Future Works, a co-working space at the end of the Elizabeth Line, is a disconcertingly optimistic upgrade to Wernham Hogg, the paper-merchant setting of The Office. The program today celebrates its 25th anniversary — and still plays an outsized role in the national imagination when it comes to depicting the purgatory of worklife just outside the capital. “The last time something happened around here,” says one 28-year-old product designer with the deadpan voice of Martin Freeman’s Tim, “was when someone shat on the wall outside.”

But these jaded souls, once preyed upon by the likes of David Brent, are slowly being replaced. Now Slough is rallying around the entrepreneurs and thought leaders of Future Works in their bid to become UK Town of Culture in 2028, hoping to pip rival Guildford by pioneering the “creative expression” of a very different England to the one depicted by The Office.

“I’m a networker,” says 31-year-old Varun, one of Future Work’s entrepreneurs, sitting in front of multiple screens in an eerily empty room. As he launches into a pitch for his fintech startup, there are a few stray Brentisms (his favorite film is Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness) but few other signs of the former regional manager of Wernham Hogg. Unlike Brent, he is a boss first and only. He has no real desire to be a friend or entertainer, and certainly no cultural hinterland that might entail an admiration of Ian Botham or an impression of Basil Fawlty.

“Being a founder can be lonely,” Varun confesses when I give him the chance to expand on his workplace philosophy à la Brent. He’s already found himself crying in the toilets due to the stress of running a startup. That angst is appropriate: Slough, after all, doesn’t exactly inspire the more whimsical, rural turn of England’s present comic imagination, with its hits like The Detectorists and This Country. Here you can find Europe’s largest collection of data centers, plonked in the midst of a place that both tops the country’s league tables for income deprivation, and is the most ethnically diverse local authority outside London.

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Downstairs, I try to see if I can find a few Gareths, or even a long-suffering Dawn. But like the notorious brutalist roundabout from the opening credit, many of these familiarities have been replaced. “I don’t think Brent would survive here now to be honest,” says Nilesh, who works as a financial consultant. “We’ve had to make a few tough decisions around firing people because of AI. And I don’t think he’d manage that because ultimately he’s a wimp.” And then there’s the town’s diversity, he says, referencing the scene where David Brent gets two Asian warehouse workers mixed up. “There’d certainly be more of that happening.”

Could the Slough of 2026 still produce a David Brent? It’s a question of national significance, given The Office’s role in depicting a certain idea of England, one that sulks outside the M25, and which is in theory home to most of us, with our dull jobs and deferred dreams. Its geography reflects Brent’s own ambitions. As he put it, “Slough’s a big place and when I’m finished I’ve got Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell.” Yet these sudden London hinterlands are now forming the vanguard of a very different English worklife. Here you can find the ominous megastructures of the AI revolution, bearing down on co-working spaces left to run the less exotic fringes of our globalized services economy, where an anxious churn — graduates, officer workers trying to reinvent themselves, newly arrived migrants — all muddle along together.

Slough, against the grain of its once-terminal drabness, now finds itself the champion of a lackluster kind of Anglofuturism. John Betjeman and his “friendly bombs” have partly got their wish, thanks to Berkeley Homes and logistics developer SEGRO, with many of the brutalist, run-down shopping centers replaced to create a new landscape of self-contained residential complexes. From a distance, some of these plastic mausoleums can be confused for one of the town’s many data centers, which have helped create a peculiar microclimate of isolated despair on London’s far-flung borders.

The irony of Slough’s recent transformation is that The Office rose to popularity in the ebb-tide of the New Labour years, a place where David Brent was left to roam in the mire of a lost future. On the eve of the millennium, Tony Blair pronounced his government had a “thousand days to prepare for a thousand years”. A timescale evidently rushed, as the country became plastered with call centers and the pastiche futurism of “pseudo-modernism”, one that produced a different kind of desperation to the crumbling postwar social contract it was intended to upgrade. For most people, Blair’s “information superhighway” still meant being stuck in an office somewhere like Slough.

