Ricky Gervais
Ricky Dene Gervais is an English comedian, actor, writer, television producer and filmmaker. He co-created, co-wrote, and acted in the British television sitcoms The Office, Extras, and Life's Too Short with Stephen Merchant. He also created, wrote, and starred in Derek and After Life. Gervais was also executive producer of and had cameos in the American rendition of The Office.
Gervais has won seven BAFTA Awards, five British Comedy Awards, two Emmy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and the Rose d'Or twice. In 2003, The Observer named Gervais one of the 50 funniest performers in British comedy. In 2007, he was placed at No. 11 on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups, and at No. 3 in their 2010 list. In 2010, he was included in the Time 100 list of World's Most Influential People.
Gervais initially worked in the music industry. He attempted a career as a pop star in the 1980s as the singer of the new-wave act Seona Dancing. The band did have success in the Philippines with the song "More to Lose". He also managed the then-unknown band Suede before turning to comedy. He appeared on The 11 O'Clock Show on Channel 4 between 1998 and 2000, garnering a reputation as an outspoken and sharp-witted social provocateur. In 2000, he was given a Channel 4 spoof talk show, Meet Ricky Gervais. He achieved greater mainstream fame the following year with his BBC television mock documentary series The Office, followed by Extras in 2005. He also wrote the Flanimals book series.
Gervais began his stand-up career in the late 1990s. He has performed five multi-national stand-up comedy tours. Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington created the podcast The Ricky Gervais Show, which has spawned various spin-offs including An Idiot Abroad, starring Pilkington and produced by Gervais and Merchant. In 2016, he wrote, directed and starred in the comedy film David Brent: Life on the Road. Gervais has also starred in the Hollywood films For Your Consideration, the Night at the Museum film series trilogy, Ghost Town, and Muppets Most Wanted. He wrote, directed, and starred in the 2009 romantic comedy film The Invention of Lying and the 2016 Netflix-released comedy film Special Correspondents. He hosted the Golden Globe Awards five times, in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016, and 2020.
Early life
Gervais was born on 25 June 1961 at Battle Hospital in Reading, Berkshire. Gervais's father was Lawrence Raymond "Jerry" Gervais, a Franco-Ontarian of French Canadian and Iroquois descent who grew up on a farm in Pain Court, Ontario near Chatham, Ontario. Lawrence emigrated to the UK while on foreign duty during the Second World War. He worked as a labourer and hod carrier before he met Gervais's English mother, Eva Sophia. They met during a blackout, settled in Whitley, Reading, and had four children. Eva died at age 74 of lung cancer. Ricky was the youngest child; his siblings are: schoolteacher Larry, Marsha, a teacher for special needs children, and Bob, a painter and decorator. Prompted by Bob, Ricky Gervais began to question the existence of God from about age eight.Gervais has mentioned in interviews that, as an 11-year-old, he asked why his siblings were so much older than he was; his mother bluntly told him that he "was a mistake". Gervais has spoken of his appreciation for his family's extreme sense of humour. He told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs that he and his brother Bob spent most of their mother's funeral "crying with laughter". They had been asked by the vicar to tell him something about their mother prior to the service, with Gervais saying, "My brother, just winding up the vicar, said, 'She was a keen racist.' And the vicar said, 'I can't say that!' So Bob went, 'Oh, OK then... she liked gardening.'"
Gervais attended Whitley Park Infants and Junior Schools and received his secondary education at Ashmead Comprehensive School. After a gap year, which he spent working as a gardener at the University of Reading, he attended University College London in 1980. He intended to study biology but changed to philosophy after two weeks, and was awarded a lower-second class honours degree in the subject from UCL in 1983. During his time there, he met Jane Fallon, with whom he has been in a relationship since 1982.
Career
Music
For six months in 1983, during his final year as a student at UCL, Gervais and his best friend Bill Macrae formed the new wave pop duo Seona Dancing. They were signed by London Records, which released two of their singles—"More to Lose" and "Bitter Heart". The songs failed to make an impact on the UK Singles Chart. Despite not being successful in the UK, Seona Dancing did manage to score a hit in the Philippines with "More to Lose". Gervais also worked as the manager for Suede before they became successful in the 1990s.In 2013, Gervais performed a live tour as David Brent along with his band Foregone Conclusion, Brent's fictional band in The Office. He and the band performed songs written under the Brent character, including "Equality Street" and "Free Love Freeway". Gervais also produced a series of YouTube videos, 'Learn Guitar with David Brent', featuring acoustic guitar versions of nine songs. In 2016, as part of the Life on the Road film promotion, Gervais published the David Brent Songbook of 15 songs, which he also recorded for the album Life on the Road as David Brent and Foregone Conclusion.
