Ricky Gervais: Funny business

The brilliant and excruciatingly embarrassing sitcom The Office has made Ricky Gervais, its co-writer and star, into a household name. Steve Jelbert meets the creator of the workplace buffoon, David Brent

"Wotcher Ricky!" cry the stallholders as I pursue Ricky Gervais through Slough's busy market. Though The Office may have exposed the unglamorous side of the Berkshire town in a way unmatched since John Betjeman's notorious poem no one here seems to take it personally, instead being more excited to see a genuinely familiar television face in their midst. A little girl nearly runs into Gervais, who gently stops her falling. She looks up at him, then runs to her mother's skirts, apparently scared at the sight of his plumply benign, bearded face, and hides herself. Gervais shrugs, as if this sort of thing happens all the time when he meets young children. We walk on through a sea of good humoured back slapping and requests for autographs...

Of course we didn't really go to Slough for a day out. We met in Ricky's management offices in Soho. He's quite aware of stories about the town's interest, after setting his debut sitcom The Office in the unglamorous setting of a local paper merchants. "That thing about me being asked to be an ambassador for Slough – Steve [Merchant, his regular collaborator] said we'd had a letter saying 'Slough's changed.' The next thing they're asking me to be Mayor of Slough," he exaggerates, then ponders. "What would his duties be? Can I get a black cat and walk to London?"

Would you open a fete there? "If I opened fetes I wouldn't turn down Slough. It's the opening fetes bit I'd turn down. It seems I'm turning down offers every day. It's not a reflection on the quality of the offers, more that I'm sick of the sight of me and I think I'm great," he splutters, "I don't want to piss the public off by popping up on things. I think I've got a really limited shelf life and I want to spread that out over the next five years."

He's joking and yet he isn't. For a comedian Ricky Gervais has an extraordinary lack of ego. Perhaps it has a lot to do with his circuitous route to stardom. Born and brought up in Reading to a Canadian father and English mother, his is the usual "bright working-class lad makes it to college" story (he studied philosophy at University College, London). Afterwards he had a stab at pop stardom,fronting the deservedly forgotten New Romantic hopefuls Seona Dancing. For a while he was a pop manager –"of a little band you might have heard of called Suede," as his character David Brent might say, though their "fame and success" period came later. "I bumped into them the other day at XFM," he says, "It was very nice to see them."

A spell as a college entertainments manager and a slot on XFM chewing the fat with a BBC trainee director called Steve Merchant followed, along with a few television appearances, a spell as vox pop interviewer on the11 O'Clock Show and his badly received, though often hysterical chat show Meet Ricky Gervais. None of which hinted that he and Merchant would come up with the most perfectly realised sitcom in years. Not only did The Office pick up the Bafta for Best Sitcom, Gervais picked up the Best Comedy Performance gong for his first ever role. ("They're heavy you know, Baftas. I'm waiting for a burglar.")

But it deserves every accolade it's received. The Office is easily the most media literate comedy to appear in years, working on many levels and reflecting the public's familiarity with a skew of docusoaps and exposés and its knowledge of the tricks involved. The new series is more of the same. Certain scenes will soon be as legendary as the famous "Training Day" episode. Brent's reaction to finding a sex toy on his desk during a meeting is shamelessly embarrassing while his one-sided battle with his younger and smarter superior Neil, makes a perfect running theme.

It takes insane attention to detail to make it work so seamlessly, though. MacKenzie Crook, who plays Brent's idiotic sidekick Gareth, told Time Out the scripts were anything but improvised. "It is a traditional sitcom, but some aspects are disguised. There's no canned laughter and we don't cut to gags for instance. But the main difference, and why people don't see it as such is that there are no convoluted plots, no coincidences, no huge payoffs," explains Gervais.

"If I had to sum it up it's a sitcom about an office where a film crew are making a documentary. The question is 'are you watching the finished product or are you watching them film it?' Do you know what I mean? To get around that 'Eye of God' thing, you're watching what happens when a film crew comes to an office. It's funny enough with normal people playing up to the cameras. That's one of the main themes – normal people given their chance."

For a man who claims to never read novels this is seriously meta-textual stuff. It may go further yet. Ideas include a possible special, "The Making of The Office", revealing the crew and characters in consultation, and even "The Real Making of The Office" where Gervais plans to play "Ricky Gervais", a temperamental actor/writer/ director given to berating his cast and crew for their inadequacies.

Thoughtful writer and director he might be, Gervais is now forever associated with the clueless David Brent, manager of The Office. Brent might initially appear to be one of a long line of characters frustrated by their circumstances, from Hancock through Basil Fawlty to Partridge. Even the gentle surrealism of Father Ted offered the decent, eternally trapped Ted Crilly.

But Brent is no mere barrel of neuroses. Rather, he's a well-meaning buffoon, insecure rather than unsatisfied, forever debasing himself in a vain attempt to curry favour amongst his long suffering minions. "He's confused popularity – not that he is popular – with respect," says Gervais, clearly fond of his excruciating creation. "You don't want to punish those sort of people. It's so easy. But just being nice to them is a dagger to their heart. It's not enough for them to succeed. Their friends have to fail too."

You really make Brent suffer, don't you? "You have to. As nothing happens, all you've got is his reaction to the normal things which we all blow out of all proportion," says Gervais. It becomes clear that his previous experience on entertainment's periphery brought him into contact with a positive gallery of types – those who don't say what they mean, others who can't say what they mean and those who say something while dreaming of another thing entirely.

When Brent regaled his staff with his awful compositions in the first series, Gervais had a real target. "The thing I liked about doing the songs was that they weren't 'comedy' songs. They were inappropriate for a 40-year-old manager. He was letting people know that he was thinking 'Maybe it isn't too late'," he says. "Brent's thinking 'I'm on a docusoap. I can probably get a record deal now.'"

So you're not David Brent one bit then? "Someone said 'You even talk like him'. And I'm using the same throat," he shrugs. "I kept the vocal cords from costume. It's set in the Thames Valley area because I can do the accent."

It was inevitable that a fake docusoap should have made someone famous, not that Gervais sees himself as such, although he's already turned down an offer to appear on the next Celebrity Big Brother. He even sees the positive side of reality broadcasting.

"I like those shows," he confesses. "Without them it wouldn't have been so media savvy. I watched Spinal Tap 138 times so I'd probably have done something like it. But it wouldn't have had that zeitgeisty sort of satire – Oh God that sounds terrible! I mean it wouldn't have been so utterly brilliant and up to date." He breaks into hysterics. Even comedy isn't that serious a business.

The new series of 'The Office' starts tonight on BBC 2 at 10pm. The DVD of the first series is released on 14 October