For a man who stands at six feet seven inches, Stephen Merchant spent a lot of his early career being overlooked. His sidelining as Ricky Gervais’s “lanky co-writer” on The Office became a running joke in the early 2000s; his very first national newspaper interview in 2002 misnamed him as “Stephen Mitchell”; he was shocked and then proud when a Red magazine reader named him as her “unlikely lust object” in 2003 (he still wanted her number).
He never starred in The Office – save for a few appearances as Gareth Keenan’s mate Oggy – but he was as intrinsic a part of David Brent as Gervais was. Now it seems Gervais wants to remove him from their creation altogether.
It was 1997 when Gervais hired Merchant as his assistant. At the time, Gervais was 36 years old and head of speech at the London radio station XFM. By his own admission he was extraordinarily lazy and the CV of 23-year-old Warwick graduate Merchant was the first one he looked at. “He’s the first one on the pile, he can do all the work, he’ll do.” He was warned in advance about Merchant’s height, but his first thought when they met was still “f**k me, he’s tall”.
We know how that turned out: the two got on like a house on fire, spending most of their time pissing about the office, doing impressions of jobsworth clowns and sending up corporate farce. When Merchant left the station to start as a TV production trainee at the BBC the next year, he roped in Gervais to revive one of their characters for a 20-minute short film titled “Seedy Boss”. That became The Office, and that became the most influential and important British comedy of the 21st century.