And then there was Brent himself. The shock troops of New Labour were the middle managers and the Mondeo Men, those trying to straddle the blokey relatability of the Nineties with the prying managerial togetherness of “The Third Way”. Sue Nye, a Labour apparatchik and wife of the BBC Chairman who championed the programme, thought she was watching a true-to-life documentary: a mistake perhaps brought about by her familiarity with the office of then-Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Once Wernham Hogg had taken hold in the national consciousness, it seemed to pop up everywhere. When Blair visited Slough police station after The Office’s second series, he greeted staff and modeled a drug test with Brentian panache. And so the regional manager from Slough became a sort of pathology for a nation weaned on delusions of grandeur, run by a set of politicians supposed to be delivering the future but who secretly fancied themselves as rockstars, humanitarians, and your own best friend.

Now a version of the future Blair once promised seems to have finally arrived in Slough — albeit one with less comic potential. When Vineet Vijh shows me a script of his updated version of The Office, set in Future Works and co-written to boost the Town of Culture bid, it’s clear that Slough’s attempts to find its feet in this new world have ended up slightly hysterical. And in this it certainly manages to capture the country’s own changing comedic manners, less masochistic and self-deprecating, and more in tune with a different national preoccupation: trying to broker a safe and gentle way for all the different tribes that now occupy modern Britain to get along.

The humor is derived not from everyone being “trapped”, as they were in the Slough of the 2000s, but from what happens “when everyone is free”. Unsurprisingly, there is now no place for Chris Finch, Wernham Hogg’s blokey sales rep, who does not survive the updated sitcom’s desired shift from “office culture to 150 cultures”. He is now a LinkedIn influencer. Comic set pieces revolve around the office’s diversity, both in background and occupation, with running gags involving “pitches every Friday that might change the world” and “flash mobs of dancers” frustrating the efforts of the documentarians. Curiously, despite potentially thriving in such an environment, David Brent is missing entirely.

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“There is something I like to call Schrödinger’s Slough,” says Rob Deeks, a social worker and champion of the town, as I ask him to take me on a tour to see if the new sitcom really does justice to the town. “To outsiders it is simultaneously a drab, gray and dreary place, but then also a vibrant, growing and sometimes dangerous place that no one apparently wants to live in.” When I suggest he might be touching on the broader condition of England, he takes me on a whistle-stop tour: a 10-minute drive that takes in the playing fields of Eton, a busy mosque now serving one of the first estates built to home bombed-out Londoners, and a data center that wafts the smells of cremated plastic into back gardens.

For the town’s population, Deeks suggests this environment can create a peculiar unease, a sense that they’re living in a future that doesn’t really want them. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t think the people living here have any idea what goes on in there”, pointing to a row of semi-detached houses that back onto a data center where the majority of England’s internet traffic is processed. “Slough is full of people who have just moved here or are just trying to get by. I think this stuff gets put here because you know they’re not going to make a fuss.”

Closer to the heart of Slough, I go in search of some more familiar set pieces from The Office, spots that might spark a bit of life into the town’s new sitcom. “No one goes out anymore in Slough,” say a pair of NHS nurses, implying that there would be no one left in Chasers, the nightclub from series one, for Brent and Chris Finch to chat up. “The people who work just seem to live in their own world, and then there are now lots of people here from places where drinking is not a big part of their culture.” Where would they set a sitcom in Slough now? The two look at each other bemused. “I’m not really sure. Perhaps you can try out the high street, which still has the odd character.”

Vineet Vijh at Future Works warned me not to go to the high street. He insisted it was not representative of his aspiring Town of Culture. It certainly contains past ruins from previous efforts at regeneration. There’s a boarded-up shop, with a flowery facade that reads: “Slough Celebrates Neurodiversity”. Graffitied onto it is an argument about immigration and the odd “Allahu Akbar” in a frantic scrawl.

