BEING mobbed was the norm for Ricky Gervais, Martin Freeman and the rest of The Office cast, when the show was at its peak 25 years ago. Fellow comic actors idolised them, celebrities wanted to meet them. Even Beatles legend Sir Paul McCartney made sure he caught every episode.
A quarter of a century after the mockumentary landed on BBC Two, Martin and co-star Mackenzie Crook still can’t believe the cultural earthquake they were at the centre of.
Mackenzie, who played floppy-haired, military-obsessed geek Gareth, said: “We were treated like rock stars. We’d go to photoshoots together or to these award ceremonies or whatever — we were bigger than The Beatles.
“What have I said?!”
Martin, who played prank-loving Tim, agreed: “We were more popular than The Beatles. It felt like being in a band.
“I would come across musicians and people who I thought, ‘Wow,
And, if you ask Mackenzie Crook, perhaps even just a little bit bigger than The Beatles. this person’, and they liked the show as well.
“I worked with Richard Curtis and he was one of the people — and Sacha Baron Cohen — who were saying, ‘You stop at f***ing nine o’clock, you go to see The Office’.
“I remember hearing at the time that McCartney used to get it videoed. F**king hell, man. It was great.
“We had a real brief moment — and I’ve always been really grateful that it was a brief moment.”
Mackenzie added: “Yeah, brief and finite, but it opened a whole load of doors, for me at least.”
Few British comedy series have burned as brightly as The Office.
Across just two six-episode series and two Christmas specials, it swept up Baftas and a Golden Globe, turning Gervais into an international star in the process.
It even inspired the award-winning US version, which ran for nine seasons and starred Steve Carell in the role made famous by Ricky.
To mark the show’s anniversary, Mackenzie and Martin, both 54, have reunited for a special episode of Remember . . . The Office, on BBC Two on Wednesday.
The pair recognise that for many viewers born long after David Brent first danced around the Slough office, the show has become a snapshot of Britain before smartphones, online meetings and social media.
Mackenzie said: “For some of our kids’ generation there’s a real nostalgia for that late Nineties, turn of the 21st Century time.
“They look back on that as this ‘golden era’. That’s understandable. But I remember doing that myself with the Sixties. Maybe that just always happens.”
Martin and Mackenzie were jobbing actors at the time the scripts landed on their desks, but they both say there was a buzz around the project that made them determined to be a part of it.
Mackenzie said: “I remember going into BBC Television Centre to meet Ricky and [co-creator] Stephen Merchant, getting the script beforehand and thinking, ‘This is the one that I’ve got to get’.
“I was going up for lots of auditions at the time and I’d become a bit blasé about them. The nerves had sort of gone.
“But this one came along and it was just so beautifully written and so natural. I read it and thought, ‘I know how to do this. This naturalistic acting with believable dialogue. I need to get this’.
“People are always asking, ‘Did you know how good it was and what it would become?’ And of course we didn’t know.
“But I do remember thinking, ‘This is special. This is like nothing I’ve seen before’.”
Martin added: “At the read-through, I remember thinking, ‘This script is really good, it’s brilliant’.
“And what Ricky was doing with Brent elevated it again.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, this has a chance to be extremely good’.
“All the characters were really well and generously written, because it wasn’t just about him. We all had a real good crack of the whip.
“Even at the table read, I thought, ‘F**king hell, this could be really, really fun’. I remember laughing helplessly.”
But Martin almost missed out after originally auditioning to play Gareth before one last-minute suggestion changed everything. “It was the showbiz cliché,” he recalled.
“I was on the way out and, as I had my hand on the handle of the door — I can’t remember which one of them said it, they would both wanna credit it to them — one of them said, ‘Do you think Martin should read for Tim instead?’
“I was like, ‘Yeah, fine. I’ll do it’. I read for that, and I can’t remember whether it was an easier fit or not.”
To Mackenzie, Martin added: “I’m very glad because you should be Gareth. I wouldn’t have got it because you would’ve got it.
“So I was very, very glad that they called me back. That was last second.”
Part of the show’s success came from performances that felt uncomfortably real, with audiences convinced much of the dialogue had been improvised during filming.
Martin says there was good reason for that and admits he is still slightly irritated by suggestions that every line came solely from Ricky and Stephen’s scripts.
He said: “It was all there on the page. However, my true feeling about it is that when it became the monster that it did and people would say it sounded improvised, then understandably, Ricky and Stephen went, No, none of it’s improvised.”
“Which is not true. When the scripts were published, they weren’t the scripts. They were the transcriptions of what had been on television.
“So that annoyed me a little bit because, well, anyone who knows any of us knows that that line came from you in that moment, that line came from me . . .
“I can understand why there was a little bit of protection about that, because otherwise people would’ve gone, ‘Hey, you just rock up and you just make it all up’. Which clearly was not the case.
“The writing on it that they did was brilliant. But you only need to know us a little bit or know the process of it. We’re also in there, you know?
“It doesn’t mean it’s a co-credit. Doesn’t mean it’s improvised, but it’s nicely loose.”
While viewers saw awkward silences on screen, life behind the camera was anything but. According to Martin and Mackenzie, Ricky spent as much time trying to make everyone laugh as he did filming.
“He famously would do anything to make you corpse,” said Mackenzie (meaning when an actor breaks character and laughs in a scene).
“He would draw something truly diabolical on a piece of paper and then just sort of slowly push it over so you could see it midway through the shot.
“I don’t think I’m looking back through rose-tinted glasses. That was part of it, the anarchy.”
Martin remembers wondering why Ricky kept sabotaging his own show: “I’d say, ‘What are you doing? This is your show. You’re literally wasting time on this show’.
“But I was saying that while I was laughing. So it’s hard to be annoyed. I think I was on the verge of laughing 40 per cent of the time.
“You knew that it had gone from ‘Ha-ha’ to ‘Get on with it’ when you heard Steve say, ‘Fellas, come on’ from the other room. You’d think, ‘Ah, f**k, yeah — we have got to really do that!’
Even Ricky’s famous dance caused a storm on set.
Martin added: “The dance was very funny just because we didn’t know what was happening, including Ricky.
“We didn’t know what that was going to be, and I think he did it a couple of times, and they were both absolutely painfully awful to watch.
“They just went on and on and on, like a nervous breakdown.
“I don’t like to give Ricky too much credit for anything but, God almighty, I do think overall that is one of the best performances of anything I’ve ever seen in anything, because, what he does really, really well is, he goes right to the line of what is credulous or is believable.
“There are people in real life who you think, ‘Well, no one would believe that’.
“And Brent is obviously kind of one of those people.”
Despite the stars creating one of Britain’s defining sitcoms, many younger viewers might only have seen its American remake.
But Martin and Mackenzie admit they initially questioned why Hollywood wanted to take on something that already worked perfectly.
Mackenzie said: “I remember hearing about it and thinking, ‘Why? Why do they need to do that? We’ve done it, haven’t we?’
“I remember thinking or joking at the time that one day somebody would say something about The Office and I’ll say I was in the original, and they’ll say, ‘I didn’t realise there was an original’.
“That’s happened countless times. I’ve never seen the American Office. I watched the first episode, which was the same script as our first episode, pretty much. Then I never went back to watching it. Not out of any petulance.”
Martin laughed and said: “It was more hate than petulance.”
Twenty-five years on, David Brent’s dance, Gareth’s military obsession and Tim’s longing glances at Dawn across the office remain woven into British television history.
While the American version may have conquered the world, for one brief, wonderfully awkward moment, a tiny sitcom set in a paper merchants in Slough became the coolest show on TV.
