Recently I’ve had a weird idea for a sitcom bouncing around inside my head. It’s partly inspired by the Ricky Gervais show The Office, and also by the IT Crowd. Oddly the main part of the inspiration comes from a flippant, throwaway comment that I made at work when I was asked where my managers was.
To put you in the picture, I have a team leader who disappears and reappears at will, and goes out of his way to do as little actual work as possible. He spends much of his time cruising around the country in his car, obstinately checking up on contractors, and smoking more of those hamlet style cigars than can possibly be healthy. I’ve actually sat in the car with him while he diverts calls with such random excuses as “I don’t like talking to that guy while I’m driving, or I don’t like that guy’s accent”. We don’t mind so much as he tends to let the team manage itself, and he only really gets involved with us to authorise holidays and fill out the online sickness forms. In all honesty there’s really there’s no need to even have him in the team other than to act as a buffer between us and the higher management.
I call him The Boy Blunder, but not to his face as he might cry.
Above The Boy Blunder we’ve got what’s euphemistically called a Team Manager. He’s the real brains of the outfit, and we’re convinced he’s some kind of Machiavellian genius.
I call him Pratman, but not to his face cause I’m scared he’ll like it.
We’re lucky if we see Pratman more than once a week. He goes to endless meetings that he seems to generate with some kind of random table straight out of a Dungeons and Dragons Handbook. He lives on buffets, hotel meals and formal dinners. I don’t even think he remembers what his wife looks like cause he’s on the road so much.
His every appearance is like the arrival of a pantomime villain as he crashes in, dispensing orders and demanding reports, actions and updates before cruising off for another week into the great unknown. He rarely remembers from visitation to visitation what he’s asked people to do, and it can be many months before he actually catches up with himself.
I know that this seems more like a rant about management at The Work than a post about a sitcom idea, but I wanted to set you up with some background to the idea.
The idea cam e about with a jokingly absurd idea that came to me after being asked for the sixth or seventh time in a row about where The Boy Blunder was that day. When I said, again, that I had no idea I was immediately asked the standard follow up question of “where’s Pratman then?” Naturally I had even less I dead where the hell he was, so I just shrugged and told them to keep phoning their mobiles till they got annoyed and answered.
So far, so standard.
It was then that I said to my colleagues, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Pratman was actually a super villian like Blofeld, or even Doctor Evil, and was out there somewhere plotting to conquer the world?” They agreed that this was a fairly absurd and humorous idea and I started to think about how it could be made into some kind of sitcom.
I have an image in my head of a group of average, everyday office workers sitting around doing paperwork, filling in spreadsheets and going about their dreary existence working for what appears to be a perfectly legitimate company. Then when one of them encounters a problem of some kind they phone up the kindly, but often absent boss, and the scene cuts to him doing something truly diabolical. It could be anything from robbing a bank, to feeding orphans to genetically modified alligators, but somehow he always manages to maintain the illusion that he’s just out at a conference or something. The humour of course would come partly from the juxtaposition of these two visions, but also from possibly the inclusion of a character that knows what the boss and the company is up to, but somehow can’t quite get his hands on the proof for a variety of comic reasons.
Sure it might not manage a whole series, and the idea might be a bit stretched at that, but if done right and with the right people, I think it would be a hit.