The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Slough’s got talent
Ricky Gervais on midlife crises, delusions of grandeur... and David Brent
Before he was Britain’s most successful comedy writer/ actor/director/ producer, Ricky Gervais had simpler aspirations: he wanted to make it in the music industry. In the final year of his philosophy degree at University College London, the then-22-yearold formed a synth-pop duo called Seona Dancing. They were signed to London Records and, in 1984, released two singles. Despite this – and videos that showcased a fairly impressive set of cheekbones, long since lost in the mists of time – neither single was a hit.
Seona Dancing split a year later, but Gervais plugged away. He became an assistant events manager at the University of London Union, then briefly managed Suede before they were famous. All to no avail. It wouldn’t be until 2001 that Gervais would make it in entertainment, starring as David Brent in The Office, the groundbreaking show he co- created with Stephen Merchant. At the age of 40, he was off. Brent, the paper merchant (and, like Gervais, frustrated pop star), is still the comedian’s most enduring creation. Today Gervais admits that he still has a “soft spot” for Suede. But what music does Brent like? “It’s difficult to know, because Brent pretends to like things if he thinks it’s the right thing to say,” he says. “That’s the problem when you’re writing Brent – he wants to be loved, so it’s complicated by the fact that you don’t know whether he really likes it, or if he is trying to impress the person standing next to him. So if he’s talking to a rapper he’ll bring up things like, ‘Dr Dre is a genius, isn’t he?’ Or, he sees hair and thinks, ‘Foo Fighters!’ He’s not even up-to-date.” Gervais smiles. “That’s what it’s all about with him – living a lie. Brent is all about white middle-class male angst.” Now, three decades after Seona Dancing fizzled out, Gervais is finally getting his rock’n’ roll close-up. He’s written, directed, produced and stars in David Brent: Life on the Road, a mockumentary film that follows the fictitious former boss of Slough’s Wernham Hogg as he has one last push at making it in music.
It is 15 years after the events depicted in the original BBC mockdoc and Brent is in his mid-50s, working as a sales rep for a toiletry supplies company. But, cashing in some pensions, he hires a band of decent session players and embarks on a concert tour that stretches the length and breadth of the Thames corridor.
Gervais first revived Brent in 2013, marking the 10th anniversary of the end of The Office with a sketch for Comic Relief.
“It started me buzzing,” he says. “It made me think about what Brent would be doing now. He’d still be on the periphery of entertainment. He’d be a sales rep but he’d be managing a band, thinking he’s the local Simon Cowell. And it would be a rapper because he’s trying to be cool. [Brent’s act is Dom Johnson, played by the comedian Doc Brown.] And that rekindles the idea of him wanting to be a pop star. It was all done in six minutes.”
Gervais likes to be in charge. Where other directors – and certainly writers-turneddirectors – are usually subject to the edicts of producers, studios and networks, he’s always insisted on the final say on everything he makes. It’s an achievement of which he’s very proud, even though critics might say some of his work, such as the Warwick Davis mockumentary Life’s Too Short, Channel 4’s Derek or his stints as the Golden Globes’ presenter, could have benefited from some editing.
None the less, the 55-year-old knows his limitations. Even if Brent is a deluded songwriter on a disastrous tour, he had to be a believable deluded songwriter. Gervais needed proper players to help him round out his musical vision.
Enter the denim-clad longhair sitting next to him on a couch in a record company office in west London. Andy Burrows made his name as the drummer and occasional cowriter in Razorlight, the fourpiece rock band. Having tired of the antics of their frontman Johnny Borrell, the affable Burrows quit the band and embarked on a multi-pronged career.
