RICKY CHATS TO HEAT
‘MY MESSAGE TO HEAT READERS? ENJOY LIFE!’ To celebrate our big birthday, the comedy giant dodges spiders and reminisces with Boyd Hilton
Ricky Gervais couldn’t be more relaxed. He’s in his dressing room at Pinewood Studios, where he’s filming his new Netflix series
After Life (which, he’s keen to point out, is not about ghosts and isn’t set in the afterlife). He’s wearing his trademark black T-shirt and preferred sweatpants for maximum comfort. He’s sitting in a velvety armchair with his feet resting on the back of the sofa in front of us, while merrily chatting away about how life has changed for him and the world in general, since heat first arrived nearly 20 years ago. Then, suddenly, he gets distracted when something drops from the ceiling. “I’ve got things falling on me,” he says, mildly concerned. And just as he’s explaining how there have been lots of bugs and flies buzzing around, we notice a small creature crawling up his T-shirt. Turns out the thing that landed on him is a little spider, roughly the size of a 5p piece. Ricky, 57, can feel it. “What’s that?” he says, looking straight at heat. “Um, it’s a spider,” we tell him. He lets out a high-pitched yelp, leaps up and jumps around the room, shouting, “WHERE IS IT? WHERE IS IT?”
We spot the offending creature – now on the carpet – and point in its general direction. “Oh, it’s a little one,” he says, visibly relieved. “I thought it was a tarantula.” Ricky explains how he doesn’t just hate spiders, he thinks they will give him a heart attack one day. Later on, he describes his reaction during the “spider incident” as, “Dancing and screaming like Oliver Hardy.”
heat has been interviewing Ricky regularly since a little low-budget BBC2 sitcom called The Office arrived without fanfare in 2001. Then came Extras, Derek, a gaggle of films, record-breaking podcasts, three stints hosting the Golden Globes, five stand-up tours, and guest appearances on shows such as The Simpsons, Family Guy and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Basically, he’s become a global comedy superstar during the time we’ve racked up 1,000 issues, so who better to help celebrate that feat than the man who now gets £20million a show for Netflix? So, once we get back on track after spider-gate, it’s time to reminisce… heat first interviewed you in our very early days about a little series called The Office. What do you remember about that time? Well, The Office was low risk – it had a small budget and it was for BBC2. I thought, “If we can get a million of the people who like things like Fawlty Towers and Alan Partridge, I’d be happy, because we can then do a second series and that would be my career sorted”. Then I remember when the BBC told me what slot we had – Monday 9 July at 10pm. I said immediately, “We can’t go out the same time as Big Brother – that is our audience”. I don’t know who
I thought I was, challenging the scheduling! But they moved it to 9.30pm. I think it would have been the death of it if we’d been up against Big Brother. I mean, it didn’t do that well, anyway – we got 1.5million, but we were all happy with that. Then they repeated it before series two and it doubled to nearly 3million, all down to word of mouth.
It got some harsh reviews to start with, didn’t it?
Oh yeah. I got up the next day, and the first paper I bought was The
Standard, and their headline on the review was, “Summer stinker.” OK! But the other thing that happened with The Office, which I’d never seen before, is that a few of the critics who slagged it off initially then admitted they’d been wrong. They thought it was a bit boring. I think it was because it didn’t seem to sit quite right. It didn’t feel like a British sitcom – it had no stars and no jokes and nothing happened.
We remember you insisted your publicist sent us all six episodes on VHS, so we could binge on the whole thing…
Oh great. Well, I want your headline to be, “Ricky Gervais invented binge watching!” But I did that because I wanted people to watch it in order and see the trajectory of David Brent’s story. It wasn’t a sitcom where you could watch the episodes in any order and it didn’t really matter.
Nearly 20 years on, how has your life changed?
I still like all the same things, and I still want to get up every day and have as much fun as I can before I die. But I’ve thought that way since I was eight. For many of those years, I was absolutely f**king poor, but I am lucky that mucking about has become my job.