Much of this will soon be replaced, with Berkeley Homes having bought up the shopping center, promising a residential-cum-leisure-complex it insists will make people want to “enjoy and actually visit Slough”. By 2039, those living in its penthouse will be able to view the Future Works by the Elizabeth Line, and gaze across the M25 towards the shimmering lights of Hounslow and Heathrow.

In the meantime, I spot an unlikely pair outside the derelict shopping center, a man who looks eerily like Chris Finch, who has just lost his patience at the job center. He’s with a woman wearing a black hijab. “Oh fuck off,” he screams at her before marching off. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. He’s just having one of his moments.” And sure enough the pair are suddenly back together, conspiring as they walk briskly up the high street. This odd couple are never going to win Slough its Town of Culture prize, but they’re certainly the makings of a more fitting drama than the one set in Future Works.

NBC’s new sitcom The Paper, a spinoff of The Office, marries the same kind of gallows humor about the state of community journalism with a well-worn workplace comedy setup. The show is set at The Truth Teller, a faltering small-town daily in Toledo, Ohio. Domhnall Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, a college journalism major-turned-salesman who arrives as editor-in-chief, insisting he wants to be “the real superhero, like Clark Kent.” Unlike Superman, however, Sampson has no powers, no cape, and has parachuted into a newsroom that resembles a hospice ward. Truth Teller pages are padded out with fluff about celebrity skincare routines and whatever comes across the AP Wire. At one point, a staffer sums it up flatly: “I’m not sure if it’s even a real paper. It’s local ads and a few articles of clickbait with some sports scores on the cover.”

As a freelance journalist myself, I find The Paper’s laughs more painful than painfully funny because the loss of quality local journalism is an American tragedy. For years, the slow-moving crisis was treated simply as a business problem, characterized by job losses or shuttered buildings, one that could be solved with apps, paywalls, or foundation grants. But as The Paper notes, it’s also a civic story about the disappearance of accountability, the evaporation of civic trust, and — as corny as it sounds — the shared story of a physical place.

Yes, like Ned Sampson, I’m a true believer. For the first several years of my career, I toiled in the newsrooms of small-town central Missouri. In the sneeze-or-you’ll-miss-it farm town of Centralia, Mo., I lost my job after less than a year. One day, I drove to the office to find it locked forever because the owner was tired of losing money in journalism and wanted to focus on a much more profitable endeavor: selling bail bonds.

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Later, at The Mexico Ledger in nearby Mexico, Mo. (town slogan: Just A Little North of the Border!), I was the sole full-time reporter, a single set of eyes on an entire community. In Jefferson City, the state capital, I covered crime and courts for the News Tribune. Most of the time, the job was thankless and the pay pitiful, but it still mattered. In Mexico, I helped expose the school district’s shady deal with a for-profit education vendor and a greedy property owner who paid for an astroturfed campaign to bring a controversial Super Walmart to town, despite opposition from local merchants (spoiler alert: Walmart won). One night, after exposing a prominent local figure’s embarrassing brush with petty crime, I found my car keyed in retaliation. It was petty vengeance, but also proof that someone cared enough about what was printed in the paper to lash out. My work, however minor, had made a dent in the local fabric.

Today, in too many towns, that fabric is fraying. Since 2005, more than 3,200 newspapers in the United States have shut down or been absorbed, according to a Northwestern University study. The closures have only accelerated: in 2022, about two papers closed every week. Of the roughly 6,000 papers left, most are published weekly, not daily. Large swaths of the country now exist in what researchers call “news deserts.” Today, at least 200 counties in America have no local news outlet at all, and more than half have either no paper or only one. Some major cities no longer have a daily newspaper at all.

