Ordinary Gweilo

This week the BBC announced that Ricky Gervais is making a new series that will be broadcast later this year.  However, there is some concern that expectations are so high after The Office that people are bound to be disappointed.  So what have the BBC done?  From The Guardian:

The new Ricky Gervais series is to be shielded from excessive expectation by being screened during the summer months and on BBC2.

[..]

Alluding to the high expectations for his series, which began filming two weeks ago, Gervais joked that Extras was the show "that some critics are already calling the disappointing follow-up to The Office".

OK, but if you want to maintain a low profile do you really announce to the world that this new series is "one of the highlights of the spring and summer season on BBC Two"…  Probably not. And I don’t see how you lower expectations by transmitting it in the summer.  Or on BBC Two.  Watching or recording BBC Two on Monday nights in July and August probably won’t be too much of a challenge for fans of The Office, now will it?

So you hype a show by saying that you really don’t want to hype it.  Now it all makes sense.