Rolling UK Comedy Thread - "Ricky Don't Lose Larry David's Number

Ricky Gervais: Step into my office

He created one of the great sitcoms. He is a very funny man. And he's concerned about his 'legacy'. Which is exactly why Nicholas Barber would like to have a quiet word with Ricky Gervais

Published: 14 January 2007

Ricky Gervais opens his new live show wearing a plastic crown and a regal red robe, with his name in lights behind him and a six-foot model of an Emmy award to his left. "Not too much, is it?" he asks with mock-concern, but the answer is, no, it's not too much. If anything, it's not enough. Once he's slipped off the fancy dress, the reigning King of Comedy strolls around the stage for an hour and a bit in his trademark jeans and black T-shirt. He couldn't be more relaxed if he was at home in his pyjamas (which he is, he says, by 6.30 most nights).

He's such a natural comic that he gets laughs every time he unleashes his falsetto sarcasm or his saliva-soaked giggle. He skilfully deconstructs his stories as he's telling them, and he slips nimbly back and forth across the boundaries of taste, so we're never quite certain how offended to be.

But compared to any other stand-up show in a venue the size of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, it's a lackadaisical performance. Between swigs from a beer can, Gervais recounts a few chat-show anecdotes, does some student bar stuff about how nonsense songs don't make sense, has a smirk at those dunces who abused a paediatrician because they thought he was a paedophile, and dishes up regular portions of ironic homophobia.

At least, I assume it's ironic. When he makes an Aids joke, and then mutters, "I won't do that one in Brighton," I'm not 100-per-cent sure why it's less objectionable than it would have been if Jim Davidson had made the same remark. Overall, it's an amiable show, but there's not much in the way of depth or quotable punchlines, and there's no theme beyond the tour's title, Fame: doing charity gigs, signing autographs, being misrepresented in the tabloids, hugging Chris Tarrant. You'd assume that someone who didn't start writing The Office until his late thirties would have a stock of pre-fame memories to transmute into comedy. There was his stint in an Eighties pop duo, and then as a university entertainments officer, to name the two best-known jobs he had before he made headway at XFM and on Channel 4's 11 O'Clock Show. But instead of mining these veins of material, Gervais seems obsessed by his own celebrity. He's like one of those rock bands who get to their third album and can't dredge up anything to write songs about except groupies, hotel rooms and the disappointments of being a multi-millionaire.

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Since The Office brought Gervais sudden fame and fortune, he's been the proverbial kid in a candy store, living out the fantasies of every film and comedy geek. He made a guest appearance on Alias because he was a fan of the show. He wrote an episode of The Simpsons, and turned up in it in cartoon form. He became friends with Jonathan Ross, as every rising UK comedian is contractually obliged to do. When Channel 4 offered him his own interview strand, he jumped at the chance to badger his heroes, Larry David, Christopher Guest and Larry Shandling. His first film roles seem to be motivated by hero-worship, too. Having shone as a pompous boss in The Office, he can now be seen cameoing as a pompous boss in both Night at the Museum and For Your Consideration. Neither film is very good, but they did allow him to hang out with Ben Stiller and Christopher Guest, just as his role in the forthcoming Stardust let him share a studio with Robert De Niro.

"It's like winning a competition," he said in one recent interview. "It's like, would you like to play with Spinal Tap for a day? Yes. Would you like to play with The Godfather for a day? Yes." Gervais is not the first British comedian to jump on a plane to Hollywood, of course, and there's nothing wrong with mutual appreciation sessions with your idols. Indeed, there's something sweet about such a major star letting his inner fanboy come out to play. As his collection of Golden Globes and Emmys attests, the American entertainment industry loves the man from Reading, so you can hardly blame him for loving it back. Who wouldn't want to be Peter Lawford in a comedy Rat Pack?

On the other hand, it's getting harder to ignore the weird disjunction between the way Gervais talks about his career and the way it actually is.

