'I told Ricky Gervais to f**k off': The inside story of The Office

There was neither fanfare nor much in the way of expectation to accompany a new television series called The Office when it debuted on BBC Two on 9 July, 2001. Billed as a “documentary-style sitcom”, it was so deadpan, and its comedy so bleak, that few knew quite what to make of it. Was it supposed to be… funny?

“A summer stinker,” decried the Evening Standard review. Of the ingratiating lead character, David Brent, the newspaper wrote: “A bore in homeopathic doses can be hilarious, but a bore in real time remains simply a bore.”

Its focus was the people who worked at Wernham Hogg, a small paper merchant company in the commuter town of Slough, all of whom – bickering colleagues Tim and Gareth, wan receptionist Dawn, a vacant accountant called Keith – seemed either terminally bored or terminally frustrated. Any action that occurred revolved primarily around the photocopier. Only Brent himself brought actual incident, a man of exaggerated mannerisms, and who continually offered direct-to-camera witticisms he thought highly amusing.

If the reviews weren’t universally positive – and in the main they were determinedly lacklustre – then others were convinced they’d just witnessed a generational game changer. Into this latter camp fell Kenton Allen, a successful producer of television comedy, with credits including The Royle Family, Rev and Mum. He’d watched that first episode with his eyes on stalks.

“It felt like nothing less than a massive tectonic shift in the comedy firmament,” he says. “Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. Everything about it was new and fresh. It was shot documentary-style, its characters continually broke the fourth wall, and there was this purity to it that made I’m Alan Partridge seem old-fashioned in comparison.”

“The default setting for the comedy producer is to absolutely hate other comedy shows, and with this, I was the green-eyed monster. I knew what it was, but didn’t want to admit it: a masterpiece.”

The Office celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Created by comparative newcomers Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, who had written the pilot as part of a BBC training scheme encouraging new writers into television, it became not only the most successful comedy of its era, but also the most influential. Without it, shows like This Country and People Just Do Nothing would never have been commissioned, while the American actor Steve Carell – who appeared in the American remake, now among the most-beloved TV shows of all time – might still be awaiting his big break. The show’s format sold into 15 territories around the world. There are now David Brent equivalents on screen in Chile, Israel and India.

“I haven’t watched them all, no,” Stephen Merchant told me in 2025. “Lots of people are doing cover versions of ‘Wonderwall’, but Noel Gallagher isn’t listening to them all, is he?”

The Office subverted everything we thought we knew about comedy, and remade it in its own image. In tone and language, it felt closer to an existential howl at the sheer misery of the 9-to-5 existence. While in highlighting the difficulties of working with other people, it revealed a thread of misanthropy that would define much of Gervais’s later work in Extras, After Life and his scathing Golden Globe Awards opening monologues.

Despite its overarching bleakness, however, The Office was also sympathetic and humane. Every performance is pitch-perfect (Gervais certainly has never been better), while the central will-they-won’t-they love between Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis) constitutes, according to the film director Richard Curtis, “one of the greatest romantic stories of all time”.

We know, of course, what happened next for its principal actors, all of whom went quickly stratospheric – both Gervais and Merchant would go on to write independently (Merchant most recently with the BBC’s The Outlaws); Freeman moved into drama (Sherlock, The Responder); and Mackenzie Crook made a masterpiece of his own in Detectorists – but what of The Office’s secondary characters, those who lurked in the background while Brent gurned, and Tim set a stapler in jelly? What was it like to be an extra in the defining show of its time? A full quarter of a century on, how do they look back?

Robin Hooper was one of those extras, but his character, Malcolm, was a memorable one. Malcolm was a little older than his colleagues, and was consequently less prepared to tolerate Brent’s preening immaturity. He stood up to him. He faced him down.

“We’d decided between us,” Hooper, now 76, tells me, “that Malcolm was someone who took his job very seriously, and that he probably still lived at home with his mother. It felt important to me to know my character fully.”

Hooper had come from theatre, and hadn’t done much television. “My agent said it would be good for my CV. But it was a very different atmosphere. There was so much laughing on set, for starters, and Ricky has a particularly hideous laugh. For the first few episodes I did think, ‘Do these two even know what they’re doing?’ Clearly, they did.”

