Money don't make my world go round. I’m reaching out to a higher ground
I speak to The Office's Ewen Macintosh and find out what we can learn from him collaborating with the likes of Ricky Gervais
I tell people at (kids’) parties that I’m ‘amazingly lucky to not work in an office’. The schools closing during lockdowns momentarily changed my love affair with home working but I knew, even then, I was fortunate to not be expected to be contactable all the time. And to not have a manager. Because I am unmanageable. I really hate authority particularly in this country where people rise to the top by sociopathic means rather than talent. I have had one good manager in my lifetime who I’ve stayed friends with but he was American, which kind of proves my point. (He used to praise me so much and end phone conversations by saying “this was a great call!” which at first I thought was sarcasm. He also liked initiative which seems an obvious managerial technique but in this country we have no real commitment to entrepreneurial spirit.)
Being in offices sucked big time and I knew this especially during my first job directly after I graduated from university. I worked for a logistics shipping company outside Heathrow in a giant hangar with people who hadn’t gained degrees (or social skills). The office I was in was above a warehouse and it was my job to speak to this guy who worked in the grubby underbelly when the cargo count didn’t match the documents. The guy (and I swear his name was Keith) was quite grumpy but he was clever enough to know that I knew he was stealing stuff and also bright enough to know I wouldn’t say anything as I wanted an easy life. (He was stealing—this bit is ridiculous—boxes of blue hand towel rolls, the type that get loaded into dispensers in office loos. He was discovered when he went on long term sick leave and the company forced him to get a medical. The doctor apparently reported that he’d been injuring himself by using the hand towels as toilet paper.)
I worked 12-hour days four on, four off (like a firemen but less glamorous) and I lived in the same house I had when I was in my third-year of university—with two engineering students. During this time Ricky Gervais’s The Office was released and it’s important to remember what a hit it was. This guy I worked with called Barry (comedy name) sent an email (lol) with the Brent dance in gif form to the whole company. It resonated with so many office workers (practically everyone) and it changed me as I wanted to escape but, like Tim Canterbury (“The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Shakespeare”), I had no plan to do so. I even quit that job before I got another one and had to come crawling back to them.
I’m so glad I’ve found a way to not work in places like these. Especially because I’m not really capable of working well collaboratively and it’s something I need to develop. Luckily this week’s email—where I speak to The Office actor Ewen Macintosh, AKA Keith Bishop—will explore whether the greatest creative achievements come from collaboration or single-minded genius.
I promise this won’t be an Office quote fest. (Maybe a gif fest in honour of Barry from Heathrow.)
“The offices I worked in weren't bad,” says Ewen Macintosh, who is on Cameo where people can order fan videos. “Keith was really just a copy of me not really knowing much about the show. It was me trying to be a bit like Nigel Tufnel out of Spinal Tap. It was to give that sort of vacant performance—‘what’s going on? Not a lot!’”
Despite having relatively few lines in the show, Keith was a fully rounded relatable character. Actually I’ll go one step further and say despite his lack of dialogue he is real: when speaking to Ewen I can’t untangle him from Keith even when he told me that he’s not socially awkward at all and did public speaking in school. Before I interviewed him I remembered that actors hate being called their screen names by fans (I am fan first, journalist second) so I wrote in my notebook in bold ‘EWEN’ so I wouldn’t slip up during our conversation and call him ‘Keith’ or ‘big man’.
But the creation of Keith—a deadpan bore the type we’ve all worked with—didn’t come solely from the genius minds of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. It was Ewen too.
“Keith wasn’t really a character to begin with,” he says. “He evolved with the show. I didn’t really know much when I turned up on set on the first day. All I knew was that it was a mock documentary. And the big film that I loved was Spinal Tap. And so I thought I'd give it a bit of a vacant chewing gum, Tufnell kind of vibe and see what happened.
“In the original script some of the dialogue just said ‘office worker’. When they were casting they didn't want extras, they wanted actual actors who hadn't been on TV much before to play office workers because they might get a line of dialogue here and there. It kind of built up from there. I ended up getting more and more to do. And the character evolved.”
This makes The Office sound (and feel) like an ad-lib fest but that, in general, wasn’t the case. Even the David Brent monologues (“Do it yourself. I've gotta save some Africans!”) and verbal tics (“did no, get an agenda”) were tightly scripted, according to Ewen. What it shows—and maybe hints at why Gervais will never create another Office—is for a sublime, influential work of art to succeed it needs to be collaborative. And you need to surround yourself with talented people.
My Dad liked The Office. His favourite sitcom was Cheers (an amazing comedy, you can see its cold opens on YouTube) but he also liked racist sitcoms like Love Thy Neighbour and even made me watch Curry and Chips on an old VCR. The latter sitcom shows two things: firstly, he viewed race in a problematic way and, secondly, he was comedy literate because nobody apart from race professors remember this piece of garbage that featured Spike Milligan browning up. (Just because my dad liked comedy didn’t make our relationship easier. In fact he would talk while watching them. That’s just criminal.)
So when The Office came along he lapped it up. So much so that he changed his ring tone to the Muppets’ theme-tune in honour of this Cheers’-style cold open. He spent his working life in offices and he must have, like me, seen himself being like Tim. He was trapped, but not economically as he lived in a time when mortgages were low and wages were high. He found himself in a 9-to-5 prison because he couldn’t take charge of his life and was emotionally inarticulate, blaming others for his failings.