Ever since The Office began broadcasting in July 2001, its star and co-creator has been repeating in interviews that he's primarily a writer and director, and that he gets "no joy from seeing my fat face on the screen". Initially, he said he didn't want to do too much TV as himself because he wanted viewers to enjoy the illusion that David Brent and his colleagues were real people; that was why he cast unknown actors.

He even boasted, somewhat ungallantly, that he'd turned down roles in Pirates of The Caribbean and the other films which went on to feature his Office co-stars. "Secretly I think I'd be quite good on QI," he told one interviewer, misinterpreting the word "secretly". "But you have to discipline yourself and you have to ration yourself. I can get sick of someone I like within the space of a weekend if I see them on two quiz shows and then in the Sunday paper." It's a strange statement from someone who once fought Anthea Turner's husband in a televised boxing match.

The Ricky Gervais who talks to journalists is a publicity-shy artist with exacting principles. "That quest for excellence, and also the legacy - I think about that," he said in The Radio Times. "I don't know if that's because I came to it older, but we really want to to have a great batting average. We don't want to let our guard down. You do it because you want to be proud of it." To Esquire, he pronounced: "When you're creating art, you've got to be a complete fascist." To GQ, he described himself and his co-writer and co-director, Stephen Merchant, as "comedy fundamentalists". He's often said that he doesn't rate many British comedians after Stan Laurel. "American comedy is better. It aims higher," he told Esquire. This Ricky Gervais is an ascetic, slightly intimidating perfectionist. And yet the other Ricky Gervais, the one who's all over the media, is someone who knows he won't be in the limelight forever, and who wants to revel in the exposure, the side projects and the glamorous friendships while he can.

It's impossible to exaggerate just how successful he's been. The Office has been broadcast in 80 countries, and remade in several, including the hit American edition with Steve Carell in the lead role. Sales of the British Office DVDs were record-breaking - four million is the current figure - and, as the tongue-in-cheek introduction to his live show reminds us, he's won an Emmy, two Golden Globes and six Baftas.

But this astonishing Midas Touch doesn't stop a large proportion of his work falling short of the benchmark he's set himself. His current stand-up tour, the fastest selling in history, sees him sitting right in the middle of his comfort zone. Podcasts of The Ricky Gervais Show are another record-breaking hit, but as funny as they can be, they consist largely of his XFM producer, Karl Pilkington, reeling off outlandish theories, while Gervais and Merchant berate him for not being as well educated as they are. And if his trio of children's picture books, Flanimals, hadn't had Gervais's name on it, the publisher would have sent it back with a polite note saying that it wasn't what they were looking for.

And then there's Extras. At the risk of inviting hate mail, I'd argue that Gervais and Merchant's second sitcom is, objectively, a patchy programme. Yes, it had its laughs. The fizzy water incident is destined to join Del Boy falling through the bar in all future bank holiday retrospectives of The 100 Best British Sitcom Moments. But it always felt less like a fully-formed show than an exercise in muscle-flexing by two writer-directors who had realised how powerful they were. They wanted superstars, they wanted location shooting, they wanted no canned laughter and almost no supporting cast; they had a list of minorities for the characters to upset and they wanted to tick them off methodically, week by week. Everything they wanted, they got.

The mysterious aspect of Extras was that it drew almost entirely from Gervais's own experiences in television, and yet it couldn't shake off a whiff of fakeness. It missed the satirical targets which were right in front of its creators' noses. Take its famous guest stars, for instance. On the programme which had the biggest influence on Extras, The Larry Sanders Show, the celebrity guests challenged us to spot where they ended and their scabrous self-parodies began, something Gervais himself does brilliantly on talk shows and on stage. But in Extras the celebs were all caricatured so ridiculously that there was never any danger that they might have been revealing their dark private selves. Did anyone watching it ever suspect that Daniel Radcliffe goes around propositioning actresses twice his age, or that Orlando Bloom pathologically hates Johnny Depp, or that Ben Stiller has exactly the same speech patterns as David Brent? Probably not. The actors could congratulate themselves on being good sports without the slightest risk.

