By When The Office first aired in July 2001, David Brent seemed to arrive fully-formed. The little tics, the half-finished sentences, the panicked looks into the camera - it was all there from the very first time that documentary team walked into Wernham Hogg. But a rough sketch of Brent had already been on TV.
Twenty years ago, on 8 September 1999, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's 'Golden Years' was broadcast as part of the Comedy Lab string of short one-off episodes from different comedians, and it followed a deluded middle-manager with dreams of stardom. Sound familiar?
This one, though, was no chilled-out entertainer. Clive Meadows is, a lot like Gervais himself, a huge David Bowie fan, and he's so excited playing his idol on Stars In Their Eyes he's started wearing full Aladdin Sane makeup to work.
Watching it now, there's something uncanny about it. It often feels like a high-quality demo version of The Office, with echoes of jokes to come - Clive's insistence to Merchant's interviewer that he's 32 rather than 37 foreshadows Brent insisting to Tim that "we're both in our mid-30s", for instance, and that the manager of a video rental shop would say he identified with Bowie because "we're both self-made men - he does what he does well, I do what I do well... I can do what he does as well" is a sketch of Brent's dismissal of Texas. An ill-advised ear piercing which "really stings" crops up too.
The slightly disconcerting feel might stem from how it looks a lot more like a standard sitcom than The Office, and looking back now, it feels like a staging post between the two eras of the British sitcom. There's much less verité wobble-cam and less seamlessly worked reaction shots than in The Office, as well as slightly awkwardly juggling of two very distinct comedy modes. There's some Office-style interview inserts, which feel much more like the Royle Family-style super-naturalistic aesthetic Gervais and Merchant simultaneously popularised and perfected.
But then there's the whacky-guy-in-everyday-situation stuff which place 'Golden Years' closer to Mr Bean, complete with stock characters - the angry boss, the put-upon secretary, the greasy showbiz agent - to hammily react to whatever Meadows has just done.
Meadows himself is an odd fella too. There's no little beard, for one thing, and that makes Meadows seem a good few years younger than Brent. That means his egotism and delusion comes off as daft and almost endearing rather than, as Brent does, carrying a strong undercurrent of tragedy and desperation. Then he tries to give a Dolly Parton impersonator £100 to see her boobs, which rather undermines it. The critical ingredient that made Brent compelling - sympathy for his basic yearning to be liked - hadn't yet been added to the mix.
'Golden Years' hasn't aged that well, but think of it as a piece of archaeology, a British comedy equivalent of the scratchy home recordings Lennon and McCartney made in the Macca family kitchen. All the elements you know are in there somewhere, but they're obscured or not quite in the right order yet. 'Golden Years' paints more broadly, but the gold Gervais and Merchant struck in The Office and Extras is in there waiting to be found.
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