You either love it or hate it but The Office is one of the most successful TV Comedy series of the 21st Century. Called a ‘mockumentary’, its filmed as a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary and set in the offices of Wernham Hogg, a paper merchant in Slough, ironically not far from here. The faster paced US spin-off follows the mundane daily interactions of a group of idiosyncratic office employees at another paper company this time in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and starring Gervais, The Office catapulted him to stardom in 2001, winning two Golden Globes, one for his acting and one for the show itself.[1] Jago Wynne in Working without Wilting, writes,
“The humour is very simple. It comes from observations about mundane office life, humour basically at the expense of all the different types of people working in the office. In fact, just as the TV series Friends was called Friends because it is about the relationships between different friends, so The Office could just as easily have been called Colleagues, because its about all the relationships between different colleagues.[2]