BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Extras returns to sour actor's dream
By Stephen Robb - Entertainment reporter, BBC News website
September 4, 2006

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are back with a second series of the BBC Two comedy Extras.

While Gervais and Merchant claim to have enjoyed total creative freedom making hit sitcoms The Office and Extras, they afford nothing like the same luxury to Gervais's character Andy Millman in the second series of Extras.

The former "background artiste" should be overjoyed to be filming his own sitcom, but is horrified that producers' interference has turned it into a comedy that Hi-De-Hi!'s Paul Shane rejects for being too broad.

Forced to wear "funny" glasses and curly wig for his character, Andy is dismayed to observe the first episode's recording being enjoyed by audience members in It's Chico Time! T-shirts.

"We wanted it to be like a real sitcom that wasn't our taste," explains Gervais.

"We wanted it to be a good 'bad sitcom'. We worked so hard on it."

Gervais and Merchant approached the sitcom-within-a-sitcom with the same thoroughness as the film and TV scenes in Extras.

They worked out back stories and discussed who would be making them - a process Merchant admits was "very labour intensive".

HORROR

Both are quick to point out that they have not shared Andy Millman's experience of seeing his artistic vision compromised.

However Gervais admits it is surprising the BBC were so trusting of the relative newcomers who made The Office.

"It's certainly not based on our experience - we didn't have any interference," says Gervais.

"They really let us auteur it."

Merchant adds: "This is the horror version of what could have happened to us."

The first series of Extras managed to overcome the massive level of expectation that followed the phenomenal success of The Office.

The BBC Two series averaged 3.9 million viewers an episode and won the Rose d'Or international award for best sitcom.

Gervais's co-star Ashley Jensen, playing fellow extra Maggie Jacobs, won the best sitcom actress Rose d'Or and two British Comedy Awards.

CELEBRITY CAMEOS

After stars including Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Stiller and Kate Winslet lampooned themselves in the first series, the six new episodes will include appearances by Sir Ian McKellen, David Bowie, Chris Martin of Coldplay and Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe.

But Gervais says his performance of the series "comes from a little, fat scouser called Keith Chegwin".

He adds: "It's not like we are just trying to get points for celebrity chums - there has to be something we can deconstruct."

The first episode of the new series sees a vain Orlando Bloom showing off magazine articles that name him the world's sexiest movie star, and incredulous when Maggie reveals she is not attracted to him.

"He did say when we got him the first draft he loved it and said we can go further if we want," says Gervais.

"They either get it or they don't. If they get it, they trust us and we can go anywhere. It's never happened that someone has said, 'I just can't do this.'"

DRAMA

Gervais and Merchant admit they would like to produce "something more dramatic" in the future.

The pair admit to being inspired by US dramas such as The Sopranos, 24 and The Shield.

"All the things we like at the moment are coming out of America," says Gervais.

"They are innovative, audacious and done brilliantly and taking on film."

Currently, though, all their energies are focused on finishing editing Extras.

"We get so exhausted at this stage that we say we are never going to do anything else ever again," concedes Merchant.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Microsoft unhappy at Gervais leak
August 30, 2006

Software giant Microsoft has said it is investigating how and why internal training videos made by The Office star Ricky Gervais surfaced on two websites.

The two light-hearted 20-minute films, called The Office Values and Realising Potential, were commissioned in 2004.

But these "were never intended to be viewed by the public", a corporation spokeswoman told Reuters news agency.

She would not say why Microsoft opposed their appearance on YouTube, from which they have now been removed, and Google.

She also refused to comment when asked if the corporation would attempt to have the videos taken off the latter site.

COMPUTER GEEKS

Gervais plays David Brent, his character from The Office, in the two films.

His co-writer Stephen Merchant acts as a Microsoft employee, and the pair discuss supposed "values" in the workplace, such as using the available facilities to find other jobs and how to balance sex and work.

They also poke fun at computer geeks and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

They were "a light-hearted way of getting our staff to think about the values they attach to working at Microsoft", the spokeswoman said.

The original UK version of The Office ended in 2003.

It has since been adapted for the US, with Steve Carell as the offensive and clueless boss, and for Canada, which will see a French-language edition called Le Job later this year.

On Sunday, the US spin-off won an Emmy award for best comedy series.

Microsoft unhappy with release of 'Office' training video
itnews.com.au
August 28, 2006

Microsoft on Friday was unhappy with the online release of a training video that was made to look like an episode of the popular British comedy "The Office," and featured the show's star and creator Ricky Gervais.

Microsoft in the United Kingdom made the 2004 video as a fun way to instruct people on how not to act at work. The 37-minute video was only for internal use, but somehow got released on the Web.

In the two-part video, Gervais plays David Brent, the bumbling boss in "The Office," in what could easily pass for a lost episode of the BBC series. On the film, he is being interviewed about Stephen Merchant, who also was as actor on the original show.

"The two videos that Ricky and Stephen recorded for us in 2004 were a light-hearted way of getting our staff to think about the values they attach to working at Microsoft and, through the character of David Brent, illustrate what not to do in the workplace," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email. "These videos were produced for internal use and were never intended to be viewed by the public."

Microsoft was trying to determine how the video was released, the spokesperson said.

Canadian The Office pays tribute to Gervais
PR Inside
August 18, 2006

An upcoming French-language Canadian adaptation of The Office will pay tribute to show creator RICKY GERVAIS by using his surname for its lead character.

Funnyman Gervais played David Brent in the BBC original, which was then adapted for the US market starring Steve Carell as petty office manager Michael Scott.

The new Canadian interpretation will feature the character David Gervais, the boss of Papiers Jenning paper merchants in Quebec.

Producer Anne-Marie Losique says, "We are paying homage to the British version."

The Ricky road to fame - TV & Radio - Entertainment
theage.com.au
August 10, 2006

In his first Australian interview since The Office, Ricky Gervais speaks to Shaun Micallef about the new ABC comedy Extras.

RICKY GERVAIS is one of the world's funniest and most successful comedians. I'm keen for him not to think me an idiot. So far, my plan is not working. I've arranged through various intermediaries that he ring me at the studios at Vega FM so I can record the interview professionally. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I'm doing. He's rung three times in the past five minutes and obviously can't hear me when I press various buttons and try to talk to him. On the last call he says "Hullo?" with what sounds like at least a small measure of irritation and then hangs up with what I fear might perhaps have been a large measure of finality.

With mounting panic I press another unlikely combination of buttons and hope like hell he rings again. This is the only Australian interview Gervais is giving about his much-anticipated follow-up series to The Office and I suspect people are going to want to hear more about it than "Hullo?"

Fortunately he does try again, and gets through. Even more fortunate for me, he's perfectly nice about it all, claiming that he too is terrible with machines. In fact he's just left one, an Avid, to talk with me. An Avid is an edit suite and Gervais is in the middle of putting together the second series of Extras. As with the first series, he is the star as well as, with Stephen Merchant, the co-writer and co-director.

But I'm confused - in the first series of Extras, which follows the set-to-set travails of a couple of background actors, Gervais plays Andy, an extra who gave up his job in a bank to become a star and who, to become that star, connives and hustles and eventually writes a sitcom script that sounds remarkably like The Office. By the end of the series Andy looks well on his way to becoming as successful as Ricky Gervais. How does he end up as an extra again in the second series?

"Well (the second series) starts with me on the day that I'm going to record my sitcom for the BBC." says Gervais. "And he fails miserably because everybody interferes, so now he's doing this very broad camp comedy that's been designed by committee and interfered with. It's everything he didn't want it to be - it's on BBC1, it's filmed in front of a live studio audience, it's just banal and watered down and begging for ratings and aimed at, you know, thickos and their kids."

Needless to say it doesn't work and Andy ends up back where he started.

Obviously this wasn't the fate of the real version of The Office, but given that so much of the uncomfortable humour of The Office is based in truth, I wonder whether Gervais had to dodge this type of interference to bring the appalling David Brent to life.

The answer surprises me, as it might anyone who has worked in, or perhaps even just watched, television. "Well, we didn't, because I just went in there and said, 'We're doing it this way or not at all'. And miraculously they went, 'Yeah, all right, whatever'. I think because we were low risk, you know, it was very cheap to make, they put it out in the summer."

This sort of chutzpah has stood Gervais in good stead. Making The Office on his terms and having it be a success enabled him to make Extras exactly the way he wanted to.

Because that success also extended to the United States (he picked up a Golden Globe for The Office and the American version of the show starring Steve Carrell is now in its third season) he has been able to lure stars such as Ben Stiller, Kate Winslet, Samuel L. Jackson and Partick Stewart to act alongside him. And though it is because of David Brent that Gervais gets to do what he wants, Gervais has decided not to play David Brent in Extras.

Mind you, he's almost the only one in the series who isn't. Ben Stiller in particular seems very Brentish in the first episode. "In a way the David Brent character is sort of anyone who is sort of pompous and desperate," explains Gervais. "You know, we inject a little bit of that into all the other players."

There is a pause and then Gervais momentarily turns into David Brent for me: "Wherever there's pomposity mixed with pretension and neediness - there's a little bit of Brent dust."

Gervais' new character, Andy, has a lot more self-awareness than David Brent ever had. He's also better looking, more talented, and actually has a decent sense of humour. Andy makes jokes that are actually funny. They're often nasty jokes about other people that reveal his own shortcomings as a human being, but they're good jokes nonetheless. We're laughing a lot more with Gervais' new character than we ever did with David Brent.

"And that was a conscious decision," says Gervais. "We thought it would be best for me not to be the lead funny man so I moved it away from Brent, you know. So we tried to make it as different as we could without losing our style of comedy."

Gervais is almost the straight man in this series. He's the one who suffers the fools - all close relations of the fool he played previously - and he does so with a mix of eye-rolling, muttering under his breath and outright rudeness.

"But strangely," says Gervais, "you don't laugh as much with Andy as you laugh at David Brent. I still think the heartier laugh is probably from laughing at someone - their delusion, or their misunderstanding or their mistake."

That's not to say Andy doesn't regularly humiliate himself for our amusement. Usually it's in front of a large group of his peers or a big Hollywood star or someone else who can end his career. For an extra who craves the limelight he seems pathologically incapable of doing anything other than embarrassing himself when he becomes the centre of attention. Or perhaps that's why he becomes the centre of attention. Either way, it's funny.

Ditching David Brent for a whole new character was a risky thing for Gervais to do. Any comedian who hits pay-dirt with a comic creation could be forgiven for mining that seam for as long as the audience wants him to. Yet this is not Gervais' way. David Brent was all over after two series and a couple of Christmas specials (and one slightly ill-fitting Simpson's episode). He uses his cachet in Hollywood and his considerable clout back home in Britain to simply do projects that interest him, such as stand-up comedy (Ricky Gervais Live: Animals and Ricky Gervais Live 2: Politics), being the voice of a fat pigeon (Valiant), or a role in a Christopher Guest film (For Your Consideration).

"One of my comedy heroes," says Gervais of Guest. "Spinal Tap. The biggest influence on me, you know. Straightforward influence on The Office."

It proved to be something of a mutual admiration society. "He was a fan of The Office," continues Gervais. "Him and his wife Jamie Lee Curtis gave The Office DVDs as presents to all their friends a few years ago and then he contacted me and we just sort of became friends. So when he said he was writing a part for me it was like I'd won a competition."

Gervais interviews Guest in another of his projects, Ricky Gervais Meets ... It's a five-part series in which Gervais interviews his comedy heroes, who also include Garry Shandling, Larry David, "the Simpsons guys" and John Cleese. A five-part series is unusual. Networks usually want a block of at least six or eight, preferably 10.

"It's five because I can't think of a sixth I want to do. It's as simple as that," says Gervais. "These are five people in the world in comedy who I really, really want to sit down and talk to."

John Cleese has been Gervais' biggest influence, both as a child and once he started performing, but his earliest influence was Laurel and Hardy. It's an influence that is still felt. You can see quite a bit of Oliver Hardy in Gervais' long-suffering Andy of Extras.

"That's exactly right!" enthuses Gervais. "I think of everything in terms of Laurel and Hardy, really. Because, you know, if you look at Tim and Gareth (in The Office), that was Stan and Ollie. And this (Andy in Extras) is much more Ollie than Stan. It's fun to play Stan but it's nice to play Ollie as well now and again."

This seems pretty much the key to Ricky Gervais. He's at the point in his career where he has the freedom to do whatever he wants and he chooses to do things that he thinks will be fun. Usually these are projects that he writes and over which he has greater creative control, but not always. For example, he wrote and starred in a recent episode of The Simpsons. "Now, that wasn't my thing but it's the greatest comedy show on TV and I thought that'd be fun," he says. "And the fun for me was doing it, not particularly the results or whether it upped my profile."

Gervais speaks about his work and his abilities with a refreshing lack of false modesty, but this should not be misinterpreted as a lack of genuine modesty. He told me about having turned down film roles (in Mission Impossible 3 and The Da Vinci Code, for example), plus several others that required him to play the leading man, which he says would be ridiculous.

I ask why. "Because I wouldn't pay $10 to see me in a film," he says. I point out that Peter Sellers played a leading man and he wasn't exactly a leading-man type (and if I'd thought about it some more I could have listed almost every other film comedian star since movies began). Gervais says Sellers did what he was good at and "I know what I'm good at, and what I'm good at is acting in something I've written for me - and then I make sure it's directed how I want it to be directed".

Gervais may have chutzpah and a certainty about where his talents lie but he remains a little gob-smacked at his success. "I've been incredibly lucky. I don't know why it's gone so well. I really don't understand it. I think it's because I've never bluffed. I've always said, 'Do it like that or I'm not interested', I do it graciously but I really can walk away. I don't want to make it at any cost."

Is it because he's not actually hungry for success that he has achieved? "Well, I'm not hungry for fame, and I think that's what sometimes makes people make bad decisions. They just think, 'Well, if I just get on telly and do this then someone will see me and I'll get that', and it just doesn't work. Go straight to what you want to do.

"Why would I do a panel show to get recognised - so they let me write my own sitcom? Just write your own sitcom. If they don't take it, then someone will. Do you know what I mean? I've never understood this."

But Gervais does understand this. Whether he knows it or not, he's describing the plight of his own character Andy in Extras, who is prepared to debase himself to get just a single line in a movie. He'll undergo any humiliation and every compromise imaginable to become a proper actor, even if it means selling his own sitcom down the toilet.

Fortunately for us, this is not something Gervais will have to do any time soon.

Extras starts Wednesday at 9pm on the ABC.

Shaun Micallef is a comic writer and performer and co-host of the Vega 91.5 FM breakfast show.

Burdens of office - TV & Radio - Entertainment
theage.com.au
August 6, 2006

David Brent made him a star, but now Ricky Gervais finds himself with a "walk-on" part in his next series, Extras. Can he ever top The Office? He speaks with Tim Adams.

There is only one thing people ask you when you say you are going to interview Ricky Gervais. They say: I bet he's just like the character, isn't he? I bet he's just like David Brent, because that was him really, wasn't it? Except sort of more so. I mean, no one else could have done The Office. There was no point in changing it for the US - why do that? And I bet he's exactly like that in real life. Must be.

Well, he is and he isn't. When I first met Gervais, he was editing the first episode of his new series, Extras, with co-writer Stephen Merchant. He let me sit down and watch it at his monitor, then, in slightly Brent fashion, couldn't quite decide whether to stay and see it with me - intrusive - or leave. He decided eventually he shouldn't stay - it's not right - dithered, and slipped out.

If he was Brent, I suppose he would have listened outside the door, ready to burst in at crucial moments to spoil his best punchlines. As it happened, he timed his return to the last word of the last line, when the door did fly open and he came back in, asking what I made of it, a bit breathless, and attempted to raise a window blind that crashed down on his head. Then he mock staggered to the centre of the room, holding the cord, his shoulders shaking with giggles, wanting me to laugh with him - Brent to a T.

In interview, later, Gervais says a few times that he knows precisely where Ricky ends and David begins, and I believe him, though he slips into fluent Wernham Hogg throughout our conversation, sometimes just for a word or two, as a little defence mechanism, sometimes for a whole, self-conscious monologue full of nods and winks.

