During a celebration of 25 years of hit workplace sitcom The Office, Ricky Gervais failed to mention Stephen Merchant, who he made the iconic BBC comedy with.
Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais(Image: BBC)
The Two men who created hit comedy The Office have chosen to celebrate the 25th anniversary in contrasting ways – with Ricky Gervais failing to acknowledge his former close friend.
Gervais, who played the lead role of David Brent, did a countdown of his character’s best 25 moments in an hour long show on his YouTube channel. But oddly, he failed to mention the co-writer Stephen Merchant throughout the programme.
Back over on the BBC where the show became such a hit, actors Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook from The Office spoke warmly of working on the show with both Gervais and Merchant in a 30 minute special. They recalled days on set filled with laughter.
Co-writer Merchant then posted an interview clip on instagram, where he discussed working on the iconic comedy. Notably in the comments, he spoke about it being a team effort.
Merchant said: “The ambition for us was lets make something that will be our favourite thing. All the writing on the The Office was sort of done jointly…we would sit in a room together and kind of spitball a lot together.
“Initially we would be talking about things. We’d often improvise a lot together. We’d sort of improvise into a dictaphone and then come back the next day and look at what worked and didn’t work.”
Gervais and Merchant were once close pals who worked on all their TV, radio and podcast projects together. The pair began on XFM before going onto The Office and then making other TV hits Extras and Life’s Too Short.
Gervais, who no longer works with the BBC and has put all his recent shows and comedy shows on Netflix, focused his 25 year celebrations around Brent.
He said the number one moment of the show was ‘the dance’ Brent did in an episode about Comic Relief, although it could have left him injured.
Speaking about the crazy dance and how the scene was made, Gervais revealed: “It probably is the most famous single thing I’ve ever done, and when we had to do that, that’s three takes cut together, the first time they laughed, the second time I laughed, and then the third one we got to the end, and and then just cut it together in the edit using people looking like bewildered, but it sort of looked like one take.
“I sort of knew the type of thing I was gonna do. It’s totally improvised, obviously. I quite like the fact that it looked nearly real. Some of them looked a bit like dance moves, and I can’t believe how low I got when I did the crab, I couldn’t do that now.”
And anymore takes might have been dangerous. He added: “I remember after I filmed it, I was sat in a corner on a chair and they were fanning me.
“I was, I think I was the blobbiest I’ve ever been. I think I was like 14 stone, no muscles to speak of, just a blob, and you know, there was a small chance of heart failure.
“So, I think people were genuinely worried about the way I was breathing afterwards. Tom Cruise jumps off buildings. Do I want to do a little dance? I’ll have go. It would f***ing kill me now. I’m glad I recorded it to show I did it once.”
Gervais admitted he was monetising The Office clips “at last” on his YouTube page.
He said for his part some of the premise had been inspired by an early job interview at a temp agency where a guy with a ponytail promised Gervais and his friend a job and called an employer up and was “trying to make us like him and trust him by lying to his friend”.
Gervais explained: “I thought ‘I’ll have that’ and it was the first scene of the whole series.”
In another apt moment for the 25th anniversary, Gervais spoke about deliberately trying to make other cast members laugh and showed a clip of himself as Brent making Martin Freeman continuously laugh for 25 takes.
Gervais said: “This gets in[the top 25 list] not just because of the scene which is funny, but more for the behind the scenes, where I was trying to make Martin laugh. I mean, I was doing that all the time, but this one he couldn’t do it. I think this is the record number of takes.”
In an interview with The Times in January, Merchant said there had been no big fallout with Gervais but they were no longer close. At the time he said: “We’re not in touch a great deal these days. But even at our closest we were living quite separate lives.”
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