Biography
The Ricky Gervais Show is a podcast starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington. The show started in November 2001 on Xfm, and aired in weekly periods for months at a time throughout 2002, 2003, 2004, and mid-2005. In November 2005, Guardian Unlimited offered the show as a podcast series of 12 shows. Throughout January and February 2006, the podcast was consistently ranked the number one podcast in the world; it appeared in the 2007 Guinness World Record for the world's most downloaded podcast, having gained an average of 261,670 downloads per episode during its first month.
The show relies heavily on the wit and bizarre theories of Karl Pilkington. Karl is "unemployed", having left his job as radio producer at Xfm. The podcast focuses more on Karl Pilkington as a primary figure of humour in the show in various ways, including questions directed at Karl that have been emailed in, either by fans of the show or by Ricky or Steve themselves, whereas the XFM show had slightly more input and humour supplied by Ricky and Steve, with Karl's theories and features being a lot less focused on in the Xfm shows.
With the start of series 2, the formerly free Ricky Gervais Show shifted to a pay model - and as a result the show is now classified as an "audiobook". It is available through Audible and the iTunes Music Store with individual episodes going for £0.95; Audible also offers the complete season for £3.75 at audible.com. The reason for this addition, according to Ricky on the podcast, is because The Guardian agreed to pay for the bandwidth for 12 episodes, and any more extra episodes would have to be paid for out of their personal finances (hence the change in company when series 2 started).
Steve and Ricky mentioned on the Christmas episode that they didn't feel like doing any further Podcasts for a long time. During an interview at XFM, Ricky did not rule out returning to XFM for a further series, though nothing has been confirmed.
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