← Back to context

Comment by mvdtnz

15 hours ago

That author on Slough,

> Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal

That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks it's more important to be kind than popular, and After Life, a series about a man who loses his wife young and how he deals with grief.

He also did The Invention of Lying, which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"

  • For me that has to be High Life. Pitched to me as "Robert Pattinson has to to take care of a baby in space", in reality it was basically a side plot to "serial killers and rapists are stuck on a spaceship together" and all that implies.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn't fit for humans now,

There isn't grass to graze a cow.

Swarm over, Death!

John Betjeman (1906 - 1984)

There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit