The Ricky Gervais Show

The Ricky Gervais Show is a comedy radio show in the United Kingdom starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington, later adapted into a podcast and a television series. Although named after Gervais, it came to revolve mostly around the life and ideas of Karl Pilkington. The show started in August 2001 on Xfm,^[1] 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. An animated series based on the podcast and adapted for television debuted for HBO in the United States and Channel 4 in the UK in 2010.

It was one of the most successful shows in the early years of the podcast industry and received a "most downloaded podcast" certification from Guinness World Records in 2006.^[2] According to the BBC, by September 2006, the podcasts of the series had been downloaded nearly 18 million times.^[3] As of March 2011^[update], the podcast has been downloaded over 300 million times.^[4] A cult following for the Xfm radio shows and podcasts has ensued in the following years, starting since their original airings and maintaining a strong amount of fans, the most popular forum used to discuss the show being the subreddit "r/rickygervais" on the popular news and media platform Reddit, with roughly 175,000 members as of November 2024.