Podcast
preview: The Ricky Gervais guide to the arts
Ricky Gervais is standing in front of me, looking perfectly normal, talking
about the cold snap. Suddenly he breaks into his famous David Brent
“chicken” dance – arms wheeling, knees doing that weird side-bend, face in a
strained rictus that shows his canines.
We are in his office. All right – it’s a Hampstead office, north London, but
we could so easily be in Slough. For a mad moment I think of recording the
dance on my mobile phone. The personal kudos (particularly from my kids) to
be gained from such a clip flashes through my mind. Fortunately I come to my
senses. Gervais would loathe me for doing it; he would think I was treating
him like a “celebrity”; he might even think I was “papping” him. He hates
all that sort of stuff.
He does tend to break into his dance at the drop of a hat – most famously at
the Concert for Diana at Wembley last year when, alarmingly, he appeared to
dry up before an estimated worldwide audience of two billion. Without any
jokes at his disposal, Gervais had no option but to resort to Brent’s most
embarrassing moment. The critics were unimpressed, one even declaring that
this was the last we would ever see of Ricky Gervais.
So, Ricky: was that Wembley gig the worst moment of your life? “Well, I was
only meant to go on and introduce Elton John,” Gervais says. “Then this
woman showed me a sign saying ‘Four minutes’. So I did the dance. I found
out later that there had been a little problem with Elton John. Apparently,
he wasn’t happy that a song of his had to be cut. There was a bit of a
disagreement backstage.”
In other words, Elton was the problem but it was poor old Ricky who looked
like the twerp? “Yes,” says Gervais, with a canine-flashing giggle. But he
hasn’t lost much sleep over the suggestion that it was a career-ending
performance. “Four minutes? The end of my career? It’s ludicrous. I think
I’ll be remembered for The Office and Extras and whatever films I do before
being remembered for going: oops, Elton John’s not quite ready. End of my
career,” he repeats. “As if.”
Yet he’s all too aware that comedy can go disastrously wrong. After all, look
at his good friend Jonathan Ross, who has had to endure lashings of national
loathing over the past week, not to mention the loss of an estimated £1.5m
after being suspended by the BBC for three months.
“Comedy is all about context,” says Gervais. And the context of Ross and
Rus-sell Brand’s messages on the answerphone of the actor Andrew Sachs?
“Jonathan’s joke was not a good joke. It was two minutes of misjudgment and
they know they did wrong. But Jonathan is a friend and I will stand by him.”
Has he spoken to him since the furore broke? “Yes, of course I have.
Privately, several times. He is very sorry. The trouble was that Andrew
Sachs isn’t a fictional character. There was a real person at the end of
that answerphone and it was a childish gag. It wasn’t a good joke – but come
on, enough is enough. [Jonathan] is not a mass-murderer.
“I think it was the fact that it was broadcast which caused the moral outrage
and that wasn’t his fault. He is so sorry. He did a bad joke. It’s become
personal now; people are camping out on his lawn and baying for his blood.
But no one died.”
Has Gervais – whose comedy is routinely described as “taboo-crunching” – ever
come similarly unstuck? “I never let my conscience take a day off. I can
justify every joke I have ever done, every joke which has been described as
‘taboo-crunch-ing’, every joke where the target is how the joke is
perceived,” he says.
“In retrospect my first show, The 11 O’Clock Show, should have had more nods
and winks so people knew it was satire, but there’s only so much you can do.
Comedy comes from a good place or a bad place. A joke can be justified – or
not justified.”
Gervais, at 47, is our most garlanded comic with seven Baftas, two Emmys and
three Golden Globes. He is the man who seemed to come from nowhere to make
The Office, the darkest and most perfect television sitcom in decades. With
Extras, his second offering, he managed the seemingly impossible feat of
satirising the modern obsession with fame while becoming extremely famous
himself.
If there is anyone in the entertainment business who shepherds his career more
closely, I would like to meet him. Everything Gervais does is superbly
controlled: “I have never sworn by mistake. In any broadcast, ever.”
Compared with the slapdash Brand and the garrulous Ross, Gervais gives the
impression that he has a career ladder lodged in his head and knows exactly
on which rung he is standing.
He is completely candid about the prime position that work holds in his life.
He and his girlfriend (Jane Fallon, the television producer and writer whom
he met at college) decided not to have children as a “life-style choice”, he
says, because “we wanted to work on our careers”. And he readily admits to
being a control freak who does nothing if he is not convinced that he can
wholly own it. Cameo roles, such as the one he played in the film Night at
the Museum, are done only as favours to mates.
“I create my own labour,” says Gervais. “I don’t look for work. I have never
looked for work. I get sent two scripts a day; I never read them. I don’t do
handcuff deals. I’m not an actor for hire.” He is quite affable about his
control freakery. If you don’t want to play it his way, no problem: he’ll
just walk away.
“My first thing was The 11 O’Clock Show [a Channel 4 comedy]. I said I’d do it
if I could write my own piece. They said okay.” This was 1999. Since then he
has done nothing that he has not personally created. Even his film cameos
are all ad-libbed, he tells me, and he rewrote his own starring role in the
new Hollywood rom-com Ghost Town.
His social life is similarly controlled: he has six friends, mates he has
known for more than a decade, and says that’s enough. “I don’t have ‘people’
who arrange my diary. I am my ‘people’,” he says wryly. Typically, by six in
the evening he will be in his pyjamas, ready for a night in front of the
telly. Going out bores him. Particularly if there are snappers around.
