The World of Karl Pilkington

A collection of the best moments from the record-breaking 'Ricky Gervais Show' podcasts with additional musings and original drawings by Karl Pilkington, the show's unlikely star. Karl Pilkington, the Confuctian-like savant of the 'Ricky Gervais Show', has led an extraordinary and curiously individual life. As a kid growing up in Manchester he regularly missed school to accompany his parents on caravanning holidays and left without collecting his exam results: his family weaned him well. His father once crashed a train into Manchester Central Station, his mother shaved one of their cats after it kept being sick and his uncle slept in a dinghy instead of a bed -- genes, some acolytes say, that have contributed to his cryptic views on life. Pilkington's is a brilliant mind, locked inside a perfectly round head, and uncluttered by the unhelpful constraints of logic or common sense; factors that have led him to such dazzling insights as 'you never see old men eating Twix bars' or that the 'Diary of Anne Frank' was 'an Adrian Mole sort of thing'. In this pithy and hilarious book, Karl is in conversation with (the often bewildered) Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the writers and stars of 'The Office' and 'Extras', outwitting even these comedy Goliaths with his take on such contentious issues as charity, the lack of Chinese homeless people, reincarnation, the rights of monkeys and favourite superpowers. Featuring Karl's original illustrations, imaginative scribblings, full-colour pictures sent in by fans, the best conversations of the first twelve podcasts, and to be published alongside the second series of the internationally acclaimed and Guinness Record-winning Ricky Gervais Show (downloaded over 4,000,000 times -- the most popular podcast ever), this is a unique trip into the world of one of our most innovative thinkers, visionaries and prophets, or as Gervais and Merchant know him, 'the funniest man alive in Britain today'.