Stars: Ricky Gervais, Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook, Lucy Davis, Robin Hooper, Sally Bretton, Joel Beckett, Oliver Chris, Stirling Gallacher, Patrick Baladi

Director: Ricky Gervais

Summary: A documentary film crew follows David Brent, regional manager of the Slough branch of Paper Merchants, Wernham Hogg as he and his 'team' go about their business. As David works he manages to alienate, belittle, embarrass and offend just about everyone who works with him... Features the episodes 'Downsize', Work Experience', 'The Quiz', 'Training' 'New Girl' and 'Judgement'. In 'Series 2' David and his team are joined by employees from Swindon following the merger of the two branches. Much to David's dismay he has a new boss, Neil, who is very popular with the others. Features all the episodes from the second series of the popular television comedy.

Both series of the award-winning spoof fly-on-the-wall docu-comedy set in the offices of Wernham Hogg, a Slough paper merchants. Ricky Gervais' excruciatingly funny portrayal of the tragically inept manager David Brent drew favourable comparisons with John Cleese's role in Fawlty Towers, and THE OFFICE is assured a similar place in the hall of fame of UK comedy. Whether dealing with his overly officious sidekick Gareth, the engaged yet lovelorn receptionist Dawn or Tim the disillusioned sales rep, handling the opposite sex, the potential redundancies as the imminent merging of two branches looms or the ultimate office cliche--the training day--Brent never fails to demonstrate his desperate inadequacies. The merger has taken place by series 2 and Brent has new faces to impress and bosses of his own to contend with. The Swindon staff are a more professional group than his own, one is black and another is in a wheelchair. They inevitably fall victim to his naive and thoughtless prejudice.

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It feels both inaccurate and inadequate to describe The Office as a comedy. On a superficial level, it disdains all the conventions of television sitcoms: there are no punch lines, no jokes, no laugh tracks and no cute happy endings. More profoundly, it's not what we're used to thinking of as funny. Most of the fervently devoted fan base that the programme acquired watched with a discomfortingly thrilling combination of identification and mortification. The paradox is that its best moments are almost physically unwatchable.

Set in the offices of a fictional Slough paper merchant, The Office is filmed in the style of a reality television programme. The writing is subtle and deft, the acting wonderful and the characters beautifully drawn: the cadaverous team leader Gareth, a paradigm of Andy McNab's readership; the monstrous sales rep, Chris Finch; and the decent but long-suffering everyman Tim, whose ambition and imagination have been crushed out of him by the banality of the life he dreams uselessly of escaping. The show is stolen, as it was intended to be, by insufferable office manager David Brent, played by cowriter Ricky Gervais. Brent will become a name as emblematic for a particular kind of British grotesque as Alan Partridge or Basil Fawlty, but he is a deeper character than either. Partridge and Fawlty are exaggerations of reality, and therefore safely comic figures. Brent is as appalling as only reality can be. --Andrew Mueller

On the DVD: Series 1 is tastefully packaged as a two-disc set appropriately adorned with John Betjeman's poem "Slough". The special features occupy the second disc and consist of a laid-back 39-minute documentary entitled "How I Made The Office by Ricky Gervais", with cowriter Stephen Merchant and the cast contributing. Here we discover that Gervais spends his time on set "mucking around and annoying people", and that actress Lucy Davis (Dawn) is the daughter of Jasper Carrott; as well as seeing parts of the original short film and the original BBC pilot episode; plus we get to enjoy many examples of the cast corpsing throughout endless retakes. There are also a handful of deleted scenes, none of which were deleted because they weren't funny.

Series 2 is a single-disc release, but the extra features are enjoyable nonetheless. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant feature in a gleefully shambolic video diary--highlights of which include Gervais flicking elastic bands at his cowriter and taping their editor to his swivel chair. The ubiquitous Gervais also mockingly introduces some outtakes (mostly of him corpsing throughout dozens of takes) and a series of deleted scenes, notably of Gareth arriving in his horrendous cycle shorts. --Mark Walker

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Documentary - 1. HOW I MADE THE OFFICE, Deleted Scenes, Out-takes, Pilot and Pre-Pilot footage, Cast Interviews, Full Length Peter Purvis Staff Training Video, Documentary - 1. Behind The Scenes, Hilarious Out-takes, Original Pilot Episode
Year:	2001
Release Date:	April 5, 2004
Runtime:	396 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	B B C D V D 1514
Keywords:	Comedy, Box, General, Series, Office, Set, Tv
Genre:	Comedy