On the 20th anniversary of slotxo The Office, its star and co-creator Ricky Gervais looks back on the success of the comedy show and considers whether viewers still connect with it today.
"I didn't have huge ambitions, it was never, 'This is going to be a massive hit,'" says Gervais of the fly-on-the-wall mockumentary, in which he starred as the excruciating boss David Brent at a fictional paper merchants in Slough.
And it wasn't at first. The Office premiered on BBC Two at 21:30 on 9 July - a Monday night in the summer of 2001.
Series one had the lowest audience appreciation of any new BBC Two show that year, producer Jon Plowman said in 2015.
"Ratings were rotten too," he recalled. But when it was shown again a couple of months later it doubled its figures.
Gervais says he and his co-writer and director Stephen Merchant were given what was a "good, standard budget at the time" of £140,000 an episode.
And so, in single-camera style, the show zoomed in on the lives of redundancy-threatened staff at the company Wernham Hogg.
"I think the first series got about 1.5 million viewers. And I was happy with that," says Gervais. "And then they repeated it, and it got 2.5 million. So that said something. Then I started to get conscious of the wave, the turn."
The exploits of the unbearable Brent and his long-suffering staff had wormed their way into the national consciousness and the show started to become a cult hit.