Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais Q&A at Edinburgh TV festival - Live blog

It's time for the most exciting and highly anticipated session of the day at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh TV Festival (by this writer at least) - the Ricky Gervais Q&A.

Ricky Gervais signs Liam Neeson for Life's Too Short

Liam Neeson and Helena Bonham Carter are the latest A-listers who have signed up for the new sitcom by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Ricky Gervais: I used to be the laziest person I knew

I used to be the laziest, least ambition person I knew. Well, lazy in terms of work. Career success, if you will.

Backstage at Ricky Gervais's sitcom

Exclusive on-set pictures from the new Ricky Gervias sitcom.

An interview with Tiffany Stevenson

Tiffany Stevenson is an actress, writer, and comedian whose screen time with comedy legends like Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry led her to try comedy for herself.

Ricky Gervais to guest star on Curb Your Enthusiasm

Ricky Gervais is taking the Mick out of himself again - this time on Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David.

Francesca Martinez interview

Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr are fans, but Francesca Martinez, who has cerebal palsy, still can't get a gig on TV.

Ricky Gervais plays dolphin in US comedy Family Guy

The comedian Ricky Gervais has been cast as a dolphin in the animated American comedy show Family Guy.

Ricky Gervais says 'No' to hosting the Golden Globes

Funnyman Ricky Gervais has said it's unlikely he'll host the Golden Globes again.

You have to give sitcoms a chance, a huge chance. You have to take the amount of time you'd give, say, a prospective brother-in-law, and multiply that by the number of characters there are. Because eventually, once you've got to know them, you're going to find them a lot funnier.

This is the theory. I've heard it expounded a lot - although, admittedly, mainly by one person who works in TV. But trying not to fall into the trap of hating everything immediately, there are bits of Trollied (Sky 1) that are a little lazy; the plotting is a bit half-cocked. Jane Horrocks's interim manager is about to have a party, and she gets blown out by everybody, including her sister; she immediately swallows her pride and asks the guys on the butchery counter, and they immediately say no.

Computer programmers talk about the "five whys": so that if you ask "why" once, then you might partly mend a bug in a program, but if you ask it five times, then you'll probably design something quite good. It's a bit random, but try deploying it in a script meeting. Why do all her guests blow her out? Why is she so desperate to have the party in the first place? Why would she invite two people who manifestly dislike her, when she has a whole supermarket full of underlings? Why, when she's apparently quite a flexible person who finds it easy to put her vanity aside, doesn't she have more friends? Why did they cast Horrocks in the first place? Is it just because every time they thought "supermarket", they got a visual picture of her wrinkling her pretty nose and arguing with Prunella Scales?

I strongly suspect that the answer to all these questions is "We don't know" and that, furthermore, if this was a computer program, it would work for about five minutes, and then it would wipe your hard drive.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh at its puerile humour, sometimes out loud. Two check-out ladies, discussing Woody Allen, agree that running off with your stepdaughter is creepy, then one of them throws in: "I gave my cousin a handjob once, in a caravan." OK, it's not Oscar Wilde. And nor is the extremely extended wordplay between two homophonous phrases, one of which is qwite wude. (Horrocks is the interim deputy manager, and says "while I'm interimming . . .", whereupon the butchers go "loads of people are into rimming" and she says, "you need to face up to the fact that I'm the only one who's interimming", and they fall about. And so did I. I'm not proud of it). Nevertheless, I'm afraid it didn't really grow on me for its second episode, and its obvious antecedents - it's trying so hard to be The Office that it has Ricky Gervais's face tattooed, metaphorically, across its own - grated a bit. The Dawn-and-Tim-alike romance is particularly plain, and I don't think it really benefits from the unavoidable comparison. Though you never know, watch it a bit longer, you may come to love them.