WATCHING The Office: An American Workplace (BBC Three) echoes that sensation you get after you’ve just had a haircut: it takes a while for you to acclimatise to the familiar-yet-different image that stares back at you from the mirror, though you get used to it soon enough.

But until you do, this US version of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s hit comedy, The Office, feels a bit like watching a bunch of Monty Python fans, or a gang of Star Trek devotees, who have been just that little bit too zealous in their adulation: instead of just dressing up like their heroes and quoting favourite sketches and snatches of dialogue at each other, they’ve actually re-created the entire series in an elaborate act of hommage. The Office: An American Workplace is not just acted, it’s minutely choreographed to mimic the original.

The new American setting (Wernham Hogg, a struggling paper company in Slough, has been replaced by Dunder Mifflin, a struggling paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania), along with the new American accents (boss David Brent has become boss Michael Scott; Gareth the dweeb is now Dwight the dweeb; Tim is Jim), serve to introduce some sense of distance from the original.

But for a flavour of how it comes across, imagine if, instead of those American accents you just had an unrecogniseable British cast re-enacting the original series, still set in Slough. That would seem a slightly spooky thing to do, wouldn’t it — like Rory Bremner, Jon Culshaw, Alastair MacGowan, Ronni Ancona and other impersonators turning up for an episode of Stars in Their Eyes (“Tonight, Matthew, we’re going to be the entire first series of The Office.”)?

The script has barely been changed for the American version. Hearing familiar Office conversations fuelling familiar Office frictions makes you feel as if you’re watching one of those Abba or Beatles tribute bands — it’s word-perfect, pitchperfect, twitch-perfect, mannerism-perfect, but still noticeably not quite the real thing. It looks like The Office. It feels and smells like The Office. But there’s something that doesn ’t feel quite right; like watching TV in a foreign hotel room and seeing a well-known TV show or movie that has been dubbed into the local language.

We will get used to the new setting and accents in time. But will we get used to the new cast? Steve Carell’s Michael Scott has the biggest hurdle to jump. Scott comes across as enough of a plonker. But does he have that underbelly of vulnerability that made Gervais’s David Brent such an hypnotically tragic figure — the boorish, smarmy loudmouth with more bad jokes than Jim Davidson who knows in his heart that he is a sad, useless, unloved buffoon?

Brent is an amalgam of ego, unfounded confidence and energetic self-deceit. Like George Costanza in Seinfeld, like Hank in The Larry Sanders Show, Brent is a Malvolio who acts as if he has all the confidence in the world, but who knows he is a figure of mockery. There’s a Munch-like scream you fleetingly glimpse in Brent’s eyes that you cannot yet detect in Scott’s.

When you travel to Paris on Eurostar, or drive your car on to one of those trains that to and fro through the Channel Tunnel, you wouldn’t sense that Eurotunnel, the company that owns and operates the tunnel, has the sort of financial problems that even Enron’s accountants couldn’t easily camouflage. In Britain’s Biggest Black Hole (BBC Two), the BBC business editor, Jeff Randall, said Eurotunnel owes its creditors £6.4 billion — and with no prospect of Bob Geldof staging a concert to persuade bankers to write off the company’s debts and give it a chance to survive.

Eurotunnel’s shares have slumped 90 per cent since flotation. A shareholders’ meeting this Friday could precipitate the company’s collapse. A rebellious French investor says that shareholders, rather than surrendering Eurotunnel’s assets to creditor banks, “will simply cart the tunnel away in pieces and you won’t have a tunnel any more, because each of them would have a brick from it”.

More likely is that Eurotunnel’s creditors would sell what they can; and whoever buys the tunnel will get a bargain. London is full of grand building projects that bankrupted their builders but which are still standing to be enjoyed many generations later. Maybe not in TV sitcoms, but in building developments it can pay handsomely to be the second man on the scene.

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