PopSyndicate.com

“Acting is a profession of extremes on the one hand, and on the other hand too. An all-or-nothing world in which triumph and rejection, comedy and tragedy, go hand-in-glove like two halves of the same puppet.”

It is a sad truth, in television especially, that innovation is often missed at first by general audiences, until something else comes along, copies it, and then reaps great success using basically the same ideas. American viewers have embraced The Office (both the UK original and the U.S. remake), but are largely ignorant of its direct progenitor, the hilariously deadpan mockumentary People Like Us.

Created and written by John Morton (who also directs or co-directors most of the episodes), People Like Us was originally a radio series that ran from 1995 to 1997. The TV version of PLU debuted on BBC2 in 1999, with a second (and final) series following in 2001. The TV episodes, with one exception, are adaptations of the radio stories, often with the same actors. It is a scripted fake-documentary series in which a hapless and rather accident-prone interviewer named Roy Mallard (the almost exclusively off-camera Chris Langham) takes a look at a day in the life of people of various occupations. His subjects are generally sad sacks of one sort or another: a real estate agent, a lawyer, a harried housewife, a vicar, etc.

Ostensibly, it seems, Roy is there to celebrate their ordinariness and give the audience a slice-of-life look at people living non-glamorous lives, but more often than not he ends up documenting their worst moments, often while attempting to lend them a hand. Indeed, one of the most endearing running gags in People Like Us is that no matter how hard Roy implores those being filmed to just ignore him and go about their day, they all insist on involving him in the story and drawing him into their conversations. Memorably, in the very first episode, the manager of a computer hardware company needs to “make redundant” (that’s British for “fire”) a blindly optimistic van driver, and actually leaves Roy to do it. No one plays by “documentary” rules, and the show is all the more amusing for it.

Certainly People Like Us did not invent the mockumentary format, which goes back at least to Eric Idle’s brilliant The Rutles/All You Need is Cash, and probably even further back than that. But PLU refines a particular kind of very British variation on the format, with characters often being oblivious to their (one would think) obvious shortcomings, and mocking the traditional British reserve with a burgeoning theater-of-the-uncomfortable that The Office would later crank up to 11. But what keeps People Like Us from being particularly savage is that Roy is just as bumbling as the people he’s profiling, and his awkward, often confusing questions are met with a variety of reactions, from befuddlement to outright ire. Some of the show’s most hysterical writing comes in the form of Roy’s obtuse, circuitous and virtually nonsensical narration (which, presumably, the character is supposed to have written himself) in which he twists the English language to its breaking point.

At a mere twelve episodes (two series of six each), there are no bad installments of People Like Us, though it could possibly be said that the debut episode, “The Managing Director,” feels a bit tentative, possibly as a result of the switch to the television format. This DVD represents the first Region 1 release of the series of any type (it did play occasionally on PBS in the early ‘00s), and includes all twelve episodes in their original fullscreen format.  It’s near-impossible to summarize the episode content without sounding hopelessly pedestrian, but the show does feature an impressive array of British acting talent, including Stewart Wright, Sarah Alexander, and Jessica Stevenson (“The Estate Agent”), Tom Goodman-Hill (“The Police Officer”), Bill Nighy (“The Photographer”), Mark Heap (“The Head Teacher”), Tamsin Grieg (“The Photographer” and “The Mother”), Nicola Walker (“The Journalist”), Lucy Punch (“The Actor”), Emma Kennedy (“The Bank Manager”), and, perhaps most famously at this point, future Doctor Who David Tennant. In “The Actor,” one of the best installments of the series (and the only one not based on a previous radio script), Tennant plays a not-very-successful thespian trying to land various jobs, and fill time in his day. The performances – even by those in small roles – are uniformly terrific, with everyone playing it perfectly straight, and Langham’s deliciously deadpan delivery tying it all together. 

People Like Us is consistently amusing and often flat-out hilarious, but it has always been a bit of an underdog, even in its native UK; the second series, even now, has never been released on DVD in England (though it did finally see an Australian release in 2007). In fact, a proposed third series was written by Morton, but not commissioned by the BBC in favor of producing a new TV series called – you guessed it – The Office. Hrrrmm. So apparently it’s lucky we’re getting this official DVD release at all.

Sad to say, there are no extra features on the discs (nor were there any on the UK or Aussie releases), which is a shame, as I’d definitely have been interested in hearing from Jim Morton and/or Chris Langham about the origins of this series, and maybe commentary tracks from some of the actors (such as Tennant) who have since gone on to greater fame. It should also be noted that while English subtitles are provided for the hearing-impaired, these rarely reflect the exact dialogue and narration as spoken, often summarizing what’s being said – and killing about 30% of the jokes in the process.  Also, the back of the DVD box has the cryptic notation, “For clearance reasons, certain edits have been made.” Although I’ve seen all the original UK versions of the episodes, I couldn’t tell what was missing, and I doubt it amounts to much.

With a series as dryly, wittily absurd as People Like Us, it is perhaps all too easy to oversell its quality; first-time viewers may not experience belly laughs, and broad, physical humor is rarely on display. But for those who love language and will be amused by hearing it twisted into verbal pretzels, and for those who can appreciate the nuances of great British actors, this is five stars all the way.

“If all the world is a stage, then actors are the actors we hire to play the parts we’re never going to play ourselves, because we’re too busy playing people who can’t act. In which case, it’s not so much that they’re people like us, but that we, if we only knew it, are people like them, which, in the end, may turn out to be the same thing.”

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