Stephen Merchant

Martin Freeman hits out at The Office

Martin Freeman came to fame as nice guy Tim in hit sitcom The Office - written by stand-up comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant - but was the actor really so fond of them behind the scenes?

Audio: Ricky Gervais on hanging out with Will Smith

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.

Video: 'Here we go again, flogging something'

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.

David Walliams narrates a history of disability on TV. It's a slightly directionless tour around the archives from the Spastics Society appeal of the 1960s via Joey Deacon's appearance on Blue Peter to Roy's hysterical abuse of a disabled toilet in The IT Crowd. There are even segments on Heather Mills and Big Brother, although the one about Mills mercifully shows no actual footage of her. Interviewees trying not to say the wrong thing include Mat Fraser, Stephen Merchant, Dom Joly, Ash Atalla and Francesca Martinez.

Comedians refused to appear on a new BBC2 documentary about how disability is portrayed on TV - because they were scared they would say something offensive. Producer Kate Monaghan said: "A lot of them said no." But she still managed to sign up big names such as David Walliams, Stephen Merchant and Ben Miller for Are You Having a Laugh.

Stephen Merchant: Disability jokes intrinsic to script

Jokes about disability in The Office and Extras were not sprung upon actors, but were "intrinsic to the script", comedian Stephen Merchant has said.

It's the end tonight of what should obviously have been called The Karl Pilkington Show, with Ricky and Stephen Merchant reduced to playing straight men in the face of Karl's non-stop stream of logical gibberish.

In the last two animated podcasts Karl's riffing on how his arrival in Heaven might pan out. "Do you think God is a fan of this podcast?" Gervais wants to know.

I'd go further than that - I'm absolutely certain that God will have taken some of Karl's suggestions for how the human race might be improved and will be attempting to pass them off as having been all his own ideas just a couple of millennia from now.

Fans of Karl's inimitable brand of round-headed, out-of-the-box thinking don't need to worry about having to do without him for too long - Karl Pilkington's Seven Wonders Of The World, will be coming to Sky1 this autumn.

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.

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.