“I could eat a knob at night.” Karl Pilkington made this startling declaration in the midst of a conversation about the best time of day to consume a kangaroo penis. It sparked the sort of response you’d expect the first blockbuster podcast to garner: Listeners worldwide plucked the phrase from the MP3 and looped it over techno beats. The gut-busting chat show featuring The Office and Extras creator Ricky Gervais, his cowriter Stephen Merchant, and their friend Pilkington now fetches $2 per episode on Audible and iTunes and holds the Guinness World Record for most downloaded podcast. Gervais told Wired that even though his name is in the title, the real star is Pilkington.
– Chris Baker
"Karl is a freak, born prematurely bald, in Manchester, with a limited education that he found under rocks and bins. Nowadays he just gathers bits of information from spurious Web sites and fills in the gaps with his imagination."
"I’m very much the straight man on the podcast, more ringmaster than performer. I wind up Karl and let him go. He’ll have arguments with himself, tell strange fables, and make outrageous observations. He speaks in these astonishing sound bites."
"I don’t think anyone else sees the world like Karl. He’s annoyed at nature and hasn’t quite grasped evolution. He found out that there’s an octopus that can spit poison, and that upsets him because ‘in the cartoons, the octopuses are always nice and happy.’ There – right there – he has brought a whole species into disrepute."
"If I cut Karl Pilkington open and looked into his brain, I’d probably find something that would win me your Rave Award for science."
Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington (from left) host the most downloaded podcast on the Web.
2006 Rave Awards:
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Bryan Singer & the Man of Steel
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