Ritual humiliation

Ricky Gervais’s latest sitcom, Life’s Too Short (BBC2, Thursday), is really a series of sketches on his favourite themes — failure, rejection, self-delusion and humiliation. I gather from friends of friends that at UCL he was often teased, not always pleasantly, for not fitting in with the right gang. Exclusion of one kind or another and the desperate need to fit in is another constant topic. You may remember the scene in Extras in which he and his friends are turfed out of the VIP area in a club to make way for David Bowie, who then makes things more horrible by improvising a song about what a pathetic and useless person Gervais’s character is.

There is usually a happy ending, but only for the people at the bottom of the heap, such as Tim and Dawn in The Office, whose coming together matches the destruction of the most odious characters, Dawn’s arrogant boyfriend Lee — and the loathsome Finchy, David Brent’s best friend, whose frequent arrival in the office of The Office is a measure of Brent’s own delusional failure.