I thought i'd explain a bit about karl pilkington. He's popping up a lot on the sift lately and there may be people who don't know him, don't know his relation to gervais, or really like him and don't realise how many hundreds of hours of material there is for him. This will be my go-to informative post about karl, because i was lucky enough to be in on him from the start!

Karl pilkington has a huge cult following amongst people in the know. He met gervais and merchant working at XFM radio station (small local london station) which gervais did after the office broke as a favour to someone who gave him a job early in his life. Whilst working there, he as a celebrity was given someone to work the desk (technical stuff), and that someone was karl pilkington. It took them a while to get karl talking on air, but once they did they unleashed some of the most unbelievable stories and unbelievably stupid logic/opinions.

Since then, gervais has mercilessly taken the piss out of karl. Karl is unique in that he's the only person in the world who's both the stupidest person ever and a complete and utter genius. Some of the stuff he'll say will make you think he's putting it on because it's so stupid. Sometimes he'll have a perspective on something that you'd never have thought of yourself. Karl has changed over the years, and the current train of thought is that he's 95% genuine with 5% hamming it up or exaggerating because he's got to get ratings now he's on telly.

They made loads of radio shows and followed this with loads of podcasts long before the tv stuff where karl was untapped and unjaded - he was 100% genuine and is involved in the funniest recordings of any kind i've listened to - i listen to them on a gigantic loop and laugh even 5 years into the loop.

For the radio shows and podcasts, the format basically goes like this: Karl says something rediculous, tells an anecdote from his childhood, expresses an opinion on something, then gervais and merchant take the piss out of him. They often ask him questions which he has no chance of understanding just to see what stupid things he'll say.

Karl is fascinated by anything different (such as 'midgets', the elephant man, gay people, siamese twins, ANYTHING different to your average human) and he's entranced by monkies and thinks that monkies are basically humans who can't speak properly. A long running bit of the radio shows and podcasts were features such as "monkey news" - where karl would misinterpret, exaggerate or outright invent stories about monkies driving cars, flying planes, performing surgery to name the more rediculous. Other features included "nob news" - which is british slang for news penises, where karl would trawl the internet/strange magazines for rediculous stories about male genetalia.

He used to come up with pathetic game shows in which he'd invent clues that he'd label cryptic (to gervais' chagrin) where he'd give a clue and a pair of initials, and you would have to guess what band or artist name he was referring to, it amounted to this;
"The jamaican fellow is swinging a fish around his head, DS"
-- Detroit Spinners (The trout spinners, in a jamaican accent - de trout spinners)
"Keep whacking the cooker with a stick"
-- Beethoven (Beat - oven)

The radio show was an absolute shambles, it was barely even a radio show and more a case of 3 blokes having a chat in a pub with a microphone left running. And i will say with certainty that i have never laughed so hard or so much at any kind of comedy. I'd say gervais' BEST work is the podcasts and radio shows he did with pilkington.

During the course of the podcasts, pilkington has dropped MANY clangers and had many more catchphrases - gervais uses a lot of references to karl in his work. For example whenever gervais wants to play his 'arrogant jerk' routine and he refers to a gay person he says "little gay fellow", because it's inherently condescending. That's actually something he got off karl who innocently refers to EVERY diversity as "little <x> fellow" - little gay fellows, little chinese fellows, little gay chinese fellows, little disabled fellows and little midget fellows.

I could go on for pages about karl pilkington, but i'll stop before it turns into anything longer than it is. If you're interested, go and find "the ricky gervais show" series one - which is the first series of the podcasts. It's incredibly funny and one of the biggest selling podcasts ever, breaking so many records so often that they had to reclassify them a few times to stop them clogging up the charts. There are 4 more series of podcasts, there's a bunch of "guide to...."'s, and ~150 hours(?) of radio show recordings which are public domain and free to download.

If that doesn't help, you can find more info at www.pilkipedia.co.uk</x>