I witnessed the absurdity of news deserts firsthand while living in Mobile, Ala. There, I uncovered a conspiracy involving a man running for re-election despite having been dead for weeks, and then how political figures colluded for his mother to take his seat so she could vote on a controversial annexation plan. It was the perfect local scoop, bizarre yet consequential. However, Mobile had no daily paper left to publish it, so I ended up running the piece in a magazine based in California, hundreds of miles away from the city whose voters most needed to know about it. The story traveled widely, but the sad fact was that a community had to read about its own corrupt politics in an out-of-state publication.

Even in places that still have papers, the reporters are vanishing. Many papers fall victim to hedge-fund and private-equity owners, whose model often involves selling off real assets or converting them to condos and laying off most of the staff and getting rid of most local reporting to boost cash flow. What remains is a ghost paper, heavily dependent on syndicated national copy and too starved for investigative resources to pay attention to the community.

Such outlets rarely have staff to sit through budget hearings, file records requests through freedom-of-information requests, or conduct in-depth investigations. In The Paper, the clueless managing editor, Esmeralda, brags about her silly long-form piece that reads: “You will not believe how much Ben Affleck tipped his limo driver.” Ironically, this race to the bottom has occurred in the age of information abundance, not drought. Many court filings, city council meetings, and legislative reports are available online with the click of a mouse, but few are paying attention, except for some scattered commentary from social-media influencers or limited coverage provided by television stations.

Years ago, I coined the term pink-slime journalism to describe Journatic, a company I once worked for that secretly outsourced local news to low-paid freelancers overseas, who strung together news releases and website copy into something meant to resemble actual news. Today, the slime has taken on new forms, such as AI-generated copy spun up to pad out hollowed mastheads. In many places, the filler has vanished entirely, leaving nothing but silence.

The effects are not abstract. When a local paper disappears, citizens are less likely to vote, those who do vote are more likely to do so in sharply partisan fashion, and local government becomes freer to act without scrutiny. In too many towns, the front page has been replaced by a Facebook group or Nextdoor forums rife with misinformation and unsubstantiated gossip. Meanwhile, cable news and the internet erased old boundaries, nationalizing our sense of attention and flattening all politics into national theater — with people knowing more about what’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop than about their own mayor.

It’s no coincidence that while liberals obsess over the corruption emanating from the White House, a thousand mini-Trumps are flourishing in towns and counties across America with little notice. Petty strongmen, grifters, and small-time operators siphon public funds, steer contracts to friends, or intimidate critics — all without the scrutiny that even a half-staffed metro daily once provided. National scandals dominate cable news, while the quiet theft in city-hall chambers is less likely to make a headline.

The link between a lack of local news and municipal corruption is now quantifiable. A Columbia Journalism Review study tracking 65 major dailies that closed between 1996 and 2018 compared districts that lost a paper to those that didn’t. Where newspapers disappeared, federal corruption charges and indictments rose by 7 percent There’s plenty of official misdoings in my current hometown of Harrisburg, Pa., which has been without a dedicated daily paper since 2012. In journalism’s absence, it’s been up to newly elected Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas to personally crusade against corrupt dealings involving his fellow elected county officials, even using phrases like “This is a heist” to call out some of his colleagues who had been siphoning millions of taxpayer dollars into pay-for-play schemes.

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More broadly, the collapse of news institutions corrodes civic participation itself. A generation ago, local papers and regional TV affiliates formed the backbone of voters’ information diets. People knew their school-board members and county commissioners because their names and faces appeared in the paper. As local outlets weaken or die, the cycle accelerates: less coverage leads to less civic knowledge, which, in turn, translates to less engagement, making it easier still to cut more reporters. The numbers are dismal. In many cities and counties, turnout in off-year elections has collapsed into single-digit percentages to decide matters such as who sets property tax rates, decides zoning codes, and who fills the pothole — or doesn’t — on your streets. When no one is covering these elections, no one votes in them.

