Ricky Gervais Interview

That the British Empire crumbled like a tea-dunked biscuit so long ago is probably for the best. We can’t run a bank, let alone a couple of sub-continents. Most of us can barely run 100 metres. But that’s what makes us us, and that’s what Ricky Gervais’s new podcast is all about. England. England and the people that make it what it is, a mass of idiosyncracies – great, terrible, beautiful, ugly, but ultimately ours.

After all, what other country could produce the idiot-savant Karl Pilkington, Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s podcasting muse whose mumblings, simultaneously stupid and ultra-rational, have made their simple little web chats the most downloaded in internet history. ShortList spoke to Ricky to find out if he knows what England is really all about… and whether Karl was any help at all in deciding.

Click on the next page for the full interview.