Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the creative team behind TV hits The Office and Extras, have finished writing the script for a new ‘dramedy’ feature film titled The Men at the Pru.

According to the Independent the movie will be a quirky, coming-of-age story set in 1970s Reading and will focus on two clerks who work at a branch of the Prudential building society.

Gervais, who has his first Hollywood leading role in the soon-to-be-released Ghost Town, was born and raised in the Reading suburbs and so will be drawing on his own knowledge as well as extensive research into the financial world of yesteryear that he and Merchant have apparently undertaken.

The Men at the Pru was initially conceived as a TV series but has now been plotted as a feature film due to start filming next May or June according to Gervais’s estimates. Described as “a cross between Mad Men and The Office”, it definitely sounds like Gervais and Merchant’s first TV success, albeit transported back to the seventies and the soulless world of finance – an ideally bland target for the creative team’s brand of quotidian satire.

Gervais who has now firmly moved into movies, will also unleash his co-writing/directing debut This Side of the Truth next year.