This looks twice as good as anything on the Travel Channel, when is it going to premiere in the US?
TV Promo of the Day: First look sneak peek trailer for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s An Idiot Abroad — a documentary series featuring beloved round-headed buffon Karl Pilkington traveling around the world and hating every minute of it.
The show is scheduled to begin airing this September on Sky1. International air dates have yet to be announced.
[videogum.]
“Gervais claims that in Derek he is satirising prejudice against the disabled. He said the same about Life’s Too Short, insisting that we laughed at Davis not because he was a dwarf but because he was “conniving, manipulative, pretentious” – and a dwarf. That the comic set pieces were of this “conniving, manipulative, pretentious” man climbing up bookshelves and falling out of a car, which full-sized people rarely do no matter how manipulative they are, makes me think we were actually laughing at the oldest joke – the dwarf’s physical limitations – rather than Gervais’s tired defence of a meta discourse that insists we are laughing at the people laughing at the dwarf falling out of a car, which merely gives us permission to laugh at the dwarf falling out of the car. I am losing patience with this argument, which feels more like lazy cruelty than satire. If Gervais were really concerned with the abuse the disabled suffer, there are many things he could do. Instead, he feeds bigots their lines.”
I am done with Ricky Gervais like you would not believe.
I hadn’t given up on Ricky Gervais, but this clip from his new show Derek makes me a little uneasy. It’d be way to easy to take this show in such a wrong direction where your just making fun of the disabled person because their disabled.