Radio
Gervais worked as an assistant events manager for the University of London Union, then was head of speech at the alternative radio station Xfm. Needing an assistant, he interviewed the first person whose curriculum vitae he read: Stephen Merchant. In 1998 Gervais's position was made redundant when the station was taken over by the Capital Radio group. Around this time he was also a regular contributor to Mary Anne Hobbs's Radio 1 show, performing vox pop interviews in unlikely locations.After the first series of The Office, Gervais and Merchant returned to Xfm in November 2001 for a Saturday radio show, where they began working with Karl Pilkington, who produced the shows and later collaborated with them on their series of podcasts. In October 2017, Gervais began hosting the weekly radio show Ricky Gervais Is Deadly Sirius on Sirius XM, which ran until 2019.
Podcast
On 5 December 2005, Guardian Unlimited began offering free weekly podcasts, including The Ricky Gervais Show featuring Gervais, Merchant and Karl Pilkington. Throughout January and February 2006 the podcast was consistently ranked the number 1 podcast in the world. It appeared in the 2007 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most-downloaded podcast, with an average 261,670 downloads per episode during its first month. Two more series, each with six podcasts, were released between February and September 2006.In late 2006, three more free podcasts were released. Together called "The Podfather Trilogy", they debuted individually at Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. These three were known by Gervais and Merchant as "The Fourth Season". In October 2007 another free full-length podcast was released through iTunes, after being originally given out for free during a performance of Gervais's Fame stand-up tour in London. On 25 November 2007 Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington released another free podcast of just over one hour.
In August 2008, Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington recorded their fifth series of audiobooks with four chapters released on 16 September 2008, and described as the Guide To... series. There are 12 'Guides' to Medicine, Natural History, Arts, Philosophy, The English, Society, Law & Order, The Future, The Human Body, The Earth, The World Cup 2010 and Comic Relief. The conversations typically begin on topic and go out on tangents about other subjects. In 2021, Gervais launched a paid-for audio series, Absolutely Mental, of his conversations with philosopher Sam Harris. Season 2 was also launched in 2021, followed by season 3 in March 2022.
Television
Early television appearances
Gervais has contributed to the BAFTA-winning The Sketch Show, penning several sketches. His mainstream-TV on-screen debut came in September 1998 as part of Channel 4's Comedy Lab series of pilots. His one-off show Golden Years focused on a David Bowie-obsessed character called Clive Meadows.Gervais then came to much wider national attention with an obnoxious, cutting persona featured in a topical slot that replaced Ali G's segments on the satirical Channel 4 comedy programme The 11 O'Clock Show in early 1999, in which his character used as many expletives as was possible and produced an inordinate number of politically incorrect statements. Among the other regular featured comedians on the show was Mackenzie Crook, later a co-star of The Office. Two years later, Gervais went on to present his comedy chat show for Channel 4 called Meet Ricky Gervais, which was poorly received and cancelled after six episodes, and Gervais has since mocked it. Throughout this time, Gervais also wrote for the BBC sketch show Bruiser and The Jim Tavare Show.
''The Office''
The Office started when Stephen Merchant had to make his short film while on a BBC production course. In August 1999 he made a docu-soap parody, set in an office, with help from Ash Atalla who was shown a 7-minute video called 'The Seedy Boss'. Thus the character of David Brent was created. Merchant passed this tape on to the BBC's Head of Entertainment Paul Jackson at the Edinburgh Fringe, who then passed it on to Head of Comedy Jon Plowman, who eventually commissioned a full-pilot script from Merchant and Gervais.The first six-episode series of The Office aired in the UK in July and August 2001 to little fanfare or attention. Word-of-mouth, repeats and DVDs helped spread the word, building up momentum and anticipation for the second series, also comprising six episodes. Following the success of The Office second series, Gervais was named the most powerful person in TV comedy by Radio Times. In 2004, The Office won the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy as well as Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy for Gervais, who said in a 2015 BBC interview that the award was the gateway to America for him.
The Office brand has since been remade for audiences in Sweden, France, Germany, Quebec, Brazil, Chile, Czech Republic, Finland, India, Israel, Poland and the United States. Gervais and Merchant are producers of the American version, and they also co-wrote the episode "The Convict" for the show's third season. Gervais has said that the episode "Training" is his favourite, where Brent plays his guitar and sings. In 2021, on the show's 20th anniversary, he suggested the show would not have been produced in 2021 due to cancel culture: "I mean, now it would be cancelled. I'm looking forward to when they pick out one thing and try to cancel it. Someone said they might try to cancel it one day, and I say, 'Good let them cancel it—I've been paid!'" In 2025, Gervais became an executive producer on The Paper, a spinoff of the American version of The Office created by Greg Daniels, who had also created the American adaptation of ''The Office.''