Peter Stear

Mockumentalism: Re-Casting the Void in Contemporary British TV Comedy

This paper examines the influence and function of fictionalized fly-on-the-wall/ pseudo-documentary techniques employed in recent British television comedy, in particular with regard to the first series of The Office. The phenomenal success of the Gervais/Merchant BBC series, nationally as well as internationally, is analysed and accounted for by using approaches adapted from television, cultural and gender stud- ies, post-structuralism as well as comedy and reader response theory. The essay argues that the comic impact of the series can be read as a complex interaction between the duties and pleasures concomitant to both making and viewing British television com- edy, i.e. predicated on ambiguous notions of masculine anxiety, augmented by a media and in many ways culturally specific ‘anxiety of influence’, as well as dependent on foregrounded notions of generationally specific media literacy.

With the performer/writers Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen, British tele- vision comedy is currently enjoying a level of international acclaim perhaps not seen since the late 1960s to mid-1970s with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers. Both performers have now come to epitomize the kind of “Creative Britain” that the New Labour government was calling for in the late 1990s when it symbolically rebranded the Department of National Heritage into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,1 thereby ushering in a more modern, forward-looking notion of British culture and identity that came to be encapsulated, however briefly, in the slogan “Cool Britannia”, a revamped and as it turned out largely over-hyped turn-of-millennium version of the Swinging Sixties. While media interest, both national and international, in the two other notable strands of this recent cultural trend, Britpop and Britart, that is popular music and contemporary British art, has waned, the “Britcom” boom as one Guardian critic dubbed the phenomenon in 1999,2 has gone from strength to strength.

1 Cf. New Labour MP Chris Smith’s Creative Britain (1998) and Driver and Martell for an incisive overview and analysis of the “attitudes, values, and ways of life that New Labour is promoting in its New Britain” (461). 2 Cf. Gibbons, the focus of whose article is the phenomenon of British television comedy writers turning to the ‘big screen’ in an attempt to conquer the US market: “We’ve had Britpop and Britart, now Britcom is attempting to sweep the world in their wake. Spurred by the success of Richard Curtis – who wrote the television clas- sic Blackadder and has rocketed into the Hollywood A-list with the films Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill – a host of British comedy stars are work- ing on their own movies”. 270

Gervais and Baron Cohen represent only the tip of the iceberg regarding the quantity and quality of current British comedy acts. With a view to the con- straints of the present format, a paper surveying the entire range of even alter- native contemporary British comedy would of course, if I might somewhat adaptively make reference to Gerry Palmer’s seminal work on film and TV com- edy,3 be a logical absurdity. I shall therefore, apart from a few contextualizing remarks at the beginning, be restricting my comments and analysis to one rep- resentative recent BBC programme only, the hugely successful first series of The Office.4 Further, and although I have somewhat deliberately ‘over-egged the pudding’ with my reference to contemporary British TV comedy as “mocku- mentalism”, the idea is not to suggest that the representative status of The Office is predicated on its eventual monumental international success per se, nor is it to suggest that there is a new monumentalist bent à la Cecil B. De Mille to con- temporary TV productions, pushing the limit with regard to the BBC’s set and wardrobe departments. Far from it: much of the essence of what is new in terms of British comedy is precisely its minimalism, which can be viewed as a product of traditional so-called British gritty realism, a revitalized fly-on-the-wall documentary quality and, of necessity, the budgetary constraints pertaining to most TV productions. What I do want to suggest, however, is that there is a ‘monumental’ quality to British TV comedy and that it consists of a monumental body of work press- ing down on contemporary British comedy writers, an anxiety of influence which is perhaps unmatched elsewhere, at least outside the US. Further, that this anxiety of influence is a double-edged sword, at once unleashing enormous self-referential, intertextual possibilities, but also seemingly condemning much TV writing to the dead hand of endless, recycled sitcom formats. There is often, in other words, a sentimental, anodyne quality – which the media the- orist John Tulloch has ascribed to the “familial paradigm” (258), whereby the “discursive tension of the sitcom is contained by the family” (253) – that is eschewed by the best of contemporary British situation comedy. Or, as the TV commentator and producer David Herman has noted: “From the 1960s to the 1980s, the classic setting for sitcoms and soaps was the family home [. . .]. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge cultural shift in television drama away from these settings to new loyalties and collective identities” (64).

3 I shall refer to Palmer’s theory later in this article. Although the focus of his study is largely British, in its theoretical framework it is abstract enough to receive consider- ation, for example, with regard to American film, cf. Horton. 4 The first series, consisting of six thirty-minute episodes, was broadcast on BBC2 Mondays, from 9 July to 20 August 2001, at 9:30 p.m., quickly achieving cult status. As the BBC’s The Office website claims: “The DVD/video release of the first series quickly became Britain’s fastest and biggest selling non-film title”.