The festive season is a strange time of year because there are so many films and TV shows that tell us how it ought to be – and yet the reality is always different, and absolutely always worse. Rosy-cheeked families smiling under Christmas trees in adverts, for example, versus your toddlers screaming down the shopping centre because, actually, they are terrified of the John Lewis Santa. The doorstep “I love you” flashcards in Love Actually versus the risky texts you will inevitably send at 9.43pm on 25 December as your fifth Baileys starts to hit.
The two Christmas specials of The Office – turning 20 this year – are the exception. Despite their age, they remain the most realistic TV document of a British Christmas: mostly banal, and occasionally wrenchingly beautiful – because of, rather than in spite of, that ordinariness. The Office’s Christmas episodes are about actual Christmas, not the version of it that we idealise culturally.
The original two series of The Office amounted to only 12 episodes, aired between 2001 and 2002 on BBC Two; but the show became such a national phenomenon that the Christmas specials, which followed in 2003, were moved over to prime festive slots on BBC One. The Office’s unflinching, aggressively down-to-earth style was groundbreaking, and essentially informed almost all British TV comedy that came after it. And the Christmas specials are perhaps its finest moment.
Today, the type of “office Christmas party” that The Office enshrines is pretty much a thing of the past. These days, you’re more likely to find yourself booked on to a festive round of axe-throwing, kindly funded by corporate, than you are to be photocopying your arse in the print room. But the spirit of the type of hilariously bleak, undeniably British Christmas that the office party (and, therefore, The Office) represents – the minor abjection of a half-eaten platter of pigs in blankets, the weird moments of tenderness under strip lighting – lives on.
There are so many well-observed moments in the party scenes – one colleague squeezing another’s bum as they slow dance in rapidly crumpling party hats, people playing darts in the meeting room – that just feel very real. They belong to the same Christmas universe as 100-piece party food platters from Iceland, and getting off with someone you went to school with on Mad Friday while Last Christmas plays and the lights come on.
The essential truth is that this is what it’s actually like: even the soaring, wonderful moments are sort of shit. The climax of the Christmas specials is, of course, the moment that Tim (Martin Freeman) has been waiting on for years. Across two seasons of The Office’s original run, Tim’s will-they, won’t-they relationship with receptionist Dawn (Lucy Davis) forms the emotional centre of a show that might otherwise have felt one-note: too cynical, too cringe-inducing.
In the final moments of the Christmas special, Tim finally gets his long-awaited wish. But as the woman he loves allows herself to love him back at last, there is no fanfare. Dawn shuffles in, and there is an awkward, searching kiss, maybe clammy hands. She is wearing her big coat. It’s probably nothing like Tim imagined – it’s just life. There’s such a brilliant inevitability in the fact that this much-anticipated, definitive moment happens while he’s mid-conversation with two blokes he only sort of likes.
I’m not a fan of most of Ricky Gervais’s work since, and his standup comedy, plainly, is pleased with itself, unfunny and offensive for the sake of it (ironically, all facets of the fragile masculinity that Gervais satirised through the character of David Brent), but The Office still manages to hit a warm, though not saccharine, note.
Discussing the specials at 20 in a recent interview with GQ magazine, Gervais’s co-writer, Stephen Merchant, alluded to this: “In a movie, the camera would do a 360 around them and the strings would be swelling,” he said. As The Office does it, the camera hovers awkwardly and all of Dawn and Tim’s colleagues are gawping at them, before they leave the room.
It’s this groundedness that makes the Christmas specials, and the series in general, affecting. There’s always a fundamental layer of crapness to a British Christmas that feels quintessential – for all of the peacefully picturesque moments we might hope for, it actually wouldn’t really be the same without a blazing row kicking off over whether a roast potato is a choking hazard for the dog. A British Christmas is a disappointing Secret Santa gift, a roaring hangover on the 25th, and still managing to have a laugh regardless. The Office, 20 years on, remains the rare show that gets that absolutely right.
Lauren O’Neill is a culture writer