It's a persona that has become part of him, one that he has been refining, you guess, for nearly all of his 45 years, and he can do almost anything he likes with it now. Quite rightly, Gervais hasn't tried to stray too far from his life's work for Extras, in which he plays Andy Millman who, week by week, has a walk-on part in a film in which a guest celebrity stars. Andy is a bit sharper than Brent, and he has less of a blind spot about his own failings.

"I don't want to put a wig on, or do a funny walk," says Gervais. "A funny face," he says, quite gravely, "has to be earned by honesty."

The idea for Extras came along at the last minute. "It was just irresistible," he says. "The scope of it. And my favourite themes are all there: men as boys, self-delusion, vanity, all the biggies."

Some of the comedy in Extras will come from the real actors Gervais' character Andy Millman brushes up against - EastEnders' tough guy Ross Kemp in the first episode, who sends himself up as a thesp with SAS daydreams - but the brilliance and subtlety and embarrassment all come from Gervais. He and Merchant approached the guest actors first and then wrote around them. They had a hit list, and everyone they asked said yes. They wanted people who were not only good actors, but who had lots to deconstruct, such as Ben Stiller, Kate Winslet and Samuel L. Jackson.

I wonder if he has been scared about trying to follow the near perfection of his first creation? He responds with one of his rhetorical monologues, the voices in his head arguing the toss, part playground point-scoring, part Socratic dialogue (he didn't get his philosophy degree for nothing).

"It's not a competition," he says. "And if I lose against The Office I've still won, because I did The Office. Did I beat my own record? No. Who cares? How do you beat The Office? Ratings? Means nothing. Being around for longer? This will be two series, too. Awards? How do you beat six BAFTAs and two Golden Globes? That's mental. That record's safe. But did I have good fun making it? Yeah. Could I have had more fun in the past two years? No ..." and so on.

It's funny listening to him going through all this for himself, but also instructive about his preoccupations. Gervais takes pressure off himself by never letting anything out of his control, and by keeping it a cottage industry. "Ego is a dangerous thing," he says. "The day you wake up and think, 'Of course I could make a film like The Matrix' is also the day you hope a voice somewhere will still be saying, 'Aw, Rick, settle down, what you are good at is very small-scale comedy, stick to that.'

"The mainstream really scares me," he adds, quite quickly. "All my favourite things have started off as intimate. Nothing I like is particularly populist. If something gets big, fine. It's not getting 10 million viewers that's the problem; it's aiming for 10 million viewers. Or rather," and he says this with a sudden vehemence, "it is things that are made to be populist that disappoint and disgust me."

In the past three years, he says, he's been asked to do every show he can think of on TV. His agent does not pass them on any more, because it's always a no. Some of them are good things, but he just doesn't want to pop up on telly. "I think you have a pile of goodwill if you have done something like The Office. And that goodwill is used up not only if you do too many rubbish things, but also just too many things. I have," he says, again refusing to name names, "seen the demise of three comedians I've liked in the past month. I've just watched things and thought: you'll regret that."

Ricky Gervais' father was a French-Canadian stationed in Britain as a soldier during World War II. He met the comedian's mother during a blackout and they settled in Reading, South East England, where he worked as a labourer while his wife was at home with the kids, of whom Ricky was the youngest, by some years. Gervais says he never felt trapped by his background, always knew he would go to university and see the world, though he has no idea why he had this confidence.

"The whole point of my family was taking the mickey out of the one sitting next to you. It was all a wind-up. Everything was fine as long as you never got the hump."

They hardly ever went to London, maybe to the zoo a couple of times, but he chose to go to university there, and has never wanted to leave. He still lives in Bloomsbury, where he was a student, and where he met his partner, Jane Fallon, the producer of TV's This Life and Teachers.

He had a go at making it as a pop star, in his student New Romantic band Seona Dancing.

"It was nothing, really," he says now. "Every bloke in the country with a funny haircut has had a record deal at one time or another, or done a demo. We got signed, released a single and it failed, and that was it. We thought we were Tears for Fears, for a bit. You only start really taking the mickey out of yourself when you hit 30 and become 13 stone. While you are 22 and still have a 30 inch waist you can take yourself as seriously as you like."

