A few years ago, I spoke to one of the producers of The Office, Anil Gupta. He remembered a difference of opinion with Ricky Gervais while making the first series. Gupta thought they needed to make it a bit more accessible. Gervais – who had done almost nothing in TV at the time – didn’t want to compromise.
“One of the arguments that we always had was, ‘Look, don’t you want a lot of people to watch this show?’” Gupta told me. “And he would be like, ‘I don’t care – I don’t care if only 10 people watch it, as long as they’re a really cool 10 people.’” Gupta thought this was “bollocks”, but back then Gervais seemed to really mean it.
So 25 years on, watching him repost streams of praise for his turgid new show Alley Cats from his fans on X feels very weird indeed. “If you can find it in your heart to watch it again that would be amazing,” he wrote earlier this month. “Let me know where you’re watching from. And keep the photos of your pets flooding in. Animals rule!”
Where’s the “10 cool people” guy? How did we get here?
Alley Cats may be popular, but it’s been a proper debacle. In the UK, the reviews have been not just bad but vicious. I completely agree. It’s rubbish for the exact reasons long-time Gervais watchers have been bemoaning his work for the past 15 years. It’s constantly in search of taboos to bust but with no sense of why it’s bothering to bust them.
Unfortunately, it also racked up some new sins. The voice acting is rotten. The characters go off on semi-improvised riffs that lose steam and collapse in on themselves. Characters are introduced and killed off with dizzying speed in service of yet more mush. The characters left alive are one-note bores. And Gervais has clearly never been more in love with the word “c**t”.
Across the board, reviewers over here agreed: Alley Cats is bewilderingly poor, and Gervais is finished.
Nobody is more incensed than the fans Gervais has had since his days on the radio with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington, the fans who had their whole sense of humour rewired by The Officeand Extras. The r/rickygervais subreddit used to be a fan sub. Now it’s somewhere people compete to see who loathes the guy the most, where people celebrate getting blocked by him on X for saying Alley Cats is crap.
“The haters, the trolls came out – even before the trailer,” Gervais said on YouTube on Monday. “‘This is gonna be shit’, then, ‘The trailer’s shit,’ then, ‘It was shit.’”
So he is at least listening. But he never seems to acknowledge that a good chunk of these “trolls” are people who used to absolutely adore his work. This is the clearest example yet of the weird place that he now occupies in British comedy and the culture at large. He knows that lots of people love him for his cussedness and animal rights activism, and he knows that lots of people who used to love him think his new stuff is unforgivably poor.
This has been in the post for a while. In 2011, Life’s Too Shortstarred Warwick Davis as a conceited version of himself but felt like an Extrasoutgrowth. The fitfully funny but intensely saccharine Derek was his first solo outing in 2012. Film projects came and went. A crack at bringing back David Brent in the movie Life on the Road (without Merchant, whom he hasn’t worked with since 2013) fell flat.
Then in 2019 there was After Life, hugely popular but honking in its attempt to do serious drama. Recently there was a bit of a to-do over Gervais not mentioning Merchant at all in an Officeretrospective on his YouTube channel, which got fans annoyed all over again.
Gervais’s creative slide has been going on so long that even the patter about Merchant clearly being the talented one in their relationship is old. It’s not even really true, brilliant as Merchant is. They’re 21st century British comedy’s Lennon and McCartney. They needed each other, then they stopped working together, then one of them did a funk rock cover of “Love Me Do” .
And The Office genuinely is that important, as clear a year-zero moment as there’s been since The Comedy Store opened in 1979 and gave alternative comedy somewhere to foment. When it came out in 2001, everything else suddenly looked out of date. Every time you go back to The Office, there’s more to see. Gervais and Merchant clearly adored it, sanding and shaping and polishing until it shone, and Gervais’s David Brent is the crowning glory.
And yet in the years since, Gervais has pared away his act rather than adding to it. Offence became his thing, then it became his only thing. Gervais joined Twitter in 2010 and regularly made jokes people objected to – perhaps that hardened a need to show that he wasn’t cowed by doubling down on being transgressive. That attracted a fandom that liked him for completely different reasons to the comedy fans who love Prime Gervais, and for whom the word “c**t” seems to only get funnier the more he says it. (And he says it a lot.) That’s the group – the Gervais Ultras who prize swearing and animals over everything else – whose opinion now seems to mean most to him.
The other nexus event was his Golden Globes hosting gig. In 2010 and 2011, Gervais’s barbs thrown at celebs seemed to sting – Robert Downey Jr said it was “hugely mean-spirited, with mildly sinister undertones”. Yet by 2012, it had become the brand. The official poster showed Gervais poised to cut tape from around his mouth. That became his default mode: not pointing out the hypocrisy and weaknesses in all of us, but knowingly trying to get a rise out of people.
If British comedy was drifting away from him through the 2010s, his hacky material about trans people – starting with a 2018 bit about identifying as a chimpanzee – truly severed any link with younger comedians. The key text here is James Acaster’s riff in his Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 show from 2018, where he cosplays as an unnamed taboo-busting comedian going round and round in circles (“What’s the matter guys, too challenging for ya??”). It said it all: Gervais used to be cutting edge; now his schtick was as groansome as “garlic bread?” or “am I bovvered?”.
It didn’t help that he openly admitted to just looking on Twitter for ideas. “I’ll tweet, ‘What’s a subject you should never joke about?’” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2019. “Some people fall for the trap and say something like, ‘Psoriasis.’ Then I can come up with 10 minutes on that.” (“Sounds like a good 10 minutes,” was the interviewer’s quietly withering reply.)
All the while, the justifications for the taboo-busting got less tenable and more high-handed. “I try and make it so that if anyone’s offended, I can explain why they shouldn’t be,” Gervais said in the same interview. And then there was this pearler, apparently delivered seriously: “I only play very cosmopolitan areas where they’re smart enough to get the irony.” Hmm.
These days the 65-year-old Gervais is an avatar for an era of comedy we’re now embarrassed by, a broadband comedian in a fibre-optic world. Gervais should be a revered elder statesman now. And yet I interview quite a lot of comedians, and when Gervais comes up, there’s usually an air of faint embarrassment. A lot of comedy fans in their thirties and forties feel the same.
It’s hard to know how his upcoming stand-up tour, Legend, will go down. He’s admitted that he might have gone a bit hard on the cancel culture material, and will do something more personal this time. The haters, however, remain a regular theme for Gervais online and on stage.
“They’ll get me one day,” he mused on YouTube last week. “I’ll push my luck. I’ll do a project that’s so f**king mental…”
Something even mildly surprising might be an idea. Alley Cats isn’t the end of Gervais. But it might be the moment the rest of comedy truly left him behind.
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