Who’s to blame? Wall Street, as mentioned, bears a share of the blame. Libertarians, meanwhile, gloat about the die-off, insisting that the internet is more efficient than the dinosaurs of old media and the free market will provide a solution, as though TikTok clips and Substacks could replace a city beat reporter with a notepad at the zoning meeting. But the truth is more uncomfortable: we’re all holding the shovel that’s throwing dirt on local journalism’s grave. We’ve collectively chosen entertainment over citizenship, shelling out much more for expensive streaming bundles over three bucks for the paper. Netflix alone now earns roughly twice the revenue of every newspaper in America combined. To paraphrase The Washington Post’s slogan: Democracy dies in distraction — when readers stop showing up to subscribe, to vote, or even to care.

In retrospect, the joke of The Onion’s Daily Planet article has only grown sharper with time. It’s one thing to suspend disbelief about a flying alien from outer space who shoots lasers from his eyes, and it seems like quite another to imagine a metro newsroom in the 21st century where Clark Kent and Lois Lane would be chasing Lex Luthor on the job instead of clickbait. We live in a world that keeps producing new Superman movies while every week newspapers continue to wink out of existence.

That’s what makes the early episodes of The Paper so cutting. In its bumbling editor, recycled wire copy, and crushing sense of apathy, it forces us to confront the fact that the joke of local journalism’s demise is ultimately on all of us.

But immediately after the first episode aired, it was clear that The Office would defy these mediocre expectations. I was working in the TV industry, and I remember an unusual flurry of surprised, word-of-mouth recommendations pinging round the pre-social media internet the very next day. Gervais had taken the mockumentary genre pioneered by Morton — with no laughter track and an unseen supposed documentary camera crew — and rocket-powered it.

There were big laughs to be had in The Office, but much of its excellence was found in smaller moments located in the excruciating gap between the characters’ projected self-image and the tawdry reality. Unlike the hapless Roy Mallard of People Like Us or the often-surreal Alan Partridge, David Brent, Gervais’s character, made your entire body clench with mortifying shame. He thinks he is a cheeky barrel of fun who keeps everyone else’s spirits up. “You will never work in a place like this again,” he says. “You’ll never have another boss like me, someone who’s basically a chilled-out entertainer.” Meanwhile it’s obvious to everybody that he is weapons-grade cringe.

But we loved him. After a very shaky start, the ratings for an unusually swift repeat of the first series jumped up, and the final episode got the highest figures of Christmas 2003, now on BBC1. Then, The Office’s enormous success transformed British comedy forever. While it had always had an element of cringe, from Twelfth Night’s Malvolio to Basil Fawlty, cringe now went from being one of the side plates to being the main course. Awkwardness had to be a central feature.

For the next two decades, most of our comedy successes (with two notable exceptions) have been riffing off The Office’s template. Peep Show, The Thick Of It, Gavin and Stacey, Friday Night Dinner — they are all comedies of embarrassment and verging-on-painful unease, filmed entirely in real locations with no laughter track, and greater or lesser amounts of men’s clumsiness and gaucheness. (In fact, there’s a curious cultural disconnect between how we exhort men to open up about their emotions for the sake of their mental health, and then laugh at them when they do.)

But we have cringed too much for too long. At its best (Gavin and Stacey, Derry Girls), cringe comedy revels in the silly little ways we socialise. The terrifying pub quiz and Red Nose Day episodes of The Office set the gold standard for this. At its worst, cringe comedy is ungenerous, snarky and sneering: take the passive-aggressiveness of Louis Theroux with a guileless expression, trying to trip up one of his victims.

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And this is the side that has become dominant, though also darker and snarkier to still have an impact. We are beset, today, by low-on-gags comedy-dramas, often set far from the workaday world of Wernham Hogg. The Office now looks almost sweet and innocent by comparison.

There is a weary and wearying sneer to Channel 4’s recent Back, the latest offering from Mitchell and Webb, which is almost entirely cringe and very little com. “As drearily British as Brexit!” gushed the Guardian’s five-star review, which really tells you all you need to know about this grim, wan tale of “broken masculinity”. Hi-de-Hi! it ain’t.

