Ricky Gervais: Modern Hero

Congratulations to Ricky Gervais who, with his television shows the Office and Extras, encapsulated the existential crisis of modern existence and - through David Brent and Andy Millman respectively - man's inevitable breakdown in response to that crisis.

The Office, in both my opinion and by general consensus, was a shade better than Extras. However, today's (the 27th of December's) Christmas edition - and climax - of Extras surpassed everything else.

I would go as far to say that tonight's episode of Extras was the best comedy - no, television - I have ever watched.

The Office and Extras were more than comedy because theirs was not the goal to make people laugh simply by reeling off joke after joke that - as law of averages would predict - eventually produce a laugh here or there. Nor, unlike most sitcoms, were its episodes self-contained: Most sitcoms are exercises in arrested development, whatever character growths occur within its thirty-minute time-slot, inevitably returns to its default settings in the next episode.

For that reason comedies frustrated me with their samsara of facsimiles. Plucking one example randomly out of the ether, Men Behaving Badly, which never progressed beyond the comfort zones of depicting two slobbish men cohabiting with their long-suffering girlfriends. At first it amused me, but then I twigged that if lives of the characters of Men Behaving Badly were so depressingly immature then why do none of them struggle out of that state of existence.

Or The Brittas Empire which featured a character, Gordon Brittas, not dissimilar to David Brent in his managerial ineptitude, who - contrary to all sensibilities, and in defiance of sanity - was still managing a leisure center many, many series later. And making the same jokes.

The lack of reality, of progression, the repetitive cycles of sitcoms depressed me. They had the opposite effect to what the writers, the producers, the actors intended.

Which is why, thank God, Ricky Gervais (and not forgetting his partner, Steven Merchant) has given situation comedy its conscience and consciousness.

The Office and Extras are aware of the absurdities of the world they exist in. Yes, Ricky Gervais has been criticised for only "doing" the comedy of embarrassment, but that is the whole point: In our behaviours, in our modern struggles, we are the most embarrassing example of humanity in the whole of history.

For all that our civilization has achieved, our lives amount to nothing more than a dingy office close to a suicidally-grey ring-road by some Slough industrial estate. And in the mundanities of this existence, we have this warped preoccupation of being someone special - an entertainer, a movie star. To make the transition from anonymous fool to celebrated fool.

The beauty of both the Office and Extras is that there is a point, after all the lead character's (Brent/Millman) self-humiliation and delusion of grandeur, is a heart-rending realisation of their loss of self and sanity as a participant of modern existence (whether that modern existence comprises an office or movie-set).

In the last episode of Extras, Andy Millman became so preoccupied with materialism and ego that he neglected his best-friend, Maggie (played by the excellent Ashley Jensen), and saw her little more as an accessory to his own existence. When he wanted to talk to her about his lack of recognition for his television work, he would take her to The Ivy. But when she spoke about her struggle as a failed jobbing actress who can only afford a low-rent apartment in the worst place in town, he didn't hear.

One scene in particular had me drying my eyes with the sleeve of my dressing-gown: Maggie in her shabby studio apartment, having returned home from her new found employment as a toilet cleaner, hoovering her blue carpet. She was the picture of dejection and her environ was depressing - a dimly-lit, claustrophobic studio porous to the outside machinations of the cruel, uncaring world - and among all her misery was the hoover itself, one of those red-ones with a smiley face. An inanimate object with a smiley face.

A smiley hoover that probably adds life to an already happy household where mum and dad have two bouncing kids. But the same smiley hoover in a dingy London studio being operated by an unhappy, lone, struggling, hurt woman is an unbearable icon.

This is what made me cry. (Okay, I know I'm lauding this as the best comedy ever and, I agree, this exegesis is somewhat contrary to joy and laughter but, please, bear with me)...

The great thing about The Office and Extras is the awakening of the main character and the redemption that comes from it.

Not until Millman was incarcerated in the Big Brother house with other celebrity-for-celebrity-sake z-listers did he have his breakdown, his catharsis. Among his Big Brother celebrity housemates were narcissistic parodies of (real) celebrities such as June Sarpong, Lionel Blair and Lisa Scott Lee, were some purposely-invented celebs such as a mother who achieved fame because her son was murdered (and seems more preoccupied with releasing a record than her son's death) and another woman who became famous for being raped (and aspires to having a Hello-funded wedding), Andy Millman breaks down.

But in his breakdown finds a vocabulary - of violence and tenderness - to articulate what I feel and, I think, many other people do too. It was akin to that scene from REM's Everybody Hurts video where they're all stuck in a traffic jam at the end of the working day and, Michael Stipe, questioning the necessity of it all, abandons his car and walks it.

To recount what Millman speaks in his breakdown would be a spoiler for anyone who is yet to see it. Sufficing to say that he makes an appeal of forgiveness from (the unreality of) the Big Brother house to his friend Maggie - the simple, uncomplicated apogee of celebrity - who is watching back home, at once usurping the degrading experiment of (un)reality television.

To have someone such as Gervais to elevate comedy into something altogether more meaningful and which isn't afraid to forsake its own given identity as a comedy to give us that which is meaningful and humane.

I honestly can say that I am proud that Ricky Gervais' work is contemporary to my own existence. Most of my literary and entertainment references are decades and centuries into the past. And as my wife put it: She is happy for Ricky Gervais that he has garnered unprecedented acclaim for projects as unlikely as the Office or Extras. His success is near fairytale.

If you haven't seen the Office or Extras see them. Somehow. And, yes, in spite of everything I have written just now, they are funny. Very funny.

Sementivae Update: Keeping Regular

Apologies to Sementivae's readers for the absence of blog entries in the last few weeks. Those few weeks were hectic, with many imperatives competing for my attention.

With those imperatives done & dusted, I shall be committing myself to keeping ever regular as to this blog.

NB. I trust the bran in the picture (right) is not Kellogg's brand seeing as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg originally devised his cereals as anti-onanism weapons against (boys but mostly) girls.