WHEN I first watched The Office, I was open-mouthed. I’ve worked in placed like this, I thought. I’ve sat at those desks, indulged in that innuendo-laden banter, sat through those awkward appraisals and danced around the filing cabinets at those office parties. I couldn’t believe how true to life it was.
BY Helen Mead
I spent many years working in offices – some could have doubled up as The Office’s Wernham Hogg paper company. And the characters – well, us office workers have met them all before, many times.
The beauty of The Office – which first aired 25 years ago – is that anyone who has worked in an office will be able to find something or someone they can relate to. The idea came from British comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, who drew from their experience working in office jobs, including with temping agencies.
In my twenties I worked in Civil Service and local authority offices in London and Yorkshire, and spent a year working as an office temp, working in companies from publishers to insurance companies, engineers and commodity traders.
Every element of The Office was there, from bonkers bosses to staff romances, cringeworthy training courses and awkward appraisals.
Most people have at some point worked for a boss who may not be a carbon copy of The Office’s David Brent, but displays many of his traits – attention-seeking, insecure, arrogant, blokeish. Middle management is awash with them.
I worked for one man who struggled to explain what the department actually did. He called female staff ‘girlies’ and sniggered as he asked us to ‘come into my office for a bit of envelope stuffing.’ He was the closest boss to the toe-curling Brent that I came across, but it was a tight-run thing. In some of the offices I worked in, it was common for people like him to be promoted over better qualified employees.
Actors Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook, who reunited to commemorate 25 years since The Office launched in the UK. Photo: BBC/PA (Image: BBC/PA Wire)
Over the years there have been other TV comedies set in offices – The IT Crowd, The Thick of It, Parks and Recreation, to name a few – but none have felt so plausible. It may be a so-called mockumentary, but there will be people out there who at first believed they were watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary. I was one of them.
In one office I worked in we had our own Finchy – Chris Finch, Wernham Hogg’s innuendo-spewing womaniser. Like Finchy, our alpha male rep worked out in the field and popped in once or twice a week to great fanfare. People seemed to be in awe of him and he got away with murder. When I first watched The Office, I was convinced that he had been the inspiration – the two were so similar.
And all offices have a Gareth. A jobsworth – male or female – who sucks up to the boss and thinks nothing of telling tales. Of limited capabilities, they stab people in the back to look good and claim other people’s ideas as their own. They are everywhere, in all industries.
The Office Christmas party took me back to the best office party I’ve ever attended, at the Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys in London’s Kingsway. It had all the ingredients – managers’ embarrassing dance moves, couples drunken fumblings under desks, fisticuffs and lots of fun. Wernham Hogg replicated it to a tee.
Then there’s the office staple, the photocopier, acting as a focus for awkward workplace interactions – just like in real life, only nowadays it would be the water cooler.
One thing I learned from my office years was that, whatever the business, the personnel are essentially the same.
The Office is utterly brilliant. I only wish I’d thought of it first.
