Chances are you will have looked at a colleague and thought: David Brent. The fictional boss played by Ricky Gervais in the mockumentary television comedy The Office has become shorthand for the cringe-inducing idiot who mangles clumsy chumminess with management nonsense. Brent is so familiar that, when meeting Mr Gervais at his office in leafy, upscale Hampstead in north London, home to literary aristocracy and overseas bankers, I cannot help seeking out similarities to the character that made him famous. They sound alike (in Gervais’s words like a “Worzel”) and share the overlapping pointy teeth that Americans believed were false comedy dentures. But there the similarities end. Brent is clueless, Mr Gervais clued-up.