Ricky Gervais, Back in ‘The Office’ Spotlight

Ten years ago, when we last saw David Brent in his natural element â€" the British edition of “The Office” â€" he was selling cleaning products, trying to get into the music business, enjoying a minor dating success and exhibiting a tiny spark of self-awareness.

In “The Office Revisited” â€" a 10-minute video posted Friday night on Ricky Gervais’s YouTube channel as part of this year’s Comic Relief benefit â€" Brent, played once again by Mr. Gervais, is still selling cleaning products and dabbling unprofitably in music. There’s no sign of a girlfriend, however, and obtuseness reigns, as it did through most of the run of “The Office,” Mr. Gervais’s trendsetting television series.

David Brent running in place on the far side of the global recession: that seems to be the joke, if there is one, of “The Office Revisited,” a modestly funny effort whose noticeable professionalism isn’t necessarily what you’re looking for in an extension of the scruffy original. Mr. Gervais is a busy man these days, a situation lightly satirized in “Revisited” when he ticks off a list of accomplishments (“My music, my recording, my short stories. Podcasting. You know”) that may be imaginary for Brent but would be a morning’s work for Ricky Gervais. “Revisited” has the feel of something that was tucked into a very talented man’s very tight schedule.

That said, there is plenty for fans of “The Office” to enjoy, from Brent’s bare calves beneath the pants of his cheap beige suit to Mr. Gervais’s performance of “The Serpent Who Guards the Gates of Hell,” a one-line joke in the show’s first season that is now a full-fledged! song. (“She’s not what she seems/She will crush your dreams/Don’t look in her loving eyes/She’s a demon in disguise.”)

Brent’s latest ploy for glory and attention involves sponsoring a young rapper with the delightful name Dom Johnson, who succinctly defines their symbiotic relationship: “When he actually offered to support my studio time financially, that’s when we properly clicked.” For his part, Brent describes himself as “like a local Simon Cowell.” After wasting valuable minutes jabbering with a recording engineer, Brent strong-arms Johnson into cutting a Brent-penned reggae song, “Equality Street.” (A video for that song has also been posted here.)

A few moments have the real Gervais bite, mostly involving Brent’s insistence on his own egalitarianism. Offering to buy his black protege a drink, he proposes a series of actual or stereotypical Caribbean libatios: “Rum coke Red Stripe Lilt” Pushing the virtues of “Equality Street” he says: “It’s mega-racial but anti-racist. This could be like Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. Better, because you could see what you’re doing.”

The wanness of “The Office Revisited” actually makes a kind of meta-sense because in the mock-documentary world of “The Office,” David Brent will always be a has-been: he peaked when the original (fictional) series was (fictionally) shown. As he says to no one in particular, because no one is paying attention, in “Revisited”: “Don’t worry about this lot. Just a film crew again, following me around. As usual.”