IT SEEMS that Ricky Gervais may not always see the funny side. Microsoft has started an investigation after two supposedly private training videos made for the software company by the comedian appeared on the internet.

Gervais and Stephen Merchant, his writing partner, agreed to make the films in 2003, said to be for a six-figure sum, on the condition that they were never made public.

But a month ago, footage from the videos, titled The Office Values, appeared on YouTube.com and a number of other sites and blogs.

In the films, Gervais plays his critically acclaimed role of David Brent, the bumbling manager in the hit television series The Office. Brent visits Microsoft’s British offices to advise its staff, and informs them that he would make a brilliant managing director for the company, so long as his pay and perks lived up to the job’s importance: £40,000 and a new Ford Mondeo should do it, he suggests.

He is asked what advice he would give to employees looking to develop their careers, and replies: “Training. Residential ones are the best, because not only do you get a day out chatting up other bosses over a few beers, you get a night away from the wife and kids. Or if you are an engineer at Microsoft, a night away from your mum and nan.”

Brent also inquires whether the company is developing “anything like a Robocop” or an android, but warns computing “dweebs” about the risks of working too hard: “Too much thinking makes Jack a mental case.”

Discussing “Sir William of Gates”, as he describes Microsoft’s multibillionaire founder, he speculates: “I don’t think Bill Gates made his fortune by spending time in meetings with idiots. I bet no one watching this has ever spoken to him. It would be easier to talk to Osama bin Laden.”

He tells the video’s host, apparently a Microsoft employee, that the tycoon is a “litterbug”. “If he drops £5,000 he doesn’t even bother to pick it up . . . Don’t stick up for him just because he’s the boss.”

The exasperated interviewer (Stephen Merchant), eventually exclaims: “I knew we should have got Peter Kay . . . he’s cheaper.” To which the (fictional) former manager of Wernham Hogg paper merchants, Slough, replies: “You’d have spent more on the catering budget, though.”

In January 2004, when the existence of the videos was revealed, a spokesperson for Gervais, who won multiple Baftas and Golden Globes for The Office, said: “The idea was to show ‘how not to do it’.”

A message on YouTube yesterday said that some of the video postings had been removed “at the request of copyright owner Microsoft because its content was used without permission”.

A spokeswoman for Gervais said: “We don’t want people to think that David Brent is coming back.”