Ricky Gervais has taken a break from promoting his upcoming cartoon about a cat that swears (brilliant) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Office.
Yesterday, the 65-year-old writer and comedian skipped the BBC’s official celebration to instead appear in a YouTube video where he reacted to The 25 Greatest David Brent Moments.
However, his fans were quick to point out something odd about the way Ricky was celebrating (turns out…).
Ricky seemed to go out of his way to avoid mentioning his former XFM radio sidekick and The Office co-creator Stephen ‘Smerch’ Merchant.
In fact, the man who helped create two of the best comedy shows ever made, and After Life, didn’t mention Steve once during the 64-minute video.
If you dared scroll through the comments on YouTube, in between references to ‘little hairy fellas’ and Rockbuster clues, you’d find plenty of people accusing Ricky of attempting to rewrite history.
One user wrote: ‘The erasure of Steve (sic) is not a good look,’ while another added: ‘Give some credit to Stephen Merchant.’
@daleemery9800 was the most annoyed, writing: ‘Honestly, the arrogance to have your favourite Brent moments not favourite Office moments. Zero credit for Merchant, who you can tell from your later work is responsible for all the subtlety and brilliant moments.’
It wasn’t just on YouTube that Ricky caught flak. On Reddit, the self-proclaimed ‘saucer drinkers’ who inhabit r/RickyGervais also noticed Steve’s absence.
‘The Merchant erasure is really mental at this point,’ wrote @Double_Sport9468.
‘It’s actually quite sad that he can’t acknowledge him at all. It also seems to be something that’s been picked up by a lot of non-saucer drinkers, judging by the comments of that YouTube vid.’
Gilneedsthis added: ‘No mention of Steve in his posts about The Office on the 25th anniversary. A post I saw said “25 years ago I had my breakthrough show” or some such narcissistic drivel.’
Others were keen to point out that Steve was more than happy to acknowledge Ricky’s contribution to the show on social media.
In his post celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Office, he shared the unaired pre-pilot presentation featuring Ricky and Steve, which led to the BBC commission.
There have long been rumours of a rift between Steve and Ricky.
The pair, who also wrote Extras, Life’s Too Short, and co-presented An Idiot Abroad, haven’t worked together since 2013.
In 2020, Steve was even accused of ‘taking a swipe’ at Ricky’s new show After Life when he said his least favourite bit of storytelling is a character ‘watching old home movies of dead child/wife to signal an inability to move on.’
This was seen as a dig at After Life, which featured several such scenes.
Steve later told The Independent it wasn’t an attack on his former colleague, denying he’d even seen After Life.
‘Whenever people stop working as closely together as they were, people immediately assume it’s “knives out,”‘ Steve said.
‘It was such a strange idea to me, that I’d take a swipe at Ricky by doing a tweet, and [make] an abstract criticism of his show.’
In 2022, while on The Last Laugh, Steve was asked again about the rumours of a falling out, and he once again denied there had been any falling out.
‘I get on perfectly well with Ricky,’ he explained. ‘I just think we started doing slightly different projects.
‘I’ve had enormous success and fun working with Ricky, but I was starting to enjoy working with different people and different collaborators and finding sort of new territory that I don’t think we’re necessarily of appeal to Ricky.
‘And so we just sort of drifted apart creatively, really, but we certainly never had any big falling out or big argument or anything like that.’
Ricky, meanwhile, told the NME in 2018 that he purposely doesn’t talk about Steve (or Karl Pilkington)because he’s seen the rumours and he enjoys annoying fans, but denied that there had been any falling out… Oh, and, er, have a good Christmas.
The Office is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer.