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March 26, 2005

The New Office

I noticed today that 'The Office', the American version, hit the screens for the first time in the States this week. It will be interesting to see how a show, based on a British format, will fare with mixed recent success.

If you take 'Pop Idol', 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' and 'Big Brother', there have been signs of transatlantic success for some British made television formats. Of course there have been some failures, most notably 'Coupling' and 'Men Behaving Badly', but the early signs have been encouraging. The original British made version, based in the depressing outskirt London town of Slough, with politically incorrect paper boss David Brent, has been a success on BBC America, winning a Golden Globe last year.

There have been 'lost in translation' problems previously when British comedies have been exported before. 'The Office', relies on generating 'wincing laughs'. By combining office characters that say and do all the wrong things, it hopes you will laugh at the sad, pathetic boss, who comes out with statements like these:-

"My proudest moment here was'nt when I increased profits by 17%, or cut expenditure without losing a single member of staff. No. It was a young Greek guy, first job in the country, hardly spoke a word of English, but he came to me and he went "Mr Brent, will you be the Godfather to my child?". Didn't happen in the end. We had to let him go, he was rubbish. He was rubbish!?"

Or the times the whole office looks on in dismay, as he cracks jokes that only he laughs at:-

"My parents had a paper shop, until it blew away."

But the funniest element of the office is portraying a manager who seemingly has not regard for anyone else, but himself. Combine this disregard for others with his shallow attempts at humour, and you get the following situations.

“I have got some good news and some bad news. The bad news, well, I have got to make you all redundant, the good news? I'm getting a promotion"

The office is a spoof documentary, made to look like it is set in a real office. And maybe, this is where some of the humour has been lost. When you have people complaining that David Brent is a ‘cruel man’ and a 'bad manager' its seems some of irony has been lost. Of course he is a bad manager, it's just this is spoof comedy documentary, poking fun at the office culture and the politically correct views enforced on us within society.

Which reminds me. I need to take a photo of the David Brent look a like in my office. Dead Ringer.


  • The original office (sample clip from the BBC)


  • David Brent



  • The new Office, clips from the NBC website


  • The new show...

    2 Comments:

    • At 10:55 pm, Blogger she said…

      jesus h christ. what the hell did you do?

       
    • At 11:28 pm, Blogger coops said…

      Well,

      I'm a bit ill (nothing serious, just bloke flu), so can't do too much, so I was that bored. I started to try to see how blogger works, taking it to bits. In my top 100 about me things, there was a 'like to take things apart without being able to put them back together bit..... need I say more.

       

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