“I don’t hang out with Samuel Jackson and Kate Winslet,” he says. “I don’t
court people. I don’t schmooze. I avoid everything. I don’t go to talent
functions or go on reality shows. I don’t go to things I can get in free to.
I don’t move in celebrity circles.”
Which may seem a bit odd to those of us who have seen Gervais appearing no
fewer than eight times on his pal Ross’s show, being extremely personable
and seeming to revel in the heady air of celebrity. Maybe he’s just doing a
favour to a mate. But most such appearances are specifically because Gervais
has a project to punt. If he has made something, he is ever-willing to
market it. Indeed, our meeting is in honour the release of the Extras
Special box set as well as his headlining part in Ghost Town.
So, yes, Gervais will occasionally fling off the pyjamas to go to premieres,
as long as they are for his own films, and he will go to award ceremonies,
as long as he has a gong to pick up. Is this outrageous arrogance or the
dutiful completion of an honest job? The fact that the question can even be
posed is part of what makes him such an interesting “celebrity”.
Although, of course, he loathes the term: “I’ve never understood it. I’ve
never understood the appeal of fame. I’m fascinated by people who think it’s
a short cut to happiness, or acceptance, or respect.”
Yet Extras, the series in which he plays hapless wannabe Andy Millman –
surrounded by a glittering cast including Robert De Niro, George Michael and
Winslet – certainly acknowledged the hot currency of fame.
“There is a big difference between Robert De Niro and someone in X Factor,”
says Gervais cheerily. “There is nothing wrong with X Factor, but someone
who lives their life like an open wound has nothing in common with Robert De
Niro, a very talented actor. And they shouldn’t be lumped in together. A
celebrity is someone who is well known . . . for being well known.”
It was when he picked up his first comedy gong, he says, that he crossed over
into the world of the mainstream celeb. “What made me famous wasn’t The
Office. It was probably the award ceremonies. Because when the papers say
you are successful, that’s when people say: yes, you are. I mean, you see a
newsreader every day of your life on television, but you don’t think:
there’s a famous person,” he adds (casually squashing the imagined status of
dozens of newsreaders).
His own response to celebdom has been to assume what he calls “faux arrogance”
– as when he received an award and promptly congratulated the Bafta judges
on their excellent choice of winner. “It makes me feel sick,” he says, “to
see someone going up there and going, ‘What, me? Oooooh’ [he fakes a starlet
going into faux raptures of surprise over an award]. And I didn’t want to do
that. So I got up there and went: yep, they got it right.”
Does he mind when people take him at face value and slag him off for being a
big-head? It seems not: “I don’t object to people not liking what I do. I
don’t care what people say. A bad review doesn’t annoy me at all; sometimes
it’s a bit of a relief.”
What does annoy him beyond measure, even more than people who take photographs
of him jogging, is people who get the facts wrong. He went to the Ivy
recently and a woman on a neighbouring table watched what he ate and then
rang The Independent with some of the details. “I ate a fruit salad, which
was true, but I had it with ice-cream. And deep-fried scampi.” says Gervais.
Leaving out the high-calorie stuff, you see, had given the resultant piece a
nasty spin, namely: “Ricky is trying to lose weight for his Hollywood
career.”
Which incensed him. He couldn’t care less about the implication that he needs
to slim, though. “I am fat,” he says matter-of-factly. I inspect the Gervais
frame, clad as usual in black T-shirt and jeans. Well, there’s a bit of a
tummy but you aren’t exactly obese, I say. He shrugs. “I don’t care if
someone says I am fat and unfunny. Opinion,” he says, exactly as Brent might
say it. “But if someone says I am fat and unfunny and kick dogs, I’ll go:
no, I don’t kick dogs. That’s what annoys me.”
What strikes me is that there is no pretence about Gervais. When he and his
co-writer Stephen Merchant first pitched the idea of The Office to a BBC
executive, neither of them had any track record. The executive was quite
interested and told them that there were a couple of directors who might be
willing to take the job on – at which point Gervais said that the BBC could
forget all about that suggestion since a) he was going to direct it, b) he
would be starring in it and c) if the BBC didn’t like that arrangement, it
could lump it.
As he points out now, what’s the point of having an Airfix kit if you aren’t
going to build the whole aeroplane?
“I just thought, where’s the fun?” says Gervais. “I didn’t want to make TV for
the sake of it. We wanted to make something which would last. I always
wanted to be a bit more . . . special. Maybe it was because I came to it
older.”
At that point he was already 38 and had a few careers under his belt,
including a stint as a 1980s pop singer and a university receptionist. If
The Office hadn’t taken off, would he have despaired?
“I worked in an office. I enjoyed it. I wasn’t sitting around thinking: this
is shit, I’ve got to be famous,” says Gervais. “I wanted to be a research
scientist, actually. I would have loved to have found a cure for Aids. I
wouldn’t have been famous, but I would have had people say: you’ve done a
good job there.
“You want to be accepted in your circle and respected by your peers and you
want to do a good job.”
Extras: The Special DVD - £21.99 RRP, Extras: The Special Blu Ray - £26.99
RRP, cert 15. Extras: The Complete Box Set - £39.99 RRP, cert 15. Available
to buy on DVD and Blu Ray from November 3.