Beyond that, there was the implausibility of Gervais's character, Andy Millman, being hoiked to stardom from work as a "background artist" even though - unlike Gervais - he had no TV-comedy experience. There was also the bewildering animus against the BBC, which was forcing Andy to wear a bad wig and specs in his sitcom-within-a-sitcom; when did that last happen in the real world? But what was more damaging was the series' grating inconsistencies. Sometimes Andy would be as crass and tactless as David Brent ever was, whereas at other times Andy would be the judicious one, and the solecisms would be parcelled out to his friend Maggie or his agent, played by Merchant.

In their introduction to the Extras script book, the writers say that they wanted a change from Brent. They wanted "Andy to be more like us: more normal, more self-aware, educated and liberal-minded, with a half-decent sense of humour". And so he was - some of the time. But he was also a man who saw a Bosnian refugee's photograph of his murdered wife, and then chided him for his choice of developer. "Oh, you missed a trick," he said. "Truprint give you a free film when you get something developed. So you're a mug." And witness the way Andy was shocked when Keith Chegwin grunted that the BBC was run by "Jews and queers" - and I'd love to know when anyone in showbusiness last said that - but was also horrified when a schoolmate he hadn't seen in 20 years thought he might be gay himself. (More only-just-ironic homophobia there.) "Andy's not a jerk at all," said Gervais in the Onion AV Club last week, but when it suited the joke, Andy mutated into David Brent multiplied by Basil Fawlty.

Whereas The Office took such pains to fool us, for half an hour at a time, that we were flies on the wall of a genuine paper merchants', Extras required viewers to give it the same leeway that they would a pantomime. In a single episode of the second series, Andy was at the BBC, filming a sitcom, and yet the same sitcom was already on air, getting a critical pasting, and Andy was also auditioning for a play, rehearsing it and performing it. Assuming that he wasn't supposed to be a Time Lord, Gervais and Merchant had given up caring whether their programme had any internal logic or not.

At the risk of inviting yet more hate mail, I'd suggest, too, that even in the second series of The Office, there were signs that its writers already believed the hype. Gareth was more obnoxious; Brent was more self-deluding; the humour was broader and cruder. When Brent frothed at a birthday party about how he'd have sex with the Corrs, the raucous, drunken festivities slammed to a halt and everyone stared in disgust.

Fair enough, that's the kind of thing which happens in sitcoms all the time, but the previous series hadn't felt like a sitcom; it had felt like an unwittingly hilarious documentary. The second series could have been written by someone who had watched the first one, but hadn't quite understood it.

That's not to say that anyone who masterminded those first terrific six episodes of The Office shouldn't be proud of himself. Nor is this an attempt to start a backlash or chop down a tall poppy. After all, everything Gervais does is worth a look, because he's funny even when - as on the current stand-up tour - he's not trying very hard. And when someone has accrued so many millions, so many plaudits and so many famous admirers he might feel justified in letting standards slip.

But let's get his output into perspective. Perhaps we should ease off on the King of Comedy accolades until Gervais's batting average, as he calls it, is a little closer to Galton and Simpson's or Clement and Le Frenais's. And that's not likely to happen unless he eases off on the cameos, the podcasts and the children's books. Maybe now that he's done a stand-up show called Fame, he can get back to the sort of work which made him famous.

The first leg of Ricky Gervais's stand-up tour has sold out. Tickets for the second leg, beginning on 6 March, go on sale on Tuesday at www.ticketzone.co.uk

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2152792.ece

BURN.

is this true?

xpost

xp

I would say that though, because I hate women.

Here's a scene. You're looking along your collection of CDs, or shuffling through your playlist, trying to find that new Lady Sovereign album or whatever. But you stumble across something else, something from 10 years ago - the Fugees, say."