I broke the chain! I’m typing this in a pub in New Malden, south-west London, during the day (the excuse is I had to travel across south London to pick up a bike for my daughter), which shows how I’ve so beaten the office trap. I’m skint though. And that’s the trade off: if you’re the kind of person that likes not worrying about money and material possessions, like toilet roll, then you need a wage (or be a thief, like Heathrow Keith).
But my Dad liking The Office shows the universality of the comedy and why on its 20-year anniversary it still resonates deeply with all types of people. And it’s not just because we can all empathise with dead-end office jobs.
“That’s just the surface,” says Ewen. “That’s what draws you in but it’s the relationships that are more universal. The [characters] could be anywhere: they could be a family or in space, like in Red Dwarf. It just happens to be where they are.
“But it’s the [well-drawn] characters and the relationships between the characters that makes it what it is. Lots of shows that have been set in offices over the years flop.”
I also love the American version of The Office, which backs up Ewen’s argument about the universality of the characters. So you can imagine my surprise when he says he’s never really watched the award-winning Steve Carell version especially as he’s such a fan of US cringe comedies, such as Spinal Tap (and Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show).
“Their set was exactly like ours but was a mirror image,” he says. “ Watching all this action take place backwards on a set that I've just been on and then doing a script similar to ours, I just almost couldn't get my head around it. So by the time I heard that it was different and it got much better [the first season of the US Office is pedestrian, particularly the first few episodes]. Yeah, they've made about 100 episodes, and it was a bit daunting. So I ended up not bothering to be honest.”
And that’s the thing that’s special about the original Office. It’s never daunting to watch. I’ll dip and out when I want. In fact, let’s check out that the Muppets cold open now…
I’ve got to get smarter at working collaboratively. For example, I presently can’t set up a beer writers’ diversity grant on my own as it’s a huge undertaking and it’s unpaid. The problem I say I have with collaboration is that it’s slow. But is that the real reason?
Honestly, I might struggle with this because of the way I was brought up. I’m fiercely independent but not out of choice. Being ignored by my parents throughout my childhood has made me this way and I need to break this chain. I moved out when I was 15. Who moves out of home at that age? Not natural collaborators.
The worst thing is I tend to lash out with people who want to help me to work collaboratively. I'm in a disaster zone. But I’m going to use a magic word: yet. I can’t work collaboratively. Yet. I haven’t got the skills to work collaboratively. Yet. So I’m going to listen to people, be patient and try my best to not smack my head against my desk when someone lightly challenges my ideas.
Because if someone who has been accused of being as stubborn and arrogant as Ricky Gervais has can produce something as groundbreaking as The Office with the help of a large group of people than I can, surely? But then Gervais was a genius and did he really need collaborators, like I do?
“We were only always on the edge of laughter,” Ewen says. “There were a couple of scenes where he was meant to be addressing the group and they had to get everyone out of the room. Because we could see it was fiction and not real we could see the funny side of it. So we had to keep it together to make the cringe work but everyone was getting the giggles all the time trying to do that.
“I think all the time how ridiculous it was! You had this crazy guy saying all this stuff and in those scenes there’s like a second pause and then it cuts away because otherwise you’d see everyone break out laughing!”
The occasions where I have collaborated well have been with people whose opinion I value and have the project’s best interests at heart—in my last office job there were so many meetings where people talked for the sake of talking. Gervais must be the same because for a man who struggles to tolerate fools he certainly found plenty of like-minded actors willing to put in a shift for his and Merchant’s pet project.
And being like a ‘crazy guy’, as Ewen says, was actually a technique that Gervais used to wring out all the comedy potential of the scene despite it looking like he was messing around. Take the famous appraisal scene he filmed with Ewen’s Keith saying “don’t know” a lot, there’s only 230-odd words of dialogue in that vignette but it wasn’t a quick shoot.
“That was the one that went on,” says Ewen. “We must have been in there for maybe an hour? Because you have to do all the different shots and angles and then you have to deal with Ricky messing it up and trying to make you mess up.
“The clever thing about it is Ricky was trying to make you corpse [have a laughter fit] and disrupt the scene but it gave the scene a kind of energy where you’re sort of on edge. Which makes the comedy the easiest thing to do. Because you’re really, really in the zone—you’re right in it. And it actually makes doing the funny bits easier.”
Which really shows that for something remarkable to be created you need to work together and you need someone in charge to take risks trusting your talent. Which is quite funny when you think about it as I’m suggesting the world’s best boss is actually David Brent. A man who, himself, said: “When people say to me: would you rather be thought of as a funny man or a great boss? My answer’s always the same, to me, they’re not mutually exclusive”.
The headline is from the opening lines from Des’Ree’s Crazy Maze which is sung by Brent when he’s interviewing a young Robin Ince. (Des’Ree actually sang “I'm reaching up for the higher ground”.)
Last week I had two stories published; one on animation films and racism by BBC Culture (I got to see Space Jam 2 in the cinema. I loved it. Maybe that’s because sitting in an actual theatre was amazing!) The other was an interview published in the Guardian with Bomb the Bass (AKA Tim Simenon) and producer Pascal Gabriel. I spoke to them pre-pandemic and have been waiting all this time for it to be published (and to be paid). In any case it’s the only article I’ve written where the comments are really quite sweet especially if you’re a fan of UK Rave Comments, which sadly announced it will not be updated any more. So we’ll never see gems like this again:
Will be back next week talking to a children’s book illustrator. Stay Safe.