The office - Complete Series 1

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice

The Office is an Emmy, Golden Globe Award and BAFTA Award-winning British television comedy that first aired in the UK on BBC Two on 9 July 2001. Created, written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the programme is about the day-to-day lives of office employees in the Slough, Berkshire branch of the fictitious Wernham-Hogg Paper Company. Although fictional and scripted, the programme takes the form of a documentary (a fictional documentary, i.e. a mockumentary), with the presence of the camera often acknowledged.

Two six-episode series were made, along with a pair of 45-minute Christmas specials. As well as being shown internationally on BBC Worldwide channels such as BBC Prime, BBC America and BBC Canada, the series has been sold to broadcasters in over 80 countries, including ABC in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand and the pan-Asian satellite channel STAR World, based in Hong Kong.

The Office shares some themes in common with Mike Judge's 1999 movie Office Space, mainly the banal and dissatisfying nature of office jobs,although Gervais and Merchant claim they had not seen the film at the time.However, at two points in the series quick reference is made to an unseen former employee of Wernham-Hogg by the name of "Peter Gibbons," which happens to be the name of the main character in Office Space (Season One, Episode 6 and Christmas Special, Episode One). The show also shares themes with a later social satire created by Gervais and Merchant, Extras, namely social clumsiness, the trivialities of human behaviour, self-importance and conceit, frustration and desperation and fame.

After the show's critical success an American version was launched four years after the original, premiering on NBC on 24 March 2005, as was a French version in the spring of 2006 called Le Bureau and a German version called Stromberg has been made since 2004. A fourth adaptation, the Canadian French language, La Job, had its TV debut in January 2007 and BBC Films is reported to be considering a motion picture version.A Brazilian show on the Globo channel Os Aspones was also heavily modelled on the series' format.