t laugh at”. When I mention the recent furore over a cartoon published while Stephen Hawking was hospitalised, advising that the motor neurone sufferer be “switched off and on again”, he laughs like a hyena and says: “People tell me, ‘Hawking is a genius, he’s used his mind so brilliantly’ and I say, ‘What choice did he have? Stephen, what would you like to do when you grow up? Be a striker for West Ham? Your choices are slim to none. What you want to be is a speaking clock’.”  

Despite his wickedness, like most great dramatists Gervais regards empathy as key to his creations. Not only must his characters – from David Brent to Bertram Pinkus, the “intelligent curmudgeon” who gave him his first Hollywood film lead last year in Ghost Town – be understood, they must be sympathised and cared for.

“Laughter is a curious process,” he explains. “It’s a celebration of life and how you feel at that moment. Someone could have the best lines ever but if I think that person is a c**t I won’t laugh. I’ve never liked comedians who dislike their characters or think that they’re above the comedy. David Brent’s worst crime is that he mistook popularity for respect. He’s not a monster, I think he’s alright.

“Comedy is so contextual. Jokes are irrelevant. We cut out loads of jokes in The Office – we thought they were too smart arse or they broke the realism. In the pilot, Tim was wisecracking with Brent. Then we thought – no, he shouldn’t be having a good time. Alienate him. Make Dawn his only joy. Make Dawn the only time he smiles. And that made the programme.”

It’s clear just how emotionally connected to his characters Gervais is – he speaks with fervour when he discusses their lives. I wonder if accusations he got sentimental and lost his edge in the last episodes of Extras or The Office bothered him. “No,” he says firmly and unsurprisingly.

“With The Office, I always knew we were going to do a happy ending. There were a couple of reasons. One – it’s not the ending. It’s just a flavour. They might not live happily ever after but who cares?

“I’m not going to go online like George Lucas and say [adopts a geeky weasel voice], ‘Chewbacca is now living on a tropical island’. There’s no afterlife for The Office. A film like The Graduate did it brilliantly – they just looked at each other on the bus and we knew there was a chance. In The Office, a woman said to Brent, ‘Call me’, he told Finchy to fuck off and Dawn walked back to Tim. I think the sentiment was entirely justified.”


Shown on BBC America, The Office came to the attention of Hollywood first through Simpsons writer Matt Groening (who invited Gervais to write and act in an episode of the cartoon) and Star Trek director JJ Abrams. As its cult status spread, it eventually gave Gervais and Merchant access to stars like Robert De Niro, Kate Winslet and Ben Stiller, all of whom appeared in Extras.

The comedy show was a BBC co-production with HBO, the subscription channel that made The Sopranos and The Wire. Gervais has always been very vocal about his love of American TV, holding up HBO’s output, along with Showtime’s Dexter and FX’s Damages, as examples of the kind of  “audacious, innovative” television that Britain isn’t making. He described this year’s Bafta winners as “the best of a bad bunch”.

“I don’t watch TV comedy in the UK anymore,” he admits. “We’ve got some poor copies of Curb Your Enthusiasm, some poor copies of Entourage and some poor copies of Seinfeld… with a few exceptions the Americans seem to be ahead of the game.”

Did he watch the Martin Clunes remake of the classic British sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin?

“I didn’t see it. I wouldn’t bother seeing it because the original was one of my favourite shows, it was perfect,” says Gervais. “Thinking about it, it must have been an influence on The Office and Extras – that existential dread, the futility, being surrounded by idiots and sycophants. A year ago I was asked to be in a remake of Arthur.  I said no immediately because I couldn’t fill Dudley Moore’s shoes [Russell Brand has now reportedly taken the role]. It’s a tough fight going up against Leonard Rossiter. Martin Clunes is a great comic actor, but he’s probably going to lose.”

Having spent the last few years acting (he can currently be seen in Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum 2 and will star in The Invention of Lying later this year), putting together his new stand-up show and releasing another record-breakingly popular podcast, Gervais has now turned his attention to working with Stephen Merchant on their first film together. He describes Cemetery Junction, based around insurance salesmen in 1970s England and set to star Ralph Fiennes, as “our blue collar Office” and beams with pride when he talks about it.

“There are a couple of things in the script that, in the read through with some of the actors, made me well up,” he tells me. “I thought it was so poignant.”
He’s inevitably faced something of a backlash in the UK since his supernova success, with critics claiming he can’t better The Office and accusing him of irritating ubiquity and smugness, but like the contented Ricky of old, he merely shrugs his shoulders when I mention the criticisms.  

“In Britain, it’s like you shouldn’t put your head too high above the other poppies,” he says. “I think it’s the way we’re brought up. Americans are told they can become the next president. English people are told, ‘It won’t happen to you’.  There’s a line we put into Cemetery Junction – when I was 18 I told my mum I wanted to go to France and she said, ‘There’s parts of Reading you haven’t seen’.” She wanted me to wander around Reading marking off the sights – seen it, seen it… ‘I’ve seen it all, can I go to France now?’ ‘You’re 78 Rick’.

“I know everything came from The Office, the ripples are still being felt. But as long as you don’t rest on your laurels too much, I think that’s okay. It makes me laugh when journalist have a go at something I’ve done by saying it’s not as good as The Office. I think, well I did The Office as well, that was me! Let’s all be judged on The Office!

“The truth is, I want this to last and as long as I think my work’s still good then I don’t mind if The Office is the best thing I ever do.”

Ricky Gervais performs his stand-up show, Science, at Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, on August 24. He is in Edinburgh Playhouse on August 25.