Fifty years and 20 centuries late

Though this conclusion flies in the face of the decidedly un-festive daily media circus, which would have us believe that nearly everyone is either a moated tax-cheat or a mouldering dole-cheat, one is beginning to suspect that a great many of one’s fellow countrymen actually work in offices.  Quite apart from the sheer number of different people who ring us each day to un-sell us ‘PPI’ (whatever that may be), there is the evidence of television.

Two of this year’s most promising new situation comedies are, at least in part, symptomatic of the producers’ need to satirise urban English office culture without actually doing so.  Bluestone 42 (Tuesdays at 10pm on BBC3) transposes the hot HR, IT, and Health-and-Safety action to the battlefields of sunny Afghanistan, where flippant bomb-disposal guru Capt. Nick Medhurst (Oliver Chris) rules the roost like a lesser royal on a permanent gap year.

Vegas was fully booked.

His hilarious self-involvement and mediocre leadership abilities constantly subvert his attempts to woo the company’s diligent, serious, and more-or-less pretty chaplain, Maj. Mary Greenstock (Kelly Adams).  Comparisons of the show to M*A*S*H have been legion, but M*A*S*H meets The Office would be more to the point, as this is fundamentally about a workplace romance – and a workplace – constantly on the verge of going horribly wrong.  The enemy bullets, and about half of the other characters, are thus far merely window dressing, though Lance Corporal Landsley (The Paradise’s Stephen Wight) and Corporal Bird (Katie Lyons) are holding up their rather light end better than the rest.

A frustrated sexual relationship is also at the heart of Plebs (Mondays at 10pm), ITV2’s decidedly belated answer to The Flintstones.  Marcus (Tom Rosenthal) and Stylax (Joel Fry) work in an office, copying and shredding memos for a man-hungry ginger boss, who reminds one more than a bit of one’s aunt Hilary.  The lads have trouble getting past the doormen of the coolest clubs, they cook and eat terrible food, and they share a rented flat with each other and Marcus’s slave, Grumio (the amazing Ryan Sampson).  That’s right, slave; for it is some time before the fifth century A.D. and we are, for what it’s worth, in Ancient Rome.

Quentin Tarantino said he would call – it seemed right up his street.

The shredding and copying takes place entirely by hand; the cool clubs are cool because they host the best orgies; and the boys’ beautiful, unobtainable Britannic neighbour (Sophie Colquhoun) has an acid-tongued slave of her own, played by the buxom and very talented Lydia Bewley.  The office water cooler, also a human being (Tom Basden), is a fountain of jobsworth-y political correctness as much as of water.

The humour of Plebs is more disgusting, both visually and verbally, than it needs to be; but despite this, the cleverness of the historical parallels – including especially the idea that London may be in the midst of its own decline and fall – makes it our winner by a nose.  Bluestone’s creators have done wonders in drawing palatable comedy out of the Afghanistan fiasco without (we trust) offending the Afghans or the families of British service personnel or the Army itself, but one wonders how long it can last before becoming offensive or dull.