That senile dribbling cunt with his own column in the Guardian weekend magazine.

That senile dribbling cunt with his own column in the Guardian weekend magazine.

Cue stock that's no way to talk about Zoe Williams gag.

I don't have a Wikipedia entry either.

Includes News Summary at 9.00pm.

like swimming in a cool sea and passing through a warm current, etc...

Where are the standards of today, I ask you.
I don't have a Wikipedia entry either.

-- Marcello Carlin (marcellocarli...)

Oh, have I got one?

Whew.

also on the bad can someone please put Have I Got News For You out of its misery.

At the risk of, on this reviewer's logic, inviting lynch-mobs to my door, I'd argue that Extras was shite.

xpost

To put things into context: Harry Hill aside, all British TV Comedy right now is total shit.

-- Ruairi Wirewool (horseproduction...), January 15th, 2007. (Ruairi Wirewool) (later)

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what were the chances of that happening?
-- mark grout (mark.grou...), January 15th, 2007. (mark grout) (later)

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If you can put CT and Green Wing on a par, you truly show a lack of discernment IMO.
Frankly, now that GW has been and gone, I'm inclined to agree with Ruairi, minus the bit about Harry Hill.

-- You've Got Scourage On Your Breath (papiermachealamphibia...), January 15th, 2007. (Haberdager) (later)

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If you can put CT and Green Wing on a par, you truly show a lack of discernment IMO.
no it's just a 'higher' (or rather 'stricter') level of discernment.

-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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'the thick of it' will be back, later in the year, and so will 'peep show'.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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but in a another more accurate sense...
-- mark s (mar...), January 15th, 2007. (mark s) (later)

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but then i do like Harry Hill so it's apples and roundabouts.
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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rubbish
-- RJG (RJ...), January 15th, 2007. (RJG) (later)

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so you keep saying
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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RJG's TV Burp
-- Dom Passantino (juror...), January 15th, 2007. (Dom Passantino) (later)

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Hmm. I was only talking about currently-running comedy shows. If Peep Show returns for a fourth bite at the cherry (and TTOI for a second), I will only be too delighted. Of course, the one I'm really looking out for is Nathan Barley II.
-- You've Got Scourage On Your Breath (papiermachealamphibia...), January 15th, 2007. (Haberdager) (later)

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i think it would be a big ask for there to be a 'great' uk comedy series to be running all 52 weeks of the year. i have low standards perhaps; but i don't ask for a 'great' film each month either.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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of course i too want 'nathan barley' back.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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They could drop scissors on a dog's head this time.
-- Dom Passantino (juror...), January 15th, 2007. (Dom Passantino) (later)

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uh, rose-tinted view there i reckon - but at least it was generating interesting discussion.
one episode of Screen Wipe a month would be good. ditto TV Burp.

-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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ha ha Dom OTM
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

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Unread Messages
as with 'green wing', take away the hype and the expectation it'll live up to 'the day today' and 'nathan barley' was 23 minutes well-spent. i lolled anyway.
-- the original hauntology blogging crew (miltonpinsk...), January 15th, 2007. (Enrique) (later)

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i didn't laugh more than i did laugh etc.
-- vita susicivus (n...), January 15th, 2007. (blueski) (later)

And Screen Wipe rocks.

Well, and conversely, the veterans are jaded and not amused by the young 'uns. UK far from the worst version in that dynamic tho.

Yeah, I read reviews of the Irish one when it came out and assumed that they were all as bad

I loved this so much that I immediately watched the Irish one and thought it was great. It got so chaotic at the end. Started the Candadian one but it wasn't as good.

The UK one was one of the best things I've seen in ages. Mortimer and Ayodae doing the speed dating absolutely killed me.

Most of the ppl in the Irish one were rubbish imo and there was so much low hanging fruit.

The Canadian one has Tom Green's Carson monologue which is worth the price of admission.

I love Aisling and I liked Deirdre, Catherine, and Jason none of whom I knew before. It wasn't as good as the UK one at all but I enjoyed it.

I stopped the Canadian one part way through so I don't think I saw that but will go back to it.

Whatever about the rest of them, some of whom I know in person and they are nice people, you could not pay me to watch a programme with David McSavage in it. He is the worst.

I know nothing about him (had to look up which one he was just now) but he was def the worst one.

Saturday Night Live is to have its own British version called SNL UK.

It will be made in London with an all-British cast, executive produced by Lorne Michaels and it will air in 2026.

— Scott Bryan (@scottygb) April 10, 2025

I quite like US SNL, there are UK comedians I like, but somehow I can't imagine this being anything other than the worst programme ever made

have there been any good UK sketch shows in recent years? The only one I can think of is Ellie & Natasia

US SNL interesting as an exercise in "how much talent can you pour into a show for decades and decades without ever being funny", don't see any need to repeat the experiment elsewhere tho.

Who's gonna sing "Hallelujah" when Reform gets in?

have there been any good UK sketch shows in recent years? The only one I can think of is Ellie & Natasia

Burnistoun is the only one I can think of.

i've watched the first 3 eps of LOL. Bob Mortimer would have me in stitches.
switched over to watch a bit of The Martian I'd recorded for another day and Mr Swallow pops right up as a NASA JPL guy, freaked me out a bit!

mitchell and webb are back, with a sketch show. which is quite rare in 2025...

Surprised no mention of Such Brave Girls on this thread...

is swearing as funny as Mitchell and Webb think it is?

Stevie Martin as the blonde one from abba was spooky though

(xp) No it isn't, but typically it seems like they've decided to make the worst sketch and the worst idea for a sketch a regular feature - I don't even understand it, are Australian dramas famous for their swearing? First I've heard. The ABBA sketch was good though.

Watched the first half of the first episode, thought it was fairly dire.

I don't even understand it, are Australian dramas famous for their swearing?

Australians in general swear a lot I guess

Actually I was sitting outside at a bar the other day and there were two guys (in their 40s/50s) at a table in front of and the guy with his back to me swore more in general conversation than I think I've ever heard anyone in my life - and I'm from the West of Scotland! It took me a whole - in between all effin' and blindin' - to work out that he was South African.

... a while rather than a whole.

Maybe M&W can't do the Saffer accent.

Well I think this week's episode ensures there will not be a second series.

It just isn't funny. Most of my favourite comedy isn't funny, but this isn't funny for the opposite reason.

Yes, absolutely fucking dire.

the Walliams reckoning has finally arrived then

All the posts I've seen pretty much say this was an open secret -- how widespread exactly was the knowledge about him?

David Walliams has been dropped by his publisher following an investigation by The Telegraph into inappropriate behaviour towards young women.

Walliams, one of the country's best-selling children's authors, faced accusations that he had "harassed" junior female employees at Harper Collins.

One woman who raised concerns was given a five-figure payoff by the publisher and left the business.
This newspaper began investigating allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Walliams last year.

The decision to drop Walliams comes after the sudden departure of the publisher's former chief executive, Charlie Redmayne, who left in October. Kate Elton succeeded him as interim boss. It is understood that Walliams did not know about the Harper Collins investigation and that its conclusions were not put to him.

Saw someone who is a former popbitch editor on bluesky talk about how they got sued by H-C for publishing accusations about him:

https://bsky.app/profile/chrislochery.bsky.social/post/3maeany7ta22u

weren't there accusations against matt lucas too?

Not that I've heard of - and I've heard plenty about Walliams over the years, they even joked about it on stage at the British Comedy Awards.

someone I work with went to school with walliams, he said he's pretty much what you'd expect and that he used to get bullied by some kids 3 years below him.

All the posts I've seen pretty much say this was an open secret -- how widespread exactly was the knowledge about him?

Friend of mine works in publishing says two different publishers had measures in place to ensure no female employees ever be left alone with Walliams.

