The success of Ricky Gervais no longer borders on the unseemly, but tramples
all over it. Thanks to his portrayal of a middle-aged nobody who believed he
was a somebody, he is now, six years on from The Office, that
somebody: David Brent’s wildest dream for himself.
“I’m back and forth to America and I’m doing bigger venues now,” he tells me.
“I’m playing Madison Square Garden.” I express honest disbelief. The
Office is the finest British comedy since Fawlty Towers . Its
follow-up, Extras , has shown moments of genius and may show more in
its still-to-be-written, positively final episode. But what of his rather
traditional, somewhat complacent, tad lackadaisical stand-up?
“Yeah. Mental.” His accent — more estuary than Berkshire, where he was born —
ignores the middle T. “That’s a good first gig in America, isn’t it? Crazy.”
He pauses. Even the pause sounds like Dave Brent. “The worst thing would be
silence. I’d rather booing than polite clapping. But you know what? If that
many people buy a ticket, I assume they must like what I do. We just say
it’s out there. We don’t do any marketing. And they just come.”
Between the rock of false modesty and the hard place that is boastfulness,
Gervais habitually chooses the hard place, knowing that his mastery of irony
will soften it. This is why this show — the one that sells out “in seconds”
in Britain and is on its way to New York — dares to begin with an announcer
hailing its star as “the creator of the most successful British comedy of
all time, Hollywood’s hottest Brit, the Podfather”.
The show is called Fame . For a comedy writer in need of a subject, he says,
fame is the new class: arbitrary, unfair, risible. “In my stand-up I go,
‘Socrates said fame was the perfume of heroic deeds’. Well it probably was
back then. You had to do something. That was before Heat and Big
Brother . When I first made it with The Office I was really very
prickly about the subject. I was very conscious about wanting to let people
know that fame was not part of what I did and that it wasn’t the driving
force.”
One day a journalist asked what advice he’d give “anyone else” who wanted to
become famous. “I said I’d tell them to go out and kill a prostitute.”
Ipswich, naturally, took it the wrong way.
So, I check, in his wilderness years, while his girlfriend, the television
executive Jane Fallon, was earning good money producing This Life (he
chose the incidental music), he never envied her or her glossy friends? “Why
should I be jealous? I wasn’t sitting around for 15 years going, ‘Ooh, the
world’s wondering what I’m going to do’. I was getting on with my life like
everyone else. I was enjoying myself. I wasn’t trying to become famous.” So
why, long before his seven years’ drudging in an office, had he been lead
singer of a failed band called Seona Dancing? “Well, it was to be a pop
star, which was a mistake really.” Today, he assures me, he would not even
record a novelty record.
He does admit that he is a star now, although he has only been “properly”
famous in America, he calculates, for six months. All he cares about,
however, is self-respect, reaching that paradise (or madness) where you get
good reviews and you think they’re deserved. Success has not changed him. It
has merely opened doors: to a part in his hero Christopher Guest’s movie,
For Your Consideration ; to The Simpsons writers’ room; to
finding a publisher for the children’s cartoons he drew for a nephew years
ago.
But note what he has turned down: Mission Impossible III ; Pirates of the
Caribbean II ; The Da Vinci Code . And here he is today, dressed in
black jeans, answering his door in a small, bare office off Tottenham Court
Road, not a flunky or a groupie or a coke dealer in sight.
Admittedly, there is the £3.5 million house being done up in Hampstead for
when he finally quits his flat in Bloomsbury. Yes, he is now rich — those
five million DVD sales that will soon be six million after next week’s
release of the second season of Extras . And, yes, he has acquired
half a dozen showbiz friends, including Jonathan Ross, to add to the half
dozen pals he has had for 25 years. But apart from that . . . But I believe
I have him here. If you need in an instant to distinguish Andy Millman of
Extras from David Brent of The Office , note the absence on Andy’s neck
of the red pimple that rested upon Dave’s collar. Has not fame, with its
attendant vanity, led Gervais to plastic surgery?
“It wasn’t a pimple. That was a raised mole. I cut it shaving and it went into
a lump and I panicked. They went and looked at it and they said, ‘Got to
have a biopsy’, and I thought, ‘What do you mean biopsy?’ It was, what’s it
called? Benign. But I just panicked.”
Hypochondria is an interesting Gervais hinterland to explore. He will laugh at
most things, but not at his fear of dying. It manifested itself one day when
he was writing The Office with his writing partner (and Extras
co-star), Stephen Merchant. Scratching ruminatively, he discovered what he
thought was a lump. The two of them dashed off to casualty. “So we went
along and I’m fine and another two years later I think, there’s a lump
again.” Back to casualty. Was he always a hypochondriac? “No, no. My mother
had just died of cancer, so I think it was just like, f*****g hell.” She was
74.” Two years after her death, just after Christmas 2001, his father, a
labourer of Canadian descent, died. Does he fear his own death now? “No, I
don’t fear death. I fear dying. If someone said there’s a new law that says
you’ll never know when you’re going to die and you’ll always die in your
sleep, what an amazing life you’d have! It’s fear of knowing. It’s too much
to think of. If only I believed in God. Why the f*** am I so cocky? Why
didn’t I just believe in it?” He moves into stand-up mode, but mortality
returns unexpectedly to the conversation when I ask why he and Kate, who
have been together since London University days, have not had a child. “I’d
just watch it sleeping all night. The fear! I’m bad enough with the cat, and
it died. Colin died. We’ve got a new one now, Ollie, which Jonathan Ross
gave me on the show.”
