Ricky Dene Gervais is an English comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director. He is best known for co-creating, writing, and acting in the British television series The Office (2001–2003). He has won seven BAFTA Awards, five British Comedy Awards, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Rose d'Or twice, as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. In 2007, he was placed at No. 11 on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups and at No. 3 on the updated 2010 list. In 2010, he was named on the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people.
Stephen James Merchant is an English comedian, actor, writer, director, and presenter. Alongside Ricky Gervais, he was the co-writer and co-director of the British TV comedy series The Office (2001–2003), and co-writer and co-star of both Extras (2005–2007) and Life's Too Short (2011–2013). With Gervais and Karl Pilkington, he hosted The Ricky Gervais Show in its radio, podcast, audiobook, and television formats; the radio version won a bronze Sony Award. He also provided the voice of the robot Wheatley in the 2011 video game Portal 2.
Karl Pilkington is an English television presenter, author, comedian, radio producer, actor and voice actor.
Radio X is a British National commercial radio station focused on alternative music, primarily indie rock, and owned by Global. Radio X launched nationally on 21 September 2015 as a rebrand of Xfm and superseded Xfm London and Xfm Manchester.
Claire Annette Sturgess is a British disc jockey, and voiceover artist.
Squiddly Diddly is an anthropomorphic animated octopus created by Hanna-Barbera, who was featured in his own cartoon segment on The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show beginning in 1965.
The Ricky Gervais Show is a comedy radio show in the UK starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington, later adapted into a podcast and a television series. Despite being named after the more famous Gervais, it mostly revolves around the life and ideas of Pilkington. The show started in August 2001 on Xfm, and aired in weekly periods for months at a time throughout 2002, 2003, 2004, and mid-2005. In November 2005, Guardian Unlimited offered the show as a podcast series of 12 shows. Throughout January and February 2006, the podcast was consistently ranked the number one podcast in the world; it appeared in the 2007 Guinness World Record for the world's most downloaded podcast, having gained an average of 261,670 downloads per episode during its first month. According to the BBC, by September 2006, the podcasts of the series had been downloaded nearly 18 million times. As of March 2011, the podcast has been downloaded over 300 million times. An animated series based on the podcast and adapted for television debuted for HBO in the U.S. and Channel 4 in the U.K. in 2010.
3 Minute Wonder is a short Channel 4 television slot that broadcasts first time directors' three-minute TV programmes in the middle of the channel's weekday primetime schedule. It offers first-time directors and assistant producers the opportunity to air their work to a large audience, and in doing so, to take a first step into the competitive UK film industry.
Bears3 are a series of short animated films created by Matt Everitt and Matt Clark. The films feature 3 teddy bears animated to dialogue taken from The Ricky Gervais Show an Xfm radio show featuring Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington. Additional original dialogue was recorded by the trio for the episode Y-Fronts and the films went on to feature on both Ricky's and Xfm's website.
Dan Fraga is a comic book artist, storyboard artist, concept artist, and animation and film director originally from Martinez, California. He also hosts a Youtube show called, "Couchdoodles Show". Immediately after high school, he was hired to work as in illustrator for Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios; one of the founding partner studios that made up Image Comics. Dan was one of the youngest creators to be a part of the beginnings of Image Comics. He worked in the comic book industry for many years, and worked on titles such as Spider-Man, Bloodstrike, Black Flag, Kid Supreme, Superman, Black Panther, Witchblade, and Wolverine.
Hippo Eats Dwarf is the title of a hoax news article which claims that a dwarf was accidentally eaten by a hippopotamus. The urban legend has been circulating via the internet since the mid-1990s. Many print newspapers have been fooled into publishing the story as fact.
An Idiot Abroad is a British travel documentary comedy television series broadcast on Sky One, as well as a series of companion books published by Canongate Books, created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and starring Karl Pilkington. The ongoing theme of both the television series and the books is that Pilkington has no interest in global travel, so Merchant and Gervais make him travel while they stay in the United Kingdom and monitor his progress.
The Ricky Gervais Show is an American-British comedy cartoon series produced for and broadcast by HBO and Channel 4. The series is an animated version of the popular British audio podcasts and audiobooks of the same name, which feature Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant along with colleague and friend Karl Pilkington, talking about various subjects behind the microphone. The TV series consists of past audio recordings of these unscripted "pointless conversations," with animation drawn in a style similar to classic era Hanna-Barbera cartoons, presenting jokes and situations in a literal context.
Derek is a British comedy-drama television series starring, written and directed by Ricky Gervais. The pilot was produced by Derek Productions Ltd. for Channel 4 and aired on 12 April 2012. Channel 4 describes the show as "A bittersweet comedy drama about a group of outsiders living on society's margins."
The Ministries of Love, Peace, Plenty, and Truth are ministries in George Orwell's 1949 futuristic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, set in Oceania. Despite the name, no actual "ministers" are mentioned in the book, and all public attention is focused on the idealized figurehead Big Brother.
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
Ian Camfield is a British radio broadcaster for radio stations in the United Kingdom and the United States.
