The Office: Series 1

I just finished watching the first season of the BBC series called 'The Office'. It's brilliant.

The Office has a documentary crew follow the fictitious goings on at the office of the paper merchant, Wernham Hogg. The Regional Manager based at the Slough Office of Wernham Hogg is David Brent (writer & director), philosopher, musician, idiot. His yes-man in the office is Gareth (on the left with David in the pic) who is the ultimate overconfident nerd and ex-Territorial Army (like a National Guard, I think). The rest of the cast are all great as well.

The show takes a little while to get into but as you get to know the characters it just gets funnier. I am looking forward to watching the second season and the final 2 hour special that ends it all.

I'm not looking forward to the US version on NBC.

Tim (Gareths nemesis in the office) will be playing Arthur Dent in the new HHGTtG.

“I could catch a monkey. If I was starving I could. I’d make poison darts out of the poison of the deadly frogs. One milligram of that poison can kill a monkey. Or a man. Prick yourself and you’d be dead within a day. Or longer. Different frogs, different times.”
- Gareth

UPDATE: Just finished the second series of The Office. While it has some extremely funny bits, I didn't find it as good as the first series. I think some of the reasons are that with the addition of the Swindon office there were just far too many characters around. Dilution. Another thing was the sense that you could see that David Brent was going to be unable to fight against the tide of normalcy that surrounded him. Neil had too much power.

The final special has been popped to the top of my Netflix list.

Oh, and I watched about 15 minutes of the US version. Wow! There is just nothing there. They have really just copied the script verbatim (I saw the episode where Jennifer first tells him that one of the offices has to shut down) and the humor is totally gone. I doubt that it will make it to the TV.