You'd think dropping the creep would be an easier fix but you can't get just anyone to write Gangsta Granny Laughs At A Fat Person or whatever his latest one is.

Didn’t realise he had a new shit children’s book out for Christmas, real profiles in courage for HC to drop him when the majority of sales will have come in.

apart from everything else, he used to do this on stage regularly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0IjrFeYoQY&

The tweet I saw first about it said "every time that there's news of someone being let go for being a sex pest, the whole of UK publishing asks 'Is it Walliams?' and now it finally is"

Not that I've heard of - and I've heard plenty about Walliams over the years, they even joked about it on stage at the British Comedy Awards.

21 years ago! Oddly, exactly 21 years ago!

https://www.thecustardtv.com/the-british-comedy-awards-2004-itv1-22/

mock the week is back! (on tlc which seems to be a channel that shows various Sheldon Cooper related shows during the day, human interest stuff after 9, if said human is interested in skin conditions or morbid obesity. or transformers films. or mock the week).

Sunday seems an odd day for a topical news quiz. did they film it on Saturday? Friday?

I've been enjoying Harry Hill's youtube renaissance, he's got a bunch of his old stuff up and a fun new chat show.

Koogs, I think Friday.

Daniel, yes, the new lo-fi Harry Hill show is pretty great. Although I object to the fact that I can no longer say I won't watch a visual podcast, because I think that's basically what it is.

True, though there are at least some visual gimmicks and characters.

from Andrew’s Walliams link:

LL Cool J, a minor rapper with his best days almost 20 years ago

Anyone checked in on how Luke took The FORCE, almost 20 years later? (His elevation of Mr Smith to the top of Todd’s canon suggests a fascinating critical idiosyncrasy)

neu Mock the Week is AN HOUR LONG. but there are adverts so probably about 12 minutes longer. they've dug out some of the older formats, introduced an audience participation round.

the sound and picture noticeably worse.

no Hugh Dennis, comedy-b appears to have that role this episode. some good jokes about tlc.

I think Ahir needs to get better at not looking like he’s reading off notes. This isn’t Saturday Night Live.

Anyone checked in on how Luke took The FORCE, almost 20 years later? (His elevation of Mr Smith to the top of Todd’s canon suggests a fascinating critical idiosyncrasy)

Just popping in to say The Force is a killer record, one of my favourite of 2024. Q-Tip's production is fierce and inventive throughout, and LL goes hard.

On related business, we cannot bring ourselves to watch the recent WILTY Xmas special due to Walliams' presence. I bet that's a booking that was quickly regretted.

I saw Ahir Shah live once in early career and he was a horrible centrist bore.

On related business, we cannot bring ourselves to watch the recent WILTY Xmas special due to Walliams' presence. I bet that's a booking that was quickly regretted.

Had entirely assumed the episode would be cancelled, I know it was very short notice but not that difficult to dig out a previous xmas special surely. Anyway it was fine, but not worth seeking out.

The Harry Hill Show is hilarious.

Monday 9th, new mackenzie crook comedy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Prophets

I gave him a lift home from a comedy club in Putney that I worked at, I'm guessing 30 years ago. He was a character comedian then, Charlie Cheese. He was funny, I remember, quite quiet offstage, but in no way offish.

I met him when he was performing Charlie Cheese as well. I was with Ed at Just the Tonic in Nottingham and Charlie Cheese was on before him. We all sat around and had a drink afterwards. Crook got a bit wistful and said "I wish anyone in my family ever came to my gigs. They all think I'm mad." Well, I bet they've changed their minds now.

As you say, Stevie, he was quiet, but friendly and very funny.

"I wish anyone in my family ever came to my gigs. They all think I'm mad."

Aw, bless. I really liked his Charlie Cheese act. Also got a strong sense of how dedicated he was to what he was doing. And he was so striking that the second I saw him on The Office I knew it was him.

Amandaland is surprisingly excellent imo