“The first time Ricky and I met was on Jonathan Ross’s chat show in 2008, with Razorlight,” begins Burrows, 37, “when he wrote all down my arm.” The excitable Gervais, as he is wont to do, butts in. “I liked the band and Andy was the most personable [member] and we were having a laugh. I was on there plugging a DVD, and he let me write
‘ Extras DVD available’ on his arm in indelible ink, which I thought was great!” he says, giggling. Three years later, the pair bumped into each other in the street in north London and Gervais ended up sending Burrows some demos of songs he’d written in the guise of Brent, including Free Love Freeway and Spaceman Came Down, both of which were featured in the hilarious “training day” episode of The Office. With a shinywaistcoated Gervais acting as Brent, and Burrows and his touring band acting as Foregone Conclusion, they played a couple of small London shows in 2013. “Andy and his band had learnt 10 tracks, and they were amazing!” giggles Gervais again. The comedian is bursting with energy and clearly thrilled to be working with real musicians. “Then I thought: well, how could Brent get a band this good?” He snaps his fingers. “They’re session guys, and he’s paying them, and they hate him. Then I thought: that’s the nub of themovie.” Making comedy music is fraught with danger, especially if you’re a musician, like Burrows, with well-earned credibility. I start to say to him that, having had one experience of working with an egotistical singer… “Don’t rise to it!” yelps Gervais, that wolfish grin splitting his face. “Pretend you don’t know what he means! He’s saying it’s beneath you. It’s like John Bonham [the drummer of Led Zeppelin] joining the Grumbleweeds!” Burrows, clearly long used to Gervais’s antic energy, smiles and says: “I’m a fan of Ricky’s work, like we all are, so it was a bit of a no-brainer. But I do know what he likes musically, and we clicked from the off.” Actually, all the songs that Gervais has written and recorded with Burrows’s help are almost too good. “They are good!” exclaims Gervais. “This is a guy who takes his music very seriously. The joke is the backstory. Ooh La La is a song about crossing America and picking up chicks, sung by a 55year-old rep who sells tampons. The fiction is funny. I didn’t want it to be comedy songs. The joke is not that it’s bad, but that it’s inappropriate and not cool.” After David Bowie’s appearance on Extras, he and Gervais ended up good friends. Did Gervais get a chance to play him any of Brent’s songs before Bowie died? “I did. About three years ago I sent him a demo of Slough, and he emailed back: ‘Perfect. In fact, I’d like to see a whole album of Brent singing about towns of Great Britain.’ Which is a lovely idea, and that sort of stuck.”
Gervais is generous in his enthusiasm for the contribution of Burrows to Life on the Road. But what of Gervais’s other collaborator, his Brent co-creator Merchant? They haven’t worked together since 2011’s Life’s Too Short. Have they fallen out?
“Not in the slightest, no,” Gervais shoots back.
Will they work together again? “Ah, well, I don’t know… It’s… you suddenly…” he says falteringly. “When you work apart, you suddenly get hooked into another stream. Because what happened was, after Life’s Too Short, he was on tour and I wrote Derek. Then I went straight on to [Netflix movie] Special Correspondents and then this, really. So it all happened. But no, there wasn’t a divorce. We’re just doing our own thing now.”
None of the other major stars from the original series, such as Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook, is in the film either. (Gervais has pointed out the difficulty of “the guy from Sherlock” returning as office junior Tim.)
Can he imagine the BBC commissioning a show like The Office now?
“Probably not, because there would be so much angst. Would I have got final edit walking in off the street? No. Would someone like [then BBC head of comedy] Jon Plowman have said, ‘OK, let’s do it’? No – there’s lots of admin now. Jon saw the little demo [of the show] and he had one question. ‘How does David Brent keep his job?’ And I said: ‘Let’s have a walk around the BBC…’ And he said: ‘Good point!’ ”
It’s not the only cultural shift in the 15 years since the debut of The Office. TV talent shows have proliferated, which in the meta world of Life on the Road is one of the reasons Brent thinks he has a chance – if Paul Potts and Susan Boyle can be famous, why can’t a 55-year-old toiletries rep? Alongside that has come the social media revolution. Gervais is an enthusiastic tweeter but, of course, on his own unabashed terms. “Let’s be honest here: Twitter for me is 90 per cent a marketing tool. People say, ‘[ Your tweets] are all about selling stuff.’ I say: ‘ Yep. And? What, do you think I want to be your f------ friend? Buy the DVD and f--- off.’ ” But he has no time for the superstar portmanteaus and turf wars that dominate social media. “Hiddleswift” and “Kimye vs Taylor”? Gervais witheringly snorts that, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t care. When I see a headline ‘Guess who’s going out with who?’, I don’t guess, and I don’t click. I don’t give af ---. I don’t know why other people are concerned about other people’s lives that much.”
And what of the other enthusiastic tweeter, delusional self-promoter and dominant celebrity du jour – does Gervais consider Donald Trump the David Brent of politics?
“He sort of is,” he says. “But obviously he’s a lot more powerful. I’m torn over Trump,” he adds. On the one hand, “democracy is democracy. He’s hit a nerve, and he’s hit those people in middle America who think everyone else is a liberal trying to take their guns away.”
But “it’s odd that America might elect a reality game show host as president. Because that’s what he is. He’s got more in common with me than he has with John F Kennedy. He’s an entertainer; he’s a guy who shows off for a living. And someone like me should not be in charge of America.”
Will he work with Stephen Merchant again? ‘Ah, well, I don’t know…’