8. It Has No Laughter Track
It may sound like a simple point but its importance cannot be overstated. The laughter track is the death knell of any good sitcom. It's the sound of everyone involved, from the studio to the scriptwriter, sharply nudging you in the stomach and saying loudly ''Get it? Get it? That was a JOKE!'' When pitching the series, Gervais and Merchant were all too aware that the absence of a laughter track, amongst other stylistic choices, would be a contentious issue with the BBC. Gervais recalls those initial meetings:
''Let's not have any real jokes, let's not have any catchphrases, let's have no one dressing up in wigs and acting funnily, let's not have a laughter track, let's have nothing happen, let's make everyone a little bit bored, let's make no one actually funny. It was like the antichrist of comedy.''
If you find yourself cringing at every second of When the Whistle Blows, then you'll know precisely the sort of comedy The Office was running away from. For The Office, a sitcom without catchphrases and 'no real jokes', could hardly have benefited from the most stale and cynical of studio interventions. Find a sitcom that uses a laughter track and then try to imagine the same show without it. Are you frantically awaiting the arrival of some sort of sign, worried that you'll miss your cue to laugh? Are you staring wide-eyed at the television, wondering just who stole all the funny lines? Hardly. Instead, you may be surprised to find that where once you were simply swept along at the studio's request, now you may have heard for the first time a line that had hitherto been drowned out by the cacophony of canned laughter. If The Office had been given a laughter track, then that would have split the jokes into a hierarchy, of sorts. Not every line causes you to roll on the proverbial floor (although, of course, many do) and as far as I'm aware the studios have yet to create the sound of a collective smirk, so how to judge one joke from another? In a post-modern twist, it's established from the outset that The Office isn't even a comedy, but instead a 'fly-on-the-wall' show about a Slough paper company filmed and commissioned by the BBC. The naturalistic setting, dialogue and, most telling of all, absence of a laughter track, fooled many a viewer into believing they were watching a docusoap along the likes of Airport and The Cruise. Now, rather than The Office borrowing from the genre, every self-aware talking head who lets a camera crew through his door looks up to The Office.