The Profound Truths of David Brent's Nights Out in Chasers

CULTURE CLUB is an occasional column where THUMP writers consider moments from TV and film that articulate or involve dance music and nightclubs.

When I first watched The Office, I was 9 years old. A lot of people don't believe me when I say that, but the truth is that somewhere between dressing up as Woody from Toy Story and recording demos on my Fisher Price tape player, I had precious little time for "friends". In this space I relied pretty heavily on music, books and TV to hang out with me. I vividly remember my Dad asking me to come and watch something with him one evening, simply saying "I can't tell if this is real or not."

In the years that followed, this odd BBC2 sitcom became a focal influence on my life and stayed there. Why a comedy about the inefficient regional manager of a paper merchant in Slough so enraptured my young imagination I don't know. I often think it was a question of nuance – not that I would have known what the word nuance meant when I was still wearing trainers with flashing lights in them – but I think what drew me to The Office was how perceptively it portrayed people. It allowed me to start noticing supply teachers who thought they were "having a laugh whilst getting the job done", or listen to kids bragging about football practice all the while hearing Simon the IT technician's audacious go-karting claims.

Put simply, The Office became my blue-print for human interaction. Episode after episode of painful and brilliant reality. It is understandable then, that long before I was old enough to even look like I could step foot in a club, the scenes set in the fictional Chasers became my introduction to the idea of going out, listening to really loud music, and getting really drunk.

Obviously, as anyone who has seen The Office will know, Chasers is pretty far from an Ibizan terrace. It is not attempting to portray a truly transcendental night out. In fact, quite the opposite. The object of Chasers was to put on screen the satellite shit-holes of suburban hinterlands. Places where blokes go out wearing the same shirt and tie they wore to work. Where drinks deals are advertised above DJs and the promoter makes semi-regular announcements over the PA. We often talk about going out as escapism, but clubbing in The Office is an almost nihilistic form of this. Ambiguously neither joyful or depressing, the drinkers are still trapped with the same people they work with even when they try and get away from it all. It is completely real.

Nailing an accurate clubbing scene in television or film is unbelievably hard, in fact it rarely ever works. Whether depicting high budget super clubs as in this scene in Knocked Up, or small dives like the R+R in Eastenders (warning: shots fired in the scene), all too often the environment is lacking. The music sounds too good. The drinks are all too full. The bar is never busy unless it needs to be for a plot point. Everyone but the main characters are basically standing still or dancing in the way only an extra who's just been told to "look like your having a really good time" can. As hard as they try, clubs on screen always look like they've been pieced together by an art department.

Chasers is altogether different. In keeping with the show's entire aesthetic, it is a note perfect reflection of early-noughties British culture. It reeks of a post-millennial malaise, shit-flickers pulled across sticky carpets to Phats and Small's "Turn Around". It is a glamour vacuum, pulling the disillusioned, the deluded, the broken and battered in through the doors, filling them with lager (sometimes cider), and spewing them out again. It is hilarious, and heartbreaking, all at once. But then this is often what going out is. The nights we talk about might be the big blowouts, where you "saw Jackmaster and then met him in the smoking area and he was mint", but for every one of those, there are a hundred sessions trailing around a faceless, black painted room, with mirrors on the ceilings and lights in the floor. Chasers speaks to the nights where you go out to forget everything, but bring it all out with you anyway.

This horrific scene highlights how important performance is to the whole thing. Ricky Gervais, despite now being a Dawkins-lite Twitter fiend who thinks kindness is a legitimate selling point for an entire series, plays drunk like nobody else. Buoyed by the bullish Chris Finch (certainly the cleverest bloke you know) he stumbles through Chasers with the giddy hope that him and his mates are the coolest, funniest people in the club. The way he talks to women, the drunker he gets, captures the sadness of a shit night out. Soaked in pint after pint, babbling through chats that spontaneously devolve into self-aggrandising and analysis. He is the ultimate big fish in a small pond, running amok through his shitty kingdom. It doesn't matter what happens, how bad the night gets, he will cloak the experience in denial, repackage it as banter, only to waltz into work the following Monday: "You're fired Keenan, drunkard!"

Ralph Ineson's Chris Finch is another cornerstone of Chasers' success. The perverse sexual attraction of a man that refers to his penis as a "single-barrel pump-action yoghurt rifle". He is the confident organ grinder to Brent's monkey. His barrage of misogyny, and furthermore its success as a mode of flirtation, mark another depressing reality presented: dick-heads rule this world. In the shit provincial club, where the most fun you can have is limited to sticking your tongue out or having a bit of banter with a toilet attendant, the rogue ranger convinced of his brilliance is able to fill the void. In this world, "girl's nights out" are reduced to opportunities, willfully preyed upon by bored sales reps.

Mackenzie Crook's Gareth then represents the bewilderment of a terrible night out. In these lost pockets of clubland there is no attention to protocol or fashion. Have a think, and I guarantee many of your funniest nights, the ones where you met the real characters who you still do impressions of with your mates, happened in the worst venues you've ever been to. In the absence of the distraction of good music, boredom allows for strange characters and situations to emerge. Gareth's dalliance with the motorcycle rider in Chasers is a classic example, before he knows it he is packed off into the sidecar of a moped, shooting one last concerned-gone-embarrassed look at the camera before he disappears into the night.

Then there is Tim. Long before he was saving Middle Earth, Martin Freeman was the anchor of the Wernham Hogg team, providing the viewer an ally in the melee of ridiculousness. For me, growing up, he became a coping mechanism. Every time something weird or awful happened in front of me, I only had to imagine casting a bemused look down a lens and everything was alright. His reassuring knowingness is no different in Chasers telling the audience, over snapshots of the night, about another venue called New York, New York, "they call it the nightclub that never sleeps…that closes at one." He becomes the person we have all at some point been. Having ended up at a crappy night, without knowing why or how, with people we don't even really like, four pints deep, questioning everything.

I would like to add, that Chasers didn't mirror what I would grow up to understand as clubbing. It did, however, introduce me to an important principle: the difference between going out for a great time, and going out to pass time. Perhaps one of the reasons Chasers is so perfectly realised, is down to its grounding in truth. Stephen Merchant and I share the same home town, Bristol, and on the outskirts of the city in Kingswood lies the real Chasers. Its website gives very little away, but suggests it isn't far away from its fictional Slough incarnation. The real club promises table booking, £2.50 brandy and cokes and, in a glimpse of how The Office 2015 might look, it is even holding a selfie challenge.

There is a weirdly motivational truth at play in the scenes set in Chasers. The whole drive of The Office, is the search for meaning and love in an otherwise beige world soundtracked by fax machines. When the characters pile into this terrible club, and drink until they are slapped around the face and need taking home, they find no meaning. They leave as, if not more, unhappy than they were when they arrived; bruised, sick, and humiliated. It is telling us that a great night out is a fragile thing, but one that starts inside. Basically a reminder that the worst thing you can ever do is get pissed when you are already lonely, confused or seeking validation. Good times don't roll around in spite of the bad ones.

Perhaps a grand conclusion, but it is worth remembering: if you want to see the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain. And you know who said that? Dolly Parton. And people say she's just a big pair of tits.

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