*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by alien_concept.

I literally LoLed..."This is stupid. Have I even shook your hand yet?"

what's the backstory here?

@residue

Backstory is that 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 as a favour to someone who gave him a job early in his life.

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.

They made loads of radio shows and loads of podcasts, then they made an idiot abroad. The format basically goes like this: Karl says something rediculous, 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. He is fascinated by anything different (such as warrick, the elephant man, gay people, siamese twins, ANYTHING different to your average human), he's entranced by monkies and thinks that monkies are basically humans who can't speak properly.

He used to come up with pathetic game shows in which he'd come up with 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)
"I told the gay man that the grape tree was mine, MG"
-- Marvin Gaye (My vine, gay)

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 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 refers to EVERY diversity as "little <x> fellow" - little gay fellows, little chinese fellows, little gay chinese fellows, little disabled fellows and very particularly "little midget fellow".

So.....gervais introduced him to warrick. And they've talked about warrick on the radio show/podcasts before.

Edit:
Might actually post this as a sift talk so people know who the new guy on the sift is.

Watching this was more awkward than a "Meet the Parents" movie.

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