The Office - The Complete First Series [2001] [DVD] Ricky Gervais (Actor), Mackenzie Crook (Actor) Rated: Suitable for 15 years and over SPEC: Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.77:1 Language: English Run time: ? 174 mins Format: PAL 2 + 4, Colour Screen Ratio: 16/9 Discs: 2 Extras: Deleted Scenes, documentary Product Description Contains all six episodes from Series 1: Episode 1 - David Brent learns that his branch of the paper merchants might be closed down. But he promises his staff that under his regime there will be no redundancies. Episode 2 - Donna arrives on work experience. But her first day at work is dominated by a dirty picture of her boss that's been e-mailed around the office. Episode 3 - It's Tim's birthday. But it's also the annual quiz night. Will Brent and Finchy be able to beat the young pretenders Tim & Ricky? Episode 4 - Rowan, a management consultant, has come to Wernham Hogg to give the staff a special training day. Episode 5 - Even though some of the staff may be made redundant, Brent decides to take on a new secretary. Naturally, he chooses the prettiest woman. Episode 6 - It's judgment day on whether the office is to be downsized. Amazon.co.uk Review It feels both inaccurate and inadequate to describe The Office as a comedy. On a superficial level, it disdains all the conventions of television sitcoms: there are no punch lines, no jokes, no laugh tracks and no cute happy endings. More profoundly, it's not what we're used to thinking of as funny. Most of the fervently devoted fan base that the programme acquired watched with a discomfortingly thrilling combination of identification and mortification. The paradox is that its best moments are almost physically unwatchable. Set in the offices of a fictional Slough paper merchant, The Office is filmed in the style of a reality television programme. The writing is subtle and deft, the acting wonderful and the characters beautifully drawn: the cadaverous team leader Gareth, a paradigm of Andy McNab's readership; the monstrous sales rep, Chris Finch; and the decent but long-suffering everyman Tim, whose ambition and imagination have been crushed out of him by the banality of the life he dreams uselessly of escaping. The show is stolen, as it was intended to be, by insufferable office manager David Brent, played by cowriter Ricky Gervais. Brent will become a name as emblematic for a particular kind of British grotesque as Alan Partridge or Basil Fawlty, but he is a deeper character than either. Partridge and Fawlty are exaggerations of reality, and therefore safely comic figures. Brent is as appalling as only reality can be. --Andrew Mueller On the DVD The Office, Series 1 is tastefully packaged as a two-disc set appropriately adorned with John Betjeman's poem "Slough". The special features occupy the second disc and consist of a laid-back 39-minute documentary entitled "How I Made The Office by Ricky Gervais", with co-writer Stephen Merchant and the cast contributing. Here we discover that Gervais spends his time on set "mucking around and annoying people", and that actress Lucy Davis (Dawn) is the daughter of Jasper Carrott; as well as seeing parts of the original short film and the original BBC pilot episode; plus we get to enjoy many examples of the cast corpsing throughout endless retakes. There are also a handful of deleted scenes, none of which were deleted because they weren't funny. REVIEW: 5.0 out of 5 stars Slough in its pre-Swindon days -- marvellous Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 November 2003 Verified Purchase When this series was first shown in the UK, there were some who assumed it was a documentary, possibly a management education programme filmed by the BBC Business Unit. There is no laughter track, and there are frequent shots of people doing not very much and photocopiers collating paper. The first-line manager (David Brent) was so incompetent that this must be the 'Before' section before the consultants moved in and transformed the company. But no, once viewers got it, and saw that David Brent was never going to improve (and would never do any work either), the BBC realised it had a major winner on its hands. But perhaps the most extraordinary part of the story is that the BBC should give total control of the writing, direction and acting to Ricky Gervaise and his collaborator Stephen Merchant. Ricky Gervaise, a fortysomething, had had no acting or directing experience. He had never been to acting or scriptwriting classes. His only contact with the media was in the 1980s when he was a member of a failed pop group. Before he made this series, he was the manager of the students union bar at one of the London university colleges. What happened was that, for his graduate training course at the BBC, Stephen Merchant had to create a 10-minute short. With Gervaise, he created a prototype of the Office, and the BBC liked it so much that they gave the partnership a series. It's hard to imagine that happening in the US, which tends to value training and experience rather more highly. In truth, Gervaise plays a character very close to his own persona. Here is a manager who plays the guitar and wants to be a comedian. It is that closeness to reality that lends the series such a genuine feel. Also contributing to the feeling of reality is the sparseness of comic characters. There are only two seriously abnormal people in that office -- Brent himself and Gareth, the weekend soldier with a penchant for childish electronic toys. The rest are, I have to confess, very true to life in the English workplace. The plot, such as it is, is not worth giving away here. Suffice to say, there is just one more series (of a further six episodes). There will be a holiday special, but otherwise the whole Office has been canned -- not for lack of popularity, but simply because Gervaise and Merchant do not believe they can better it. ******************************************************************** AS GOOD AS NEW - NEVER PLAYED - MINT CONDITION ********************************************************************* CLICK BACK BUTTON IN YOUR BROWSER TO GO BACK TO THE SITE