Gervais' surprise at Globes win


Ricky Gervais, the co-creator of TV hit The Office, has made history as the first British actor to win a TV comedy acting award at the Golden Globes.

The Office is also the first UK sitcom to win the best comedy prize.

The 42-year old ended up beating Matt LeBlanc - Joey in the hit US comedy Friends, who Gervais had tipped to beat him.

And The Office itself won the best comedy prize, ahead of US show such as Sex and the City and Will and Grace.

When he and fellow office stars Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis took to the stage to take the prize, Gervais looked absolutely overwhelmed.

"Obviously we didn't expect this," he said, wide-eyed. "They told me to thank people, I said 'We're not going to win anyway'." The first people he thanked were the "Hollywood Foreign Press", the Globe's voters.

"I'm not from these parts... I'm from a little place called England. We used to run the world before you," he joked on stage.

Accepting the second prize of the night - his own award for best actor in a comedy - the Reading-born comic said: "Two. Bookends. Excellent. You need the set, one looks... y'know."

Its success is all the more surprising given that the show - where Gervais stars as incompetent office manager David Brent - is only shown in the US on BBC America and not on one of the major networks.

The show is being remade in the US - Gervais recently said he had found the actor to play the US David Brent, but did not say who. The new series will do much to raise his profile.

The comedian made his way down the Golden Globes red carpet virtually unrecognised. "I don't think we've really made much impression in America," he told reporters before the awards were announced.

Last week he had downplayed his own chances in interviews.

He told BBC News Online: "It would be good to lose. I need my come-uppance and Matt LeBlanc is the man to do it - it's character building."

The morning after the ceremony, BBC head of comedy Jon Plowman said: "To see the staff of Wernham Hogg surrounded by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson and Barbara Streisand was truly bizarre, but somehow appropriate.

"Who would have thought that bad management could be so popular?

"When you see the likes of Sting and Trudie Styler and the cast of Sex and the City queuing up to meet David Brent to congratulate him you cannot help but feel that something truly extraordinary is going on.

"Perhaps those who continually tell us that American comedy is always better than ours will have pause for thought," he said.

The Office's Globes triumph comes just days after a BBC blunder that almost saw the comedian overlooked in eligibility for nominations in the forthcoming Baftas awards.

Gervais was almost unknown before playing David Brent
But even before the Golden Globes, Gervais was being lauded as the first of a new wave of British comedians poised for success in the States.

- BBC


and Who said the Uk doesn't have any good comedians?

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