Product Description

A collection of the best moments from the record-breaking 'Ricky Gervais Show' podcasts with additional musings and original drawings by Karl Pilkington, the show's unlikely star. Karl Pilkington, the Confuctian-like savant of the 'Ricky Gervais Show', has led an extraordinary and curiously individual life. As a kid growing up in Manchester he regularly missed school to accompany his parents on caravanning holidays and left without collecting his exam results: his family weaned him well. His father once crashed a train into Manchester Central Station, his mother shaved one of their cats after it kept being sick and his uncle slept in a dinghy instead of a bed -- genes, some acolytes say, that have contributed to his cryptic views on life. Pilkington's is a brilliant mind, locked inside a perfectly round head, and uncluttered by the unhelpful constraints of logic or common sense; factors that have led him to such dazzling insights as 'you never see old men eating Twix bars' or that the 'Diary of Anne Frank' was 'an Adrian Mole sort of thing'. In this pithy and hilarious book, Karl is in conversation with (the often bewildered) Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the writers and stars of 'The Office' and 'Extras', outwitting even these comedy Goliaths with his take on such contentious issues as charity, the lack of Chinese homeless people, reincarnation, the rights of monkeys and favourite superpowers. Featuring Karl's original illustrations, imaginative scribblings, full-colour pictures sent in by fans, the best conversations of the first twelve podcasts, and to be published alongside the second series of the internationally acclaimed and Guinness Record-winning Ricky Gervais Show (downloaded over 4,000,000 times -- the most popular podcast ever), this is a unique trip into the world of one of our most innovative thinkers, visionaries and prophets, or as Gervais and Merchant know him, 'the funniest man alive in Britain today'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5818 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Review
'Not many idiots could make something this funny.' Guardian 'Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!' Sunday Telegraph

Sunday Telegraph
'Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant!'

Evening Standard
'Priceless.'

Customer Reviews

Fans will be disappointed by this lazy cash-in
I'm a big fan of the Podcasts - having subscribed to series 2 and 3 on Audible and thoroughly enjoyed them. Yes, they're very formulaic now but no worse for that - in fact that's the point. The main problem with the World of Karl Pilkington is that it will appeal mainly to the fans of the podcasts, but that audience will perhaps be the most underwhelmed of any reader. The reason is that the book offers very, very little new material.

Comedy spin-off books tend to be either comedy books in their own right containing entirely new, original material (Goodies, New Statesman, Vic Reeves, John Shuttleworth, Young Ones for example) or are pure transcriptions (Porridge, Morcambe & Wise, Rising Damp). The World of Karl Pilkington is better suited to the former but I'm afraid is much more of the latter variety.

I had hoped and expected this book to mainly contain new, previously unbroadcast inane and obtuse musings from the spherical headed sage, with unseen extracts from his diary and fresh Da Vinciesque theories sketched out in his own childish hand (perhaps in an unsavoury faecal medium). Instead the bulk of the book comprises selected transcriptions of the podcasts (in miniscule typeface with massive line spacing on horrible glossy paper).

Script books can be enjoyable but are always ultimately lacking for obvious reasons. Watching Hancock, Barker, Fisher or Rossiter bring scripts and characters to life with their genius performances is superb. But you can still appreciate a Galton & Simpson, Clement & La Frenais, Ian Pattison or Eric Chappell script read cold since it evokes pretty well the performance you're familiar with.

That's where material like the Podcasts falls down: the comedy is almost entirely reliant upon the performance itself and no transcription (especially heavily abridged transcriptions as these are) can do it justice. The immediacy, interplay, context, pauses, corpsing and nuance are all lost. In fact the converse is really true of transcriptions of ad-libbed, dynamic material like this: familiarity with a sit-com can help bring a script to life when you read it yourself whereas familiarity with the podcasts just makes the transcripts feel more lifeless.

Great Podcast - Average Book
Having listened to all of the Ricky Gervais podcasts and watched the video podcasts. I find myself a little disappointed with the book. I opened it up and almost straight away found myself reading one of the scripts from one of the podcasts. I had heard that some of the book was going to be podcast scripts, but most of this book seems to be podcast scripts. This is somewhat annoying as reading this sort of comedy isn't quite as funny as hearing it, especially when you have already heard it.

This said the book has its good moments, with some hilarious drawings and brilliant diary extracts. Although I would have a look in the book before you actually buy it, so you can decide if it is worth your five pound note or not.

Good Evening this is the Monkey News.
I got this for Christmas and read it on Christmas day and Boxing day laughing all the way. Particular highlights are Pilkington's Monkey News story about the zoo keeper who took his mate the monkey home at night with him, and Pilkington's general inability to grasp the non-literal meanings behind popular phrases like "people in glass houses...". Which he thinks means you shouldn't go chucking stuff about.