David Brent: Life On The Road, review: Neither Sidcup, psychiatry, fat women, nor Native Americans are safe

It doesn’t really do to try to be funny about something that is funny. So, seeing as David Brent: Life On The Road is very funny indeed, I will confine myself to retailing a few of the vast harvest of gags from this excruciatingly brilliant film, mentioning in passing a few weaker bits, plus a couple of tentative reflections, not too pretentious and David Brent-like, I hope, on Ricky Gervais’ comic genius.

I can’t resist one Brentism though. “Did I enjoy the movie? “Er, guilty. I mean I did, and it was a press viewing, so I didn’t even have to pay. They gave us some wine, but there were no nibbles. Not even cheese twists. So, swings and roundabouts…”

Right then, gags. Here’s one from his demonstration of some brushes he is selling door-to-door these days: “It’s as stiff as you like and it won’t damage your rug. Or at least that’s what I told her”. Or let’s sample the lyrics from one of Brent’s many execrable compositions for his national “tour”, in reality a trundle round one corner of Berkshire, this one a rap number:

“Black people aren’t crazy/

Black people aren’t lazy/

And dwarves ain’t babies/

You can’t just pick ‘em up/

They got rights”

There are old gags too. I can remember this one from school, so I think it can be carbon dated to at least 1972: “What do you call a glass bra? “Smash n grab”. And an inexhaustible range of more novel comic foils, sometimes passing, sometimes developing into burlesques of their own, all attacked with devastating comic effect: Female “squirting”, “jam rags”, “the handicapped”, the Vauxhall Insignia, tattoos, drugs, David Essex, fat women (including one leather clad example who munches and boozes her way through Brent’s hotel minibar), Sidcup, psychiatry, and the Native American people (who “soar like an eagle/sit like a pelican”).

So if you have missed Brent, more or less absent from our screens in the 12 years since the last episode of the original The Office series was run, then you will be pleased to learn that Brent is back, and more grotesque, more embarrassing, and more humiliated by life than ever. Where once he revelled in being the inept but “chilled out all-round entertainer rather than a boss” leading the Slough team at paper merchants Wernham Hogg (and, briefly, the merged Slough-Swindon office, an unhappy alliance) now he is a mere travelling sales rep. The highlight of his life, these days, is “grabbing a Costa in Gloucester”. Worse than paper, his new employers, Lavichem, is a cleaning and ladies’ personal hygiene products company. Brent is despised by most of his fellow workers and still pursuing his Walter Mitty dream of “Brentertainment”. Hence he takes some unpaid leave, cashes in a series of personal pensions (almost worth the cash he put into them in the 1990s), and takes to the road for a tour with some paid session musicians and his patronised, literally, rapper protégé.

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In the manner of an Austin Powers or a Naked Gun movie, maybe even a Marx Brothers caper, the adventures of David Brent and his band, Foregone Conclusion, are no more or less than an excuse for a series of pyrotechnic displays of the Gervais wit, and we needn’t complain about that. Well, not too much. I do wonder, though, about his use of the N-word. On the one hand it is very funny and very Brent-ish. So it “works”. After another disastrous gig Brent gets drunk with his vastly more talented sidekick, a mixed race musician (in fact Ben Bailey Smith/Doc Johnson), and, barely coherent, begs him to “call me [Brent] a n*****”. OK, it is funny, but you think how many shall we say impressionable youths will pour out of the local Vue and copy Gervais’ line to rather less sophisticated ironic effect. The same goes for a mercifully brief appearance of some sort of stereotype “Chinaman” with a dreadful punning name, of the type Benny Hill used to do, and which lurks like an indelible stain at the back of the memory of anyone much over the age of 40.

I suppose what I mean is that in the same way that Alf Garnett was supposed to be an outrageous caricature of a Tory racist bigot we were supposed to laugh at, and instead turned into a hero figure for the wrong kind of people, maybe there is a bit of the Brent creation that, in the wrong hands, could be used to hurtful, hateful effect. Gervais is far cleverer than anyone who has the temerity to write about his work, so he has obviously spotted and thought about this danger. Still, though, he may not have got his judgement quite right, like when he got into all that bother over “mong”.

One other criticism. At no point in David Brent’s life have many people who has come into contact with him developed anything approaching respect or affection. This time round it includes his session musicians who refuse to share the tour bus with him (the Insignia is pressed into service instead) and who have to be paid £25 an hour each to even have a drink after a gig with him. Why, then, do they develop warmth towards him? And why is this occasioned by what looks suspiciously like a Gervais tilt at the Christmas Number 1 slot for 2016? A bit unrealistic, even for the unreal world of Brent.

I hope that next time we see Brent he will remain, as one of his co-musicians puts it, “the kid who owns the football but doesn’t know the rules”. In any case, like Steve Coogan with Alan Partridge, it is a joy to see an artist so happy in their own skin that they can return to their most amazing creation with no hindrance to their other projects. Fact.