Sunday, December 27, 2020

Ricky Gervais / Stephen Merchant / Karl Pilkington - The Ricky Gervais Show - The Specials (2008)

As well as the regular episodes which were released from 2005 to 2008, the trio also released a number of one-off special podcasts, collected together here for this final post. 
Fame special
A special podcast was made available as a giveaway to people who went to see Gervais' standup tour Fame, which played from January to April 2007. It was later released for free to the public in October of that year.
Do We Need 'Em? 
A feature from the middle years of the XFM series, which originally was simply called 'Pilkington', where Karl interviewed a woman who claimed to have had a ghostly experience, prompting him to ask "You're not on crack?". This morphed into Do We Need 'Em?, in which Karl would call an animal expert and argue for the extinction of a certain animal species, which he felt was useless and "getting in the way". Karl became dismayed by the opposition he faced from the experts, believing there was a conspiracy to keep every animal from extinction, and thus ended the feature. At the beginning and end of the feature, the theme tune to Michael Parkinson's chat show was played.
White Van Karl
At the time, The Sun newspaper ran a feature called 'White Van Man' whereby questions on the stories of that week were put to white van drivers across the country, just to gain an insight into the views and opinions of 'the common man'. Stephen Merchant posed the same questions to Karl, to find out more about him. The best aspect of this was Karl's bizarre beliefs and theories. Gervais and Merchant also found humour in the very mundane answers the White Van Man of the week would give (the most famous of these being a comment about Sainsbury's bringing in square tins: 'That should be interesting for meatballs'). This feature was mainly used as a way to introduce new listeners to the mind of Karl Pilkington and was only used during the earlier days of the XFM shows.
XFM Special One Off Podcast
While Gervais and Merchant were broadcasting the XFM radio shows between 2001 and 2005, they also recorded a special one-off podcast in 2004. This might have had some influence in their decision to change the format of their broadcasting the following year, with their last show for XFM being aired on 2 July 2005, after which they chose to switch from radio to podcasting.
Bonus Hour Podcast
On 25 November 2007, Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington released a special bonus podcast for free. In it Ricky and Steve continued to probe Karl with questions from Inside the Actors Studio. Originally released as an extra on the audio CD release of series one, it was later made available free through iTunes.
NME Test Broadcast
Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington recorded a two-hour radio show as part of the test transmissions for the new radio station NME Radio. The episode aired on Monday 9 June 2008, and also featured music (edited out from this file).



Track listing

01 Do We Need 'Em  (2003)
02 White Van Karl  (2004)
03 XFM Special One Off Podcast  (2004)
04 FAME  (2007)
05 Bonus Hour  (2007)
06 NME Test Broadcast  (2008)

 

No comments:

Post a Comment