The Ricky Gervais Show
My favourite radio show/podcast/audiobook The Ricky Gervais Show has been turned into an animated feature series consisting of 13 episodes, (from series one of the podcast version of the show), by HBO. If you’ve never heard of this show before, (which is unlikley if you use iTunes seeing as its the best selling audiobook series for years now), then I’ll tell you: it’s just three men talking nonsense.
That’s all there is to it, the three men are of course Ricky Gervais who is accompanied by Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. In the early days, the show was broadcasted on a local radio station called XFM which ran from 2001 to 2004 consisting of about 90 episodes, each an hour in length. Karl Pilkington was working as a producer on XFM and was told her had to work on Saturdays, so he was lumbered with Ricky and Stephen. Slowly and surely they began to unravel the gift that keeps on giving, the gift in question is of course the round-headed manc twat Karl who whinges, moans and complains all the time.
However, his childhood stories about horses in houses, adulthood stories about washing up with no thumbs, insane stories about monkeys acting as last-minute firemen and shadows in Boston pushing people of their bikes make him the funniest person in the world. He is quintessentially the perfect round headed mong.
The latest version of trios audio work comes on the form of The Ricky Gervais Guide To… where the three discuss big topics ranging from medicine, philosophy and the future. However it’s currently nearing the end of the second series and it’s uncertain what the future will bring, hopefully more audiobooks.
Anyway, back to the HBO series I started talking about. Before I show you a video clip of the animated show, I’m going to show you a video of the three of them just having a chat to promote the animated show itself.
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In case you’re still interested in the animated version of the show, then here’s one of the many preview clips that have been provided by HBO. If you live within the United States, then you can legally download the first full episode of the animated series through the HBO RSS feed.
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So, that’s Karl Pilkington. Do you like him? Well, you should. If you want to hear audio clips of him on the original XFM show or the podcasts, then YouTube “Karl Pilkington” and you’ll get a lot of results to listen to. Then, if you really, really like him; head over to this topic on Pilkipedia to download all 101 episodes, (some are pre-Karl from 1998 with just Ricky and Stephen), which contains over 100 hours of material. Best of all it’s legal and free, but I’m afraid if you want to download the 5 series of podcasts and the 2 series of the Guide To’s, then you’ll have to pay for them on either iTunes or Audiable.
If you fancy having the rounded headed twat, (I say that with all the love in the world), as your desktop wallpaper then please click here to be taken to a larger version of the picture you see below; which by the way I made on Photoshop after taking a screen grab of the original preview.
I don’t think I can put into words just how much these three people mean to me, I know that’s an odd thing to say seeing as I’ve never even met them and they do not know of my existence, but their collaboration on the this show that has lasted 10 years in various formats has kept me entertained and happy when I needed them most. Whenever I’m upset or just want a laugh, I know I can just set iTunes to random and let it cycle through hundreds of hours of the worlds greatest audio show.
I’ve mentioned a lot of websites in this blog post so here’s a list of them.
The Ricky Gervais Show starts on February the 19th on HBO.
Steven, Administrator.
Published on February 17th 2010 / Filed under Media
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