He would not have a child for fear of its dying? “Yeah. That’s not the reason,
but thinking about it: the trauma, just the trauma, which is ridiculous
because I’m sure you’d get over that.” It is not hard to locate where comedy
fits into Gervais’s panicky metaphysics. It is old-fashioned laughter in the
dark. When he finally comes to tackle death in his work, it will be a theme
worthy to succeed The Office ’s universal take on life or (as he
summarises) “boy meets girl, midlife crisis, men as boys, making a
difference, a boss you don’t get on with, a boss you feel sorry for, a man
in free-fall”. In the meantime we are stuck with fame.
The first series of Extras in 2005 was content merely to show
celebrities as varieties of idiot. Last year’s more interesting second
season turned each episode into a fable about the pitfalls of fame, famous
people substituting for Aesop’s allegorical animals. He goes through them
for me. Episode One: the artist sells out (Andy’s edgy sitcom becomes the
crass When The Whistle Blows). Two: the artist earns respect only from those
he does not respect (and David Bowie composes a song, Little Fat Man Who
Sold His Soul ). Three: the artist falls victim of the media. Four: the
artist finds himself a fish out of water (at the Baftas). Five: for
credibility’s sake the artist takes on work he does not believe in (Ian
McKellen’s coming-out play). Six: the artist deserts his old friends for new
(Jonathan Ross) only to return to them, disillusioned.
Referring to Andy Millman as an artist momentarily surprises me, but then I
always find it hard deciding who Andy is meant to be. He changes so much: a
mordant Sgt Bilko among his friends, a socially incompetent and politically
incorrect buffoon among his celebrity betters. Gervais thinks Andy is simply
more complex than the “slightly cartoonish” Brent. The difference may be,
then, in the worlds they react against. The Office characters lived
within a docu-soap. Extras ’ characters seem only too aware that they
are in a sitcom: its gay director could not be camper; its blonde could not
be dizzier. Merchant, as the incompetent agent, could not look weirder.
“ I’d say it was broader than The Office ,” Gervais says.
“But, you know, there are camp people around. There are very camp people
around.” Making a broad sitcom is no crime. It is simply odd, given that
Andy is accused of selling out when he makes one himself. And there is
something else uncomfortable about Extras : its timid use of
celebrities. McKellen, Chris Martin, Keith Chegwin, even Robert De Niro —
“no one says no to a guest spot”. But it is a no-risk proposition for them.
Except in the case of Les Dennis, the subject of the first season’s finest
half hour, Extras does not touch upon their real vulnerabilities but
makes up new ones for them. Ronnie Corbett is a coke fiend. Chris Martin
wants to get home to the chicken nuggets prepared by his wife (Gwyneth
Paltrow, who is a vegetarian).
How close does he think he got to satirising his guest stars? “I have no idea
and it doesn’t matter. They all seemed very normal, but we’ll never know.
Les Dennis certainly isn’t like that, not a morbid character who sits round
feeling sorry for himself.” So he and Merchant were randomly generating
comic personas? “Of course.” If Extras takes us no nearer
its guest stars, what hope is there of it telling us anything about Ricky
Gervais? Andy Millman cannot handle fame. Gervais, we have established, can.
As for The Office , if Gervais was anyone he was Tim, the observer
who knew there was a world elsewhere.
So what about Gervais’s stand-up persona, as developed on Channel 4’s 11
O’Clock Show in the 1990s? “He’s a boorish, right-wing bloke who’s
clever but can get stuff wrong. He’s clever enough to rant but not as clever
as he thinks.” So we need not be ashamed to laugh at his prejudices for they
are not his? “The humour’s tested. It’s been tested. This is safe,
postmodern irony; liberal, educated satire. It’s absolutely fine. You’re
laughing at the right thing. Trust me.”
To glimpse Gervais’s less correct face, you need to look elsewhere, to the
moments when he is, perhaps, playing himself. Suffer, for instance, his
relentless teasing of Karl Pilkington, the inadequate producer-fall guy
first of his Xfm radio show, now his pod-casts. Or watch the feature on the
new Extras DVD in which he maltreats his film editor Nigel Williams,
taping him up, decorating his face with cereal, force-feeding him a banana.
I hope, I say, this is a put-on. He swears it’s for real.
“But the question isn’t whether I really do that. It’s whether he enjoys it
too. Does he mind me saying, ‘You’ve got a head like a f*****g orange’?
Clearly, clearly, clearly it’s mutual.” So he is a successful David Brent?
His staff actually find his jokes funny? “Hopefully, they find it funny.”
Because it’d be terrible to discover they were just playing along to please
the boss? “Exactly.” Not everyone puts up with his teasing. Merchant
doesn’t. Nor, did Garry Shandling, the creator of The Larry Sanders
Show , to which Extras owes much. Interviewing him for Channel 4
last year, Gervais wrongly assumed that he had entered a mutual admiration
society meeting and pursued a strategy of sycophancy mixed with rudeness.
Even by the standards of this pusher at the frontiers of the comedy of
embarrassment, this was an excruciating encounter, with Shandling, through
passive aggression, making Gervais look as puny as Andy Millman. “Well, that
must have been my fault then,” he says.
In other outtakes on the Extras video you can observe Gervais among
friends: much horseplay, much giggling, much corpsing at the hilarity of
their own scripts. “It’s lucky,” he says, “that I can do a job where I can
act like a four-year-old, that I’m the boss, and no one can come in and go,
‘Gervais, you’re acting like a four-year-old!’ Maybe that’s what I was
always aiming at: getting to the point where no one could say, ‘Gervais,
grow up!’ ” But come the day those words do need to be said, I fancy they
will have to come from Ricky Gervais himself.
The DVD of Extras — Series Two is on sale from Monday at £21.99
