Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais cartoon to be screened on Channel 4

Ricky Gervais' US animation series, based on his podcasts, is to be screened in the UK on Channel 4.

Fans of the cult US comedy Arrested Development will recognise David Cross who played Tobias Funke in that series. This pilot for C4's Comedy Showcase series is his first project for the UK, co-written with Shaun Pye who played Greg Lindley-Jones in Extras - the RADA graduate who was Ricky Gervais's bitter enemy.

So what's this all about? It starts in the US with Todd Margaret (Cross) accidentally promoted by his psychotic boss to head up a UK operation selling energy drinks. Overhearing Todd repeating the aggressive patter on a self-help CD convinces him Todd is the right man for the job - despite being a meek office drone who couldn't sell a sandwich to a starving man. His arrival in London unleashes more misadventures - as well as a meeting with comedy star Sharon Horgan who plays a cafe owner.

By the end of this sharply scripted episode you'll be hoping for a full series to find out what happens to him next - and you can't ask any more of a pilot than that.

Ashley Jensen - 'Ricky and Extras changed my life'

A Ricky Gervais sitcom made Ashley Jensen a star and helped her land a role in Ugly Betty.

With a script supervised by Ricky Gervais (though it's not clear whether he helped with the gags or just read it and gave a regal wave), the latest Comedy Showcase pilot takes its cue from the absurdity of mobile phone shops, which will be instantly familiar if you've ever had to go into one for any reason at all. Writer Phil Bowker, who produced Pulling, does a great job of keeping it as quick as the jokes are tight. Should it be turned into a series? Yes please.

The second of Channel 4's sitcom pilots is written by the man behind Pulling (Phil Bowker) and script-edited by Ricky Gervais - yet though funny in places the humour can be a bit laddish and idiotic. PhoneShop is about the employees of a mobile phone shop, and tonight, new recruit Chris (Tom Bennett) faces the notorious sales trial.

Ricky Gervais returns with new workplace comedy

More than eight years after The Office changed British comedy forever, Ricky Gervais has helped create a new television sitcom that finds its laughs in the drudgery and absurdities of another unglamorous workplace.

The second sitcom try-out in C4's Comedy Showcase season, and this one packs some more heavyweight comedy credentials. It boasts Ricky Gervais as script editor - a solid gold seal of approval. Disappointingly, there's no sign of former EastEnders Dean Gaffney or Shaun Williamson who manned the phone shop in Extras. This one is staffed by Ashley and Jerwayne (Andrew Brooke and Javone Prince).

Emma Fryer's in it too, still wearing that dazed, sleepwalker expression that she used in BBC2's Home Time.

Tom Bennett is new boy Chris, trying to make his first sale in the cut-throat world of 24-month contracts and impress his sex addict boss (played by Martin Trenaman).

Written, directed and produced by Phil Bowker (who also produced Sharon Horgan's Pulling) I hope this one gets the go-ahead as a series too.

The cast gel together as if they've worked together for years and even manage to turn BNP leader Nick Griffin into joke fodder.

Although Graham Norton was in his finest form about five years ago on Channel 4, his squawky chat show moves tonight to BBC One. The first guests are that rare combination of the incomprehensible and the ageless, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, chat show perennial Ricky Gervais (who was on Jonathan Ross's show just a month ago) and ballad mistress Olivia Newton-John.

Ricky Gervais: 'Before The Office I never tried hard'

Ricky Gervais talks to The Guardian about the difference between sitcoms and film - and why he will never go back to his old lazy ways.

Has the world had a collective loss of short-term memory or did The Office never happen? If it hadn't then the clowns on Lunch Monkeys might just about have got away with it. But it did and they don't. Xeroxing Ricky Gervais's face and sticking it on my plasma screen would have been quicker and funnier.

I'll be brief because it makes me weary just thinking about it but the set-up is this: it's a comedy in an office. It's full of people who are either bored or stupid. Actually they're mostly bored and stupid. There's an Asian idiot called Asif, an English slapper called Tania and a lovelorn, long-haired streak of photocopy paper called Kenny, thus ensuring a generous range of gender and ethnic groups are duly insulted.

Somewhere hiding in the back office, praying he doesn't get many lines, sniffing his Chariots Of Fire shorts and wondering how, how, how did it come to this is Nigel Havers and it's here that Lunch Monkeys achieves the impossible: it makes you feel sorry for Nigel Havers. How did he wind up as the boss of a personal injury law firm in a sitcom which constitutes a crime against comedy? His hair is still lovely and floppy and everything.