Karl Pilkington done a interesting interview with the Independent recently to promote the 'Ricky Gervais Guide To...' podcast and revealed he wants a new challenge in his life because, he says, working with Ricky Gervais is not a proper job and more alarmingly declared that the current run of the series of podcasts is definitely his last.Karl Pilkington's Fridge“I got bored of them from series three and I wanted to knock it on the head then,” he says glumly. “It doesn’t matter who you are, there’s only so much you can talk about and it felt like I had nothing left to say. Ricky convinced me to stay on for a few more, but after series five I said, ‘That’s definitely it’.”
But, with the help of a poster campaign that invited fans of the show to decorate their streets with posters of Karl’s face, Gervais convinced Pilkington to do a sixth season, which started in December. Titled The Ricky Gervais Guide To…, the shows are loosely structured around certain topics. So far they have covered medicine, natural history and, in last Friday’s episode, the arts.
As he sits in a café in London’s Soho, Pilkington, 36, is insistent that this season will be the last. It is a curious decision, given that the show has turned the bald Mancunian with just one GCSE (an E grade in history) into a cult celebrity and provides his main source of income.
Its popularity was instant and after its first month in December 2005 it entered Guinness World Records as the most popular podcast ever when it averaged 261,670 downloads a week. In three years it has managed to attract more than 155 million downloads.
But the success is a mystery to Karl. “I don’t understand the appeal of it. I think, ‘Why would anyone want to listen to this?’ It’s just a few blokes chatting. People can do that in the pub with their mates, can’t they?”
