Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais: Female characters often treated as props

The creator of Derek says Hollywood portrays women as air heads or so ambitious they "need to be taught a lesson".

The Robin Ince three minute interview

Stand-Up comic Robin Ince isn't a name dropper. So Martin Walker will do some for him. In a 25 year long career he's worked with the likes of Chris Addison, Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Natalie Haynes, and (gulp) Brian Cox. He's currently touring his show, Robin Ince: In and Out of His mind.

Ricky Gervais changed the way we look at our working lives with his lampooning of crap desk jobs on crap British light industrial estates in The Office. The cod-documentary W1A, John Morton's follow-up to his Olympic satire Twenty Twelve, takes an updated potshot at management and the workplace, this time in the consultant-speak era of 2014, and against the backdrop of the BBC's New Broadcasting House.

This is an environment where high-vis-wearing executives are forever carrying Brompton folding bikes round open-plan offices, chairing pointless meetings of the Way Ahead Task Force or the Senior Damage Limitation Group in glass "informal spaces" before attending one of the regular "digital handshake" sessions for staff. Even as parliament debates whether to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, the self-lampooning W1A demonstrates that the BBC has a very British ability to laugh at itself.

Review: GQ Extravaganza, Hammersmith Apollo

GQ has a long-standing reputation for being a stylish fashion magazine, but it is also building up a reputation for stylish comedy. Thanks to the contacts book and charm of its comedy editor, stand-up James Mullinger, it has put together a number of striking special editions featuring the world's greatest clowns and comedy actors from Jerry Seinfeld to Paul Rudd and Ricky Gervais. This year they went one stage further with a formidable comedy gig, which worked absolutely brilliantly. Until the headline act came on...

David Brent announces new tour dates

Ricky Gervais's comedy character will take to the stage again later this year in Oxford and London.

Ricky Gervais: Satire, Celebrity and the Muppets

Comedian and writer Ricky Gervais likes to make fun of celebrities-and, sipping a latte during a recent interview, he is true to form.

Radio 4 launched us on Wednesday night into the inexplicably late-scheduled Nurse (11.15pm!), co-written and starring Paul Whitehouse. Johnny Depp once described Whitehouse, without seeming irony, as "the greatest actor of all time", and it's not wholly impossible to understand the compliment.

This was dark and enthralling comedy. It will attract faint criticism - what does Whitehouse, with his comfy Aviva ads, know of mental illness? - but it turns out that Whitehouse, without being quite as close to it as Jo Brand, had, during his Fast Show years, done a little clever research into mental illness. This show, also featuring Esther Coles as a community psychiatric nurse, is, essentially, all about bewilderment: the bewilderment of those on fringes who simply can't understand the way the rest of us think, nor why we should insist on doing so. It's deeply subtle, and the subject matter doesn't lend itself to LOL-itude, but it was a quiet (if inexcusably late-night) delight, and executed with only about four squillion times the sensitivity of Ricky Gervais's Derek.

Ricky Gervais reveals another Extras prophecy

In the wake of Samuel L. Jackson being mistaken for Laurence Fishburne in a cringe-makingly awkward US TV interview, the funnyman took to Twitter to point out that Ashley Jensen's character had done the exact same thing in a 2005 episode of the show.

Ricky Gervais interview

We chat to Ricky Gervais on the set of Muppets Most Wanted to find out more about the film...