Reality TV was a big influence on The Office, wasn’t it?
Yeah, well, it was really about the breakdown of a man who thinks his life can be saved through reality TV. I remember watching the first Big Brother and thinking, “Oh God, how do I compete with that? How do I make fiction as good as that?” That’s why we embraced reality in The Office, using the fake documentary form. The more real a show is, the more it resonates. Real life will always have that power. You can be watching
The Godfather, but if there’s shouting outside your window and the neighbour’s being taken away in hand cuffs or something, then you pause The Godfather to go and have a look.
Do you still watch reality TV?
I ration myself. I don’t watch Next
Top Model or Love Island. Not because I think they’re bad, only because I don’t have time. I still watch The Apprentice and I’ll probably watch the next Big
Brother. Even then, I want them to take out all the bits where they’re being nice to each other and go, “OK, here’s them fighting, and crying.” Because that’s why we watch it, let’s be honest.
What’s been your favourite series of Big Brother?
I liked the one where Victor went off on one [BB5]. It was like he was about to rip the house apart. That really got my adrenaline pumping. That’s why we watch any fiction, for drama and conflict. And watching it for real might be a guilty pleasure, but I don’t want to watch 12 idiots being nice to each other.
And now we have a reality TV President from The Apprentice…
Yeah, it’s the biggest reality TV show the world has ever seen.
You seem more politically active and angry these days…
Yeah, I think you’ve got to be. It becomes your duty. You have to fight injustice and when someone is getting away with something they shouldn’t, you have to step in. You can lose fans and followers, but so f**king what? I think we have to step up. I don’t like doing political material in my stand-up, because I think it’s a bit too easy. And also, the situation is too serious. We shouldn’t be making jokes about Trump. We should be putting him in f**king jail.
What particularly angers you about Trump?
The lying, the propaganda, the abuse of power and the enabling of all that we know is wrong – racism, sexism and homophobia. Someone’s come along and said, “You shouldn’t be ashamed of those things.” So, there’s no shame any more. How did he get in after he admitted that he grabbed women by the “pussy”?
What have been the other most amazing changes in the world over the last 20 years?
Technology. I remember when the mobile phone was the future. Now I can’t imagine where it will end. CDS were enough. I thought, “Let’s stop now!” And the internet, of course, has changed everything.
In terms of TV, how important has Netflix become?
Huge. What it did was take the internet and the idea of streaming, and pander to the way people were already watching TV – which is binge watching. They got us all asking, “Why would I wait a week to see the next episode of a series I love?”now I want everything to be available like that. With Game
Of Thrones now, I won’t watch it until I’ve got all ten episodes ready.
You’ve hosted the Golden Globes three times, and guest starred on The
Simpsons and Family Guy…
And Sesame Street, and Spongebob Squarepants! And I’ve just done Scooby Doo as myself. That was great.
Wow. We didn’t know
Scooby Doo still existed. What’s been your most fun guest appearance?
Probably Curb Your Enthusiasm, because [star and creator] Larry David had the idea I should behave horribly, and I got to improvise around that, and there’s nothing more enjoyable than that.
You must have pretty much everything you could want in life now, but is there one thing you haven’t got?
A dog. One day, hopefully, we’ll be able to have one, but we’re too busy at the moment. So, Jane [Fallon, his partner of 36 years] and I go to the dog pond in Hampstead, or we go to Central Park when we’re in New York and hang out with the dogs there. I love them. The greatest privilege is to have a dog that loves you unconditionally. My dream is to have a big house in the woods and be surrounded by animals and big dogs.
Finally, what message have you got for heat readers as we celebrate our 1,000th issue?
Something really responsible and pompous – a bit Bono. How about, “Get involved, this is your world.” I feel like fighting injustice and speaking up is really important. Or else I would just say, “You’re going to be dead soon, and there’s no afterlife, so you’d better f**king enjoy it.” [Pause.] And I got the title of my show in…
‘The greatest privilege is to have a dog that loves you’