Karl Pilkington

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Comedy trio Ricky Gervais, Karl Pilkington and Stephen Merchant have seen their programme The Ricky Gervais Show find a celebrity audience in the States. They talk to Newsbeat about their success.

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Xan Brooks talks to Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington about The Ricky Gervais Show, an animated series based on the trio's massively popular podcasts, which launched on guardian.co.uk and is released on DVD on 19th July.

They are little snatches of comedy nothingness, these cartoon conversations between Gervais and his mates. At the start of each one it feels as if there's nothing there, just inconsequential chat, blokes sitting around, as they will, talking nonsense. But gradually each programme draws you in and you find yourself wanting more. It's like eating travel sweets: you don't expect great substance or nourishment, but they're pleasant and they pass the time. This week gullible sage Karl Pilkington offers his thoughts on Papua New Guinea, antiques and nurses "carrying lungs about", as well as relating an unlikely tale about armed dolphins. As Gervais and Stephen Merchant try to shatter the urban myths, the animation brings each quirk of the banter to life.

So out-there are the musings of Karl Pilkington - friend of Ricky Gervais - that his thoughts cannot be constrained in a single TV show. Picking up where he left off last week, tonight's TV version of the popular Merchant/Gervais/Pilkington podcasts begins with his increasingly bizarre thoughts on age and ageing ("At 78, they get injected in the temple, but it's OK..."). The 1950s-style cartoons bring additional comedy to an already deranged exchange.

The series that gives new meaning to the phrase "an animated argument" continues with more surreal musings from its star, Karl Pilkington. The pattern is, as fans of the original podcast will know, that Karl sets off on some naive flight of fancy only to be brutally shot down by the comic blunderbuss of Gervais, backed up by the rationalist sniper's rifle of Stephen Merchant. Karl's riffs this week include the idea that old people should receive an injection at death so they can then live their lives in reverse, and a plausible theory that most superpowers are "more of a hindrance", which is why superheroes are always unhappy. "Rick" and "Steve" mock every utterance as mercilessly as school bullies. But it's joyously watchable. And where else could you see Cher being interviewed by a chimp on Russian TV?

"Karl! You are living in a cartoon world!" shrieked Ricky Gervais, in the very first of the podcasts he recorded with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. They all are now, HBO having taken the original recordings and added Hanna-Barbera-ish visuals to what they introduce, in a portentously grand American voice, as "a series of pointless conversations". Gervais looks like a knock-off Fred Flintstone and Stephen Merchant like some amiable gump out of a Seventies road-safety film, while Pilkington is just a baffled pink golf ball. If you missed the originals, Pilkington is the point of thing - his stupefied take on the world the catalyst for Merchant and Gervais's flights of fantasy (and delighted incredulity). "I've seen him blossom from an idiot into an imbecile," said Gervais fondly as they started out, though half the fun of it is that in between absurdities, Pilkington will occasionally stumble on an undeniable truth: "If you haven't bungee-jumped by the time you're 78," he pointed out flatly, "you're not going to do it."

The animation has allowed HBO to fill out the more florid phrases, so when Gervais reacted to a particularly groggy aperçu from Pilkington by saying "he sounds like he was found in a glacier and thawed out", you get a little sequence showing the defrosting. This quite often adds to the comedy of the original. But there are times when you sense a loss too, particularly in the yelping reactions that follow some particularly dopey remark from Pilkington. On the ear, these eruptions of hilarity were very infectious, and the deliberate simplicity of the animation occasionally seems to mask the expressiveness of the voice, rather than match it. It is still funny, though, not to mention a very canny bit of recycling.

The Ricky Gervais Show (C4), which is produced by HBO, is an animated version of the radio show and highly successful podcast by Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. The format involves Gervais and Merchant making fun of "the little round-headed buffoon", as Gervais calls Pilkington, whose homespun wisdom is a morose combination of the absurd and the mundane.

Gervais's cartoon looks like Fred Flintstone with a hint of Oliver Hardy, and the lack of resemblance makes you wonder why they didn't just film the three men. For one thing, it wouldn't have been any less funny. The strength of the audio show's comedy lay in its flights of fancy, with which the audience were at imaginative liberty to amuse themselves. But now the surreal jokes are pinned down, and therefore restricted, by cartoon illustrations.

The result looks like the kind of thing at which a student might laugh after holding in marijuana smoke for a long time. You'd have to get mighty stoned, though, to giggle and howl as much as Gervais. It used to be a great comic effect, that laugh, but it's beginning to get a little irritating, like the sound emitted by someone happily going all the way to the bank.

I've never really seen the point in Ricky Gervais's podcasts: him and his mates Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington rambling on about nothing in particular. Well, mainly Pilkington, who just gets hold of an idea and runs off with it, like a naughty puppy.

But I get this even less: it's just the same podcasts, animated. So you've got Ricky, Stephen and Karl, turned into what look like characters from the Flintstones, rambling on about nothing in particular. Occasionally one of Pilkington's wayward thoughts - babies being born to dying 78-year-old women, for example - is animated, too. That's very lazy TV, isn't it? Radio with pictures. Maybe they should animate The Today Programme. I'd like to see John Humphrys turned into a Flintstone.

I guess it only works if you're amused by Karl's idiotic thought-streams. Ricky and Stephen clearly are: they spend most of it giggling hysterics. It leaves me cold.