“Martin was so clever and interesting, and Mackenzie was so strange.” How? “Well, he was so disciplined and focused, totally emerged in the character. Malcolm, my character, would just think he was psychotic, ‘I’ve got to keep away from him!’”

Ultimately, Hooper found the experience enervating. Theatre is a collective endeavour; in television, he felt like a spare part. “It was frustrating because you’d be standing around all day just eating biscuits, and waiting for your bit. Occasionally, I’d get to say something like ‘huh’, but not much else.”

“It was fascinating to watch Ricky work, but I didn’t particularly want to have lunch with him, and I don’t think he wanted to have lunch with me.” Why ever not? “Well, I was a little bit shy, and Ricky does tend to command attention. He kept telling his stories, even over cod and chips. I wanted a break from all that. Perhaps I was a little too serious?”

Producers wanted him back for the second series, but warned that he might have even less to do. “All these new people were coming in” – from the Swindon branch, as the company merged workforces. Hooper had just been offered a play, and took that instead. The right decision?

“Oh, yes, definitely. But having said that, I do still wish I’d done it. It was something special, wasn’t it?”

One of those “new people coming in” was Patrick Baladi. Then 31, Baladi would take centre stage in the second series, playing Neil Godwin, David Brent’s superior and nemesis. Neil was everything David Brent was not: popular, capable, handsome. He wore a leather jacket better than Brent did, and was part of the managerial firmament in a way the other man could never be. In short: a grown-up.

“I’d been in the business for nine years by that point,” Baladi says. “I’d been at drama school with Martin Freeman, I’d loved the first series, and was very keen to be in the second.”

When he auditioned, he says, “Martin helped keep Ricky in check”. In check? “Well, Ricky laughs a lot during filming.”

It was Neil’s finesse as a dancer – he and a co-worker recreating Saturday Night Fever for charitable causes – that prompted one of the series’ most memorable scenes: David Brent’s own highly idiosyncratic dance.

“We’d been rehearsing it a lot, and I was very nervous. Ricky kept coming in to laugh at us, and I had to tell him to f**k off!” he says. “You know, I never saw Ricky rehearsing his dance because, well, it was very distinctive, wasn’t it? It was the focus of it I admired most, I think. Where did it come from?”

By the time of the 2003 Christmas special, the show was a global sensation. For its final two episodes, another new face arrived, Elizabeth Berrington, playing Tim’s co-worker, Anne. Anne was so self-obsessed that Tim, like the viewer, found himself missing deskmate Gareth, who’d recently been promoted to boss.

“Wasn’t she just vile?” Berrington says, beaming. An experienced television actor, Berrington relished the role. “By that stage, The Office was a phenomenon, so we knew that everybody would be tuning in at Christmas.”

She laughs at the suggestion. “No, I loved it. I thought it was such fun to play an absolute cow.”

The Office closed its doors for good after just 14 episodes. Its stars went off into their respective galaxies. Secondary characters like Ralph Ineson and Sally Bretton continue to appear across TV today (Game of Thrones; Death in Paradise) while Ewen MacIntosh, who played the lugubrious Keith, was in Miranda and Little Britain before he died in 2024, aged 50. Robin Hooper returned to the stage, Elizabeth Berrington can currently be seen in the new Russell T Davies TV drama Tip Toe. “If you look at my IMDb page, it looks like I’ve done a shit ton of work, but I haven’t had my big break yet, no,” the 55-year-old confirms. “Still waiting for that.”

During filming, Gervais would taunt Patrick Baladi that he’d surely become the next James Bond. In the event, he was offered Holby City, which he turned down in favour of another medical drama, Jed Mercurio’s Bodies, and then went to America to try his luck there. “But I didn’t enjoy it at all, so I came home.” Like Berrington, he has remained in steady, if intermittent, work ever since.

“Acting is a muscle,” he suggests, “and you have to keep working to stay in shape. You need that childlike belief that something else is going to come along, and that’s why confidence is so important in what we do. Not in that arrogant way, but in trusting yourself and your instincts. So it’s nice to be reminded that I was in The Office, that I was in something that good, and that I can maybe do something else that is equal to it… or at least close.”

‘The Office’ is available on iPlayer. ‘Remember…The Office’ will be broadcast on Wednesday 8 July at 10pm on BBC Two and iPlayer.