But British comedy wasn’t always like this. Mainstream, studio-based sitcoms with a live audience and a broad appeal were the mainstay not so very long ago, before technology fragmented society. There were hours of this stuff, good and bad, dotted around the schedules. Now, the communal, uplifting, broad belly laughs of the studio sitcom are regarded as terminally dated and naff. Tellingly, Extras, Ricky Gervais’s project after The Office, was about the cringe of making such a show — shop-floor comedy When The Whistle Blows, with its catchphrases (“Are you ‘avin a laugh?”) and stock characters (the thick one, the brainy one). Meanwhile, the astonishing ratings success of Mrs Brown’s Boys and Miranda (the notable exceptions from before) didn’t register in the zeitgeist of creatives. It’s as if their eyes can see them, and their brains register the information, but they never act on it; they never think of tailoring their output to what people actually like, rather than what they think people ought to like.

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This current lack of uplifting, mass-appeal comedy has lent a curious sheen to the forgotten staples of old. I recently revisited Me And My Girl, an Eighties ITV studio sitcom about a single father and his teenage daughter. It’s the kind of uplifting, jolly fare that seemed ho-hum back then, but which now looks like a work of staggering genius: it has a lightness of touch, likeable characters, a warm heart and, crucially, lots and lots and lots of jokes, with a very high strike rate.

Unfortunately, the supposedly important, talkative demographics who hold huge sway decided such stuff was rubbish, so we chucked it. This despite the fact that nobody much is watching the supposedly important people’s programmes: the most recent Alan Partridge struggled to raise a million viewers on Friday night prime time. Prestige has become more important than getting bums on seats. Meanwhile Dad’s Army, on its zillionth repeat, is still often the highest-rated show of any kind on BBC2.

Producing a show so bouncy and cheering — light, but with just enough ballast to keep it from floating off like an untethered balloon — turned out to be a special kind of alchemy. And it has become almost impossible to recreate deliberately what had happened by accident. But, then, TV channels can only pour out of a jug what is going into the jug. Wider cultural and social changes have ripped up the desire to make populist comedies. And you can’t produce something the viewers would like to see if nobody wants to make it.

In fact, Ricky Gervais said last year that The Office would not get made today, as any kind of nuance and context is too much of a risk in the age of the Twitter mob. We forget at our peril that laughter is a vent for the release of steam under pressure.

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When I started out in television in the mid-Nineties, it was a very different place. The prestige, progressive TV sector  — middle-class and socially conscious — was still boxed off, and regarded with some suspicion by executives whose main concern was snaring large audiences. You might still encounter “creatives” who didn’t have a university degree. Such people are now vanishingly rare.

The very idea that TV is primarily entertainment and diversion is now looked upon with suspicion. Something of supposed social value has to be attached. And it is nearly always the same thing, coming from the same middle-class, Remain-y place, with all its cemented doctrines, dished out as if it were the original and startlingly innovative telling of truth to power. Recently the Daleks, Inside No. 9 and even the BBC adaptation of The Pursuit Of Love gave us a good scolding for Brexit. This is not art, not even low art, but mutual masturbation.

There was always a gap between the people who make television and the people who watch it. But that has now become a chasm, as with many other areas of public life. Viewers are low-status and embarrassing. They need to be jolly well educated, whether they like it or not. The mass audience, though, can smell this stuff a mile away, and it finds something else to do. It doesn’t want to sit down after a hard day’s work only to be scolded. It’s no coincidence that the biggest TV hits — Strictly, Bake-Off, Love Island — are not trying to improve or lecture people; the dropping off in viewing figures is not solely the result of technology and the proliferation of choice.

So While The Office revolutionised TV comedy, it also ruined it. It wasn’t trying to improve us. In fact, it depended on us being a bit silly, a bit worn-out, a bit impatient with the way things are — but never all that committed to change. Just like its characters, that is. And if it were to want to make a comeback, it would have to sack off the sneer and snark, and start loving the office workers of Slough, again.