‘That’s so Brent.’ You’ll hear that phrase a lot. I hear it a lot. I grew up in Willesden Green, a pocket of north-west London in the borough of Brent. Covering 17 square miles, it’s one of the bigger boroughs. I love it. The actor David Mitchell proudly lived in Brent while making the sitcom Peep Show. A show that ran for nine series, co-written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, of Succession fame, and is widely considered to be one of the greatest comedy shows ever made.

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And yet, it’s not The Office. It’s not even close to The Office. My dad still tells me he thought The Office was ‘real’. Twenty-five years ago, on 9 July 2001, on BBC Two, when the famous credits rolled for the first time to ‘Handbags and Gladrags’, my dad thought he had watched a genuine documentary about an office in Slough. Alfred Hitchcock said that cinema was ‘life with the boring bits left out’. The same could be said for television. The genius of what Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant did was leave the boring bits in.

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