Office Relocated

The other day I decided that I would watch the U.K. Office and try and note all of the differences that had to go on to make the show appealing for an English audience. I chose the first episode of the first season to view. Of course the location of the show changed and the offices are now in Slough England. This helps to create a real and relatable place for the audience. When I began watching I noticed that the plotline was almost identical to that of its American counterpart. Many of the same jokes were made, but the dialogue for the joke was completely different. In the American office Michael gets a fax from headquarters and says to Pam “We have a special filing cabinet for faxes, it’s the garbage” while in the U.K. version Bent calls it “the waste paper basket.” Another joke was when Jim, or this version Tim puts Dwight’s, or Garrett’s stapler in Jell-O. Garrett from this version of the Office calls it Jellies. It is very clear that for the jokes to make sense they need to change the slang. Other words that were different from our dialect were “redundancies” (down-sizing) “slag,” “mental” and “twat.” Another thing that I was noticing was that the language used was much more blunt because they swore more freely saying things like “shitty” or “cock.” The thing that I found to be the most interesting is that the ideas or characteristics of the characters will still similar Dawn, the Pam character remained a soft spoken moderately pretty receptionist. Ricky, the Oscar of this series was still a different ethnicity only this time he was Indian. And lastly the Kevin of this show was again a fat dull man.