I've just finished watching This Office LIfe, a TV comedy that aired on the BBC in 1984. Someone has uploaded it onto YouTube.
It was written by Keith Waterhouse, who also wrote the novel from which it was based. I read the novel many years ago. I think I was in my early twenties when I read it. It was one of Waterhouse's better novels, though not a patch on his masterpiece Billy Liar.
Both the novel and TV adaptation feature something of an everyman character (or perhaps someone slightly dimmer than an everyman) who goes to work in a company called British Albion, a labyrinthine and bureaucratic company typical of the time. (Or perhaps somewhat more typical of the seventies, when the novel was published.) But the odd thing about British Albion is that nobody seems to know what they actually do.
My memory of the book is that it was a rather light satire on corporate bureaucracy for about half of its length, after which it became an equally light Kafkaesque mystery. I preferred the mystery to the satire. Satirizing office life is shooting fish in a barrel. Besides, how many people are now nostalgic for that "stultifying" corporate environment of the past?
Whether or not my memory of the novel is accurate, the TV version leans much more towards the Kafkaesque mystery. The mild surrealism kicks in very early. One effective visual has a man in a gorilla suit banging on the glass doors of the company's reception area, as a sort of incidental background event. He turns out to be a novelty act for an office birthday party. In a later scene, "Administration Services" is directly across the corridor from "Services Administration", and is staffed by the same guy.
A central plot point involves The Albion Players, the company's own amateur dramatic troupe. I'm guessing that, when the show was broadcast, this was something that might actually exist. I love the idea and I'm sad that this kind of thing became obsolete.
The story itself is absorbing and suspenseful enough to keep you watching, with a few reasonable twists, and an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The only review of any length that I can find is on the Curious British Telly Substack. Not a single person has reviewed it on IMDB.
I never know whether anyone takes up my suggestions when it comes to these "recommended viewing" posts. So if you do watch it, let me know.
I remember watching this, in the sense that I remember the basic idea - but I had forgotten its name and that it was by Keith Waterhouse. It was a true insight, that there is something generic that characterises being a bureaucrat/ manager, such that it does not matter what you are supposed to be doing, or whether you are doing nothing at all. All functionalities will be wrecked, regardless!
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed remarkable that offices, civil service branches etc, used to have amateur dramatic societies - and these would even perform classical plays such as Goldsmith and Shakespeare. That is the world of The Art of Coase Acting, and its author Michael Green's excellent autobiography "Nobody Hurt in Small Earthquake".