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A History of the Ricky Gervais Show

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As these things go, I’m a relative latecomer to the podcasts of The Ricky Gervais Show: I only got ’round to listening to them a couple of weeks ago. Better still, I came into it totally cold, not knowing what to expect, and I was instantly hooked on the mad ramblings of Karl Pilkington.  So much so, that as a matter of fact, I have no issues with paying for the podcasts of the second season.

It totally passes my Blackjack test:  do I anticipate getting more pleasure out of this than playing a single hand of Blackjack?  And in this case, the answer is a resounding “yes.” To be fair, Ricky was on Letterman last week, and explained that they are charging for this season to recoup the hosting and bandwidth costs for all of the downloads.

However, for those of you who don’t want to pay for your monkeynews, or you want to see to find out what the buzz is all about  prior to  paying — it looks like the Podcast Series  1 archive will also cost $5 to grab in one fell swoop — I’ve discovered a secret online stash of dozens of episodes of The Ricky Gervais Show.

Well, probably not that secret, especially for those of you in the U.K. But for those of us stuck here in the Colonies, it seemed amazing how fully-formed and natural the comedic  interplay was. Turns out that there was a simple reason for that: Ricky, Stephen Merchant and Karl  have been doing this off and on for four years now. So while it’s season two of the podcasts, it’s more like season six of the actual show.  By the that most of  the rest of us were first picturing the banana dispenser on the spaceship or pondering the science behind backwards aging, Ricky and Stephen had been dealing with this stuff for years.

The first series of shows were radio broadcasts done for the XFM Radio in the U.K. in early 2002, shortly after series One of The Office had been broadcast on the BBC.  There was another series of shows in early 2003 (confusingly labeled on the XFM website as “Season One,” another in late 2003, and a final one just last summer.

The good news is that all of these pre-podcasts are available for your listening pleasure from XFM’s website; the not-so-good news is that the 2002-2003 stuff is only available as streaming audio. However, the broadcasts from last summer are downloadable for playing at your leisure on your Durosport.

For those of you who like things nice and tidy,I’ve put together a little guide to where you can find each series, from the early years to the current podcasts.  I’ve also indicated how many episodes there are in that particular season, and whether it is streaming or downloadable.