This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
When Ricky Gervais appears on screen for our Zoom chat, it could be a scene straight out of Extras, his merciless comedy lampooning all that is self-important about Hollywood and its luminaries. Behind him, I count at least five BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globes and, on a low shelf, almost as an afterthought, an Emmy.
“Are those in case I had forgotten what you’ve done?” I ask.
“Well, it’s my office…” he starts, before breaking into a trademark Gervais howl of laughter. “I could have faced the camera in another direction, I know.”
If any homegrown entertainer deserves to have their trophies up front and centre, it’s Gervais. Since breaking into the public consciousness and changing the rhythm of British comedy for ever with his mockumentary series The Office in 2001, the Reading-born comedian, actor, writer and director has enjoyed a hit rate second to none.
As well as executive producing the US version of the show, he and co-creator Stephen Merchant followed up with Extras and Life’s Too Short, while Gervais also created Derek and, notoriously and gloriously, hosted the Golden Globe Awards five times, making it quite clear on each occasion how little he thought of every superstar in the room.
Now he can add another one to the trophy list – coming top in the RT poll to find Britain’s best modern comedy, where our readers voted for their favourite show of the past 15 years. The winner is After Life, Gervais’s bittersweet tale of recent widower Tony and his journey back to, if not happiness, then contentment, after losing his wife to cancer. Sweetly, he says he’s “thrilled” to be pocketing this victory.
Considering the other titles in a pedigree list, why does he think this show, which finished four years ago, has landed so well? “Well, if I’m being totally honest, the answer is because it’s on Netflix, the biggest platform in the world, with 300 million subscribers. That helped,” he grins. “But I also think it resonated because everyone has been through something like it, and people like seeing themselves on telly.”
As Tony Johnson, Gervais paints a convincing portrait of a man swimming in a pool of bottomless grief. Finding little joy in his job on a local newspaper, or at home, where he watches endless videos of his late wife, Tony ultimately aborts an attempt to take his own life in order to feed his dog Brandy, a scene-stealing German Shepherd.
“It wasn’t meant to be about grief,” Gervais says of his original inspiration for the show. “The idea came around 2017, when cancel culture meant people started being careful of what they said. I wanted to write a comedy about a bloke who doesn’t care any more. I thought, ‘Why wouldn’t you? If you were going to kill yourself and didn’t. Why were you going to? Because you thought you’d lost everything. And why didn’t you? Because the dog was hungry.’ It all started from there, and it got deeper.
“Then, after the first series, people came up to me,” he continues, “and I realised everyone was grieving – they all thought it was about them. You don’t get over it. Someone told me, grief is like a heavy backpack, it doesn’t get lighter, you just get better at carrying it. So it became a study of grief, and it resonated.
“I spoke to a friend who works with the Samaritans, and they said, ‘Please don’t ever make Tony go through with it,’ so, for the first time, I was conscious of the responsibility. I don’t feel responsible for a middle manager in an office in Slough, and I don’t feel responsible for portraying Hollywood in Extras, but this time, I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this right. I’ve got to be bothered’.”
Although Gervais has often acted in other projects, including the Night at the Museum films and Muppets Most Wanted, it’s the body of work that he has created, written, directed and starred in that has had the most impact. How does he balance those tasks? Does he see himself in a role from the beginning?
“It all comes at once,” he explains. “My influences are mostly from real life, and I write about what I know, where I’ve been, how I’ve felt. I’m fascinated by humanity, and all those things that seem trivial: embarrassment, ego, jealousy. I don’t think most people sit down and ask, ‘What’s the point of life?’ They say, ‘Why is Jack such an idiot?’ Most of us are living in a safe sort of society, where your firstborn isn’t dying of dysentery and you’re not being shot at. The worst thing that happens is a waiter being rude to you.”
David Jason recently told RT that the secret to Only Fools and Horses was that it wasn’t a comedy, but a drama that happened to have characters doing funny things, and Gervais believes the same is true of After Life. “People ask me, ‘Is it a comedy or a drama?’ I say, ‘Well, it’s real life. What’s yours? A bit of both.’ You can’t have a group of people telling jokes all the time, it’s wearing. Realism is interesting enough. In my shows, no one gets a gun, no one sees an alien. You just want the people you love doing things in a funny way.
“When you write a film, it’s beginning, middle and end; sitcoms are just middle. The victories are tiny, like in The Office when David Brent told Chris Finch to f**k off. That was massive.”
Another theme running through Gervais’s work is the power of kindness; no person gets left behind. As Penelope Wilton’s sage friend Anne tells Tony in the latter, “It’s not all about you.” However, Gervais is a rare entertainer who can justifiably decide it is all about him, shelves bulging with trophies and all. Even in his Golden Globes-hosting schtick of telling his A-list audience, “if you do win tonight, remember that no one cares about that award as much as you do… don’t get emotional, it’s embarrassing,” he’s still highly paid and centre stage. What are his own checks and balances?
Gervais comes from a family who worked or still work in the care sector. He’s had the same woman, TV producer turned novelist Janet Fallon (who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer herself), by his side since 1982, and donates millions to animal charities. He adds now: “Was it Oprah Winfrey who said, ‘If you don’t know who you are by the time you become famous, it will define you.’ I didn’t have any money until I was 40, so the work is done.”
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Gervais can also claim to be one of our most successful exports Stateside. As well as the millions he has earned, he has a home in New York, buddies like Larry David, and a string of Netflix stand-up comedy specials, including a record-breaking turn at the Hollywood Bowl. But in his work, he remains palpably British. “People ask me, ‘Why are your characters so grotesque?’ We’re force-fed people like George Clooney as a doctor, but it’s a false expectation of life. We look like me and David Earl [After Life’s Brian]. There’s nothing funny about being cool and handsome.”
Runner-up in our best modern comedy poll is Detectorists, the creation of Gervais’s fellow Office alumnus, Mackenzie Crook, whom Gervais persuaded to direct as well as write. “I told Mackenzie, ‘Why are you telling someone else what you want? You’re there anyway.’” The gentle, bucolic comedy is very different from the coarser, more vulgar world of After Life, but Gervais sees a shared sensibility: “Nothing huge, nothing surreal, just minute, tiny things. It’s the silences, the pauses, the naturalism.”
No bum jokes or C-bombs in Detectorists, though. Why does Gervais reach for them? “Because those people do exist, so I just like to throw them all in.” Drama and comedy, rude and gentle, After Life is also intensely revealing. Through “Tony”, with his great love for his partner, his happiness with his dog, his great consolation in the tiniest nonsenses of all human life, it’s clearly an extremely personal work. Will Gervais ever create such an expansive, self-exploring piece again?
“I don’t know,” he admits. “You don’t know you’re changing when you’re changing, you have to look back. I worked in an office for years, so I wrote about it. I’d been in entertainment for a couple of years when I wrote Extras. Derek came out of my family working in care homes. But it’s never the sit- or the com. It’s the people, always the people. “If I had one central message in my comedy, it would be that we’re all idiots, so it’s all OK.”
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After Life is available to stream on Netflix.
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