After he started eating, he says, he carried on with a full-time job as entertainments officer for the London students union. I wonder if in that time he had a sense of failing, particularly as Jane was already becoming a great success in television.

"Not at all," he says. "When I was working at (the union) I never thought, 'This is shit' or 'The money is bad'. I thought: 'This is quite a good job'. I suppose if all this had not come along, I might now have been a 45-year-old entertainments manager. But that never worried me at the time."

One of the things that Gervais was learning, while working at his office job, was what exactly made him laugh. In a way, The Office was a comedy about bad comedy, using up all the cringe-making unfunniness he had witnessed in his "years and years standing round a student bar hearing bad comedians getting rounds of applause. If a comedian tells me that sometimes politicians are corrupt or dictators are bad, my reaction will be: no shit, never thought of that before. I have no interest in telling people that George W is not all he might be. For that reason my comedy targets tend to be, you know, Gandhi."

He only got around to doing stand-up after the success of The Office, which guaranteed him a sympathetic audience, so it doesn't really count, he thinks.

Instead of a stand-up career, Gervais got a job as head of speech at the alternative radio station Xfm. Steve Merchant was his deputy. Instead of worrying too much about being heads of speech, they mostly worked on little routines.

"I said to Steve, 'You've done media studies, you can do all the boring stuff, all the filing, I'll mess around'. He said: 'OK'. And that was that."

By being the funniest man in the pub, by making loyal friends, like Merchant, Gervais got a show on the radio. From there he was invited to fill a spot vacated by Ali G on Channel 4's otherwise dire The 11 O'Clock Show, playing a bigoted reporter. That in turn led to Meet Ricky Gervais, which lasted a series. At the same time, as part of his BBC producer's training course, Merchant submitted a short film, Seedy Boss, in which the David Brent character first appeared. This was seen by BBC2 chief Jane Root, who sent Merchant and Gervais some money to work on scripts.

At this point Gervais finally decided to find out what he might be capable of. If The Office had a message, he says, it's "for God's sake, don't end up here. Be true to yourself. You don't have to change the world, you don't even have to make a difference, but you can try to make as much difference as you possibly can, so at the end of the day you can say you did the best you could with your life."

Oddly, perhaps, given his childlike joy at the world, he and his partner have decided not to have children. He used to say it was because he couldn't face the sleepless nights and so on, but now he suggests that was just a line: "It was a kind of shorthand. The point I was making was that it was a conscious decision and we have not just forgotten."

He says he is happy with his half a dozen old friends and does not need any new ones (after he accepted his British comedy award he told any potential freeloaders: "You don't know me so don't come up and congratulate me afterwards," and more than half meant it). He seems to fear becoming blase about this life he is in, of losing connections, of getting caught up in Hollywood, say.

"Well, I have not even done a film yet," he says. "I have turned down films for four years. I've only done my own shows, stand-up, the podcasts (for The Guardian) and writing an episode of The Simpsons."

After he won his two Golden Globes, Gervais was called in for an audience with Matt Groening and the 20 Simpsons writers - they all sat there quoting The Office to him. "They asked me if I wanted to be in it? And I said: 'What are the hours?' And then they said: 'Why don't you write an episode?' No one had done that before. So I said yes, of course I would. And then I walked out and panicked a bit."

In among all of his theories about comedy, one that he won't accept is that it must always come out of a kind of darkness, the tears of a clown. I ask him if there have been times in his life when he has felt down; has he ever not wanted to get out of bed in the mornings?

He looks genuinely appalled at the idea. "No. No depression. Oh God, no. I mean, when someone dies I cry. But I would never say: 'What is the point of life?' I know there is no point to life. The point to life is having a laugh, getting on with everyone. Full stop." He thinks about this a bit. "I know how lucky I am. I don't allow stress. Being out of my comfort zone annoys me a bit; you know, if I have to drive a long way or something. Then I go: 'Gervais. Your dad used to hod-carry (on building sites). F---ing grow up.' That always