It’s been 13 years since audiences had their last glimpse of Ricky Gervais’ iconic The Office alter-ego David Brent, and he’s now back on the big screen in the mock-doc Life on the Road. Critics have been wondering if Brent’s desperation to launch a rock-star career is an echo of Gervais’ own ambitions.
The comedian laughs this off. “It’s a fake documentary!” he says. “I don’t think I’m a pop star. The point is that Brent’s been sold a lie. He was told that if you’re not performing, you won’t be popular. And if you’re not popular, then you’re nothing.”
Gervais sees this as a comment on contemporary society. “People don’t think they exist unless they’re in the paper or they’re trying to be a singer. For Brent, it’s a vanity project. But it’s really bad. He’s a man at his lowest ebb.”
And he thinks the time is right to revisit this character. “Since The Office we’ve had The Apprentice,” he observes, “where people get on by saying, ‘I’ll destroy anyone who gets in my way.’ So now it’s harder, it’s more dog-eat-dog. We have Donald Trump saying, ‘I’d like to punch that person in the face!’ It’s like Gordon Gekko has come true: greed is good!”
To promote Life on the Road, Gervais has been touring with his band performing songs from the movie. “This is an album I have created as David Brent,” he says. “It is part of that fiction.”
Intriguingly, Gervais did have a brush with pop music stardom early in his career with the 1980s new wave group Seona Dancing. “It was all too good to be true,” he laughs. “We put a single out and it nearly broke, so we put a second single out and that nearly broke but didn’t. And that was our bite of the cherry. It was all over in about six months.”
As for The Office, Gervais continues to insist that he will never go back, only forward. “I said I’d never bring back The Office and I won’t,” he says. “And this isn’t that. This is David Brent now, what he’s doing now. There might be another spin off – like the soundtrack album and live gigs – so he might pop up now and again. But as a huge big project, a series of David Brent or The Office, or another movie? Probably not.”
The original BBC sitcom The Office ran for 14 episodes from 2001 to 2003, and now 13 years later Ricky Gervais returns to his iconic character for a follow-up movie. Referring to the original series as a “BBC documentary”, David Brent gets a camera crew to follow him as he makes a last-gasp attempt at achieving his dream of being a rock star. But instead of going on a reality show like everyone else, he hires a band and hits the road.
David is now working as a tampon salesman for a firm in Reading, with a chucklehead colleague (Tom Bennett) who gets all his jokes and a coworker (Jo Hartley) who has a soft spot for his idiocy.
Now he has decided to take all of his holiday and cash in his retirement fund to reform his band Foregone Conclusion with session musicians as well as rising-star rapper Dom Johnson (Ben Bailey Smith).
The music is actually quite good, while the lyrics are simply painful (Native American seems like the low point until he kicks into Please Don’t Make Fun of the Disabled).
David is the only person on screen who doesn’t realise how appalling this is. And yet, since the film is written and directed by Gervais himself, there’s a strange sense of irony at work here, as if Gervais himself would like to be a rock star, and is using this film as a chance to ignite a side career.
