It's the same – but just a bit different

Published on Thursday 26 June 2008 19:42

TV review

The Office: An American Workplace, ITV2

Gok's Fashion Fix, Channel 4

THE continuing brilliance of the American remake of The Office is a lesson to know-it-alls everywhere. We all said it was bound to be terrible when the Yanks dared to redo the work of genius by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and we smugly awaited a disaster of epic proportions – perhaps along the lines of the Comic Strip's spoof Miners' Strike movie starring Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill.

And now, almost 50 episodes later, those words have been thoroughly chewed, swallowed and digested; we're sorry, we're so sorry (as The Doctor would say). Once the new show got away from copying the British episodes, The Office: An American Workplace somehow became a wonderful thing in its own right. It's softer, true, but that's probably less to do with American sentimentality than the requirements of a longer-running series – Michael Scott simply can't be as useless and selfish as David Brent, or he'd have been fired long since (yeah – that's not always how it happens in real life, but this is, after all, a sitcom).

In last night's episode, Women's Appreciation, Scott's dopey attempts to bond with his staff involved taking the female workers shopping in a misconceived attempt to "make up" for one having been flashed at in the car park. Michael, naturally, believes himself to be an expert on feminism ("I know the crap out of women," he boasts). But it all ended up with him crying in the food court about his hugely dysfunctional relationship with boss, Jan, while bemused employees counselled him.

While Steve Carell is deservedly flavour of the month in Hollywood these days, his recent announcement that he'll stay with the show for another three years is wise, because this is the role of his life. He's pitch-perfect as the hapless manager, switching from farce to pathos convincingly. But the rest of the cast, with more developed roles than the British original, are spot-on too, from chilly Angela to authoritarian Dwight. And the writing is all the funnier for being so precise: there are no throwaway moments (Michael's mobile ringtone, for instance, plays the horrible but absolutely appropriate tune My Humps).

Such praise may sound like overcompensation for those early doubts, but it's really not. Though buried away in ridiculous late-night slots on ITV2, it's by far the best comedy on telly at the moment, right on top of its form, proving that "remake" needn't be a dirty word. That said, have you seen the clips on the internet from the pilot episode of the American version of Life On Mars? It looks rubbish.

And speaking of that, Gok's Fashion Fix is a noisy attempt to "extend the brand" of the relentlessly encouraging stylist into a magazine show, much like Gordon Ramsay's The F Word but with clothes. The motives are good, I suppose, aiming to show that nice outfits needn't cost a fortune by displaying cheaper versions of designer wear, but then flitting to a soft-focus profile of Roberto Cavalli's extravagant excesses rather undermined the point.

The number of different elements crammed into the show – makeovers, celebrities, Gok accosting people in the street to gush over their outfits – make it as shallow as, well, fashion itself. A stupid race with the runners in stilettos, for instance, revealed that, gosh, they're not that practical! And the basic principle that outward appearance is everything was, as usual, unquestioned.

Anyway, how can you take the show seriously when its idea of a fashion icon is Geri Halliwell? If you can find me one woman who wants to look like Desperate Spice, I'll eat my fascinator.