Notes from a small cavy

About twenty minutes into the Christmas special of extras, Andy Milman (Ricky Gervaise) encounters George Michael (himself) on a park bench, taking a break from service to cruise the heath. After a few minutes, George leaves and Andy is accosted by a paparazo looking for George. This incident takes approximately five minutes and is not referred to at all in the rest of the hour and a half episode. So what was the point of the scene? Take your pick

1) To show that George Michael is gay and likes cruising Hampstead Heath (which we all knew)
2) To show that celebrities sometimes behave a little badly (which is hardly news after watching the last two series of Extras).
3) To show that Ricky Gervaise and George Michael are really great mates and don't mind sending each other up.

Obviously the answer is not 3, because that would totally contradict the supposed message of this programme; that we all too obsessed with the lives of celebrities.

Later on, Clive Owen (himself) insults Maggie (Ashley Jensen) in a scene where she is supposed to be a prostitute and Clive Owen does not think she is quite up to the standard of prostitute that a butch fella like himself would chose. Just a suggestion, but wouldn't it have been a whole lot funnier to swapped around the Clive Owen and George Michael parts; have the alpha male Clive Owen secretely cruising while have George Michael deluding himself as to his perceived heterosexuality. Or are our friendly celebrities not that much up for having a laugh.

Extras has always struck me as a strange beast. The Office is, of course a work of sublime genius as everyone but the willfully deluded would agree. Extras, on the other hand, seemed to rely on two jokes, 1) Big name celebrities are willing to send themselves up and 2) Andy & Maggie sometimes say and do embarrasing things. This lack of focus meant that the series veered from stylistic extremes, from broad farce to painful honesty but did at least produce some occasional moments of sublime comedy (However, in the first series, it is noticeable that the celeb giving the most self-immolating performance was the B-list Les Dennis while the biggest Celeb, Samuel L Jackson was treated with kid gloves by the clear besotted Gervaise). Extras - the finale, seemed to highlight all the contradictions about the series

We are, for example, treated to some clips of Millman's painfully dumbed-down sitcom When The Whistle Blows. But is the scene where Andy attempts to impress a journalist by pretending to have Ridley Scott ring them really any less contrived than anything in that sitcom? And would Maggie, ill-educated as she is, really call the director Wrigley Scott? (After all those years as an extra?).

Much has been made of the end speech, where Andy breaks down on Big Brother and launches into a diatribe against Big Brother and an obsession with celebrirty culture. But, and this is the big problem with Extras, most of the jokes depend entirely this knowledge of celebrity culture; Andy Millman threatening to punch a chef only works if we know that this chef is the celeb Gordon Ramsay.

And there is a sense in which Gervaise and co-writer Stephen Marchant have spent too long emersed in this celebrity culture. The Office was, after all, at its best informed by the knowledge of the life of the ordinary working person and never invited us once to mock this life. However, in Extras; the downfall of Maggie is shown by the fact that she has, horror of horror, to live in a flat with a fold down bed (she is shown as most distressed by the fact that she'd have to move her table about).

Which is not to say that there were no moments of hilarity in Extras; for example the idea of a Carphone Warehouse staffed entirely by former Eastenders cast members and Andy's agent having to put binders in the window to avoid a stream of highly inventive insults being thrown at him. But this scenes seemed almost to belong in a different programme.

Perhaps Gervaise and Merchant need to abandon both their munch vaunted 'comic integrity' and celebrity friends, stop trying so damned hard to 'make a point' and get back to the comedy.