[thechat] The Office

[Martin Burns]

On Saturday, June 21, 2003, at 05:59  pm, Bob Davis wrote:


>> Have you seen the stapler in jelly yet? (my favourite ephemeral 
>> moment)
>> My favourite line:
>>
>
> That was on last night!

Hey, that's Series 1 Episode 1 iirc!

In case you want to replicate this:
http://homepage.mac.com/elliottday/theoffice/stapler.html

>> each episode gets better, the second series more cringingly funny than
>> the first, for me the funniest bits are Tim's unspoken glances and
>> facial expressions and the fact that the situations are all so real.
>>
>
> The subtleties are brilliant. You have to pay attention to the show.

For sure. The whole repartee between Tim and Gareth just keeps going:
“Team leader don’t mean anything mate.”
“Excuse me, it means I’m the leader of a team.”
  “No it doesn't-it’s a title someone’s given you to get you to do 
something they don’t want to do, for free. Right? It’s          like 
making a div kid at school milk monitor. No one respects it.”
“I think they do.”
“No they don’t Gareth.”
“Er, yes they do, because if people were rude to me then I used to give 
them their milk last, so it was warm.”

“If a military man like you, a soldier, er, could you give a man a 
lethal blow?”
“If I was forced to, I could. If it was absolutely necessary, if he was 
attacking me.”
“If he was coming, really hard?”
“Yeah, if my life was in danger, yeah.”
“And do you always imagine doing it face to face with a bloke, or could 
you take man from behind?”
“Either ways easy.”
“So you could take a man from behind?”
“Yeah.”
“Lovely.”

It got better and better over the 2 series.

However, stand-out episodes:
* Quiz Night (series 1)
* Series 1 finale
* Comic Relief Day (series 2)

And some lines:
“He’s thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?”

“Some of you seem to have got off on the wrong foot with me. You didn't 
like some of the jokes I told earlier. You've got to chill out, yeah, 
trust me, this is what I do, alright? You will never work in a place 
like this again. This is brilliant-fact.          And you will never 
have another boss like me. Someone who's basically a chilled out 
entertainer.”

“Manamana, do do do do do, manamana do do do do, manamana, do do do do 
do, do do do, do do do, do do do do do do do do do do.” (x3)"


The thing is, Brent is a deliberately non-catchphrase character. Part 
of the point of him is that he recycles *other people's* catchphrases, 
like so many office 'comedians', but the icing on the cake is that he 
claims to have invented them:
          “What ones are your that I use?”
          “Same shit, different day, that’s mine. Exsqueeze me, instead 
of excuse me.”
          “Wankyou very much.”
          “Yeah, I invented that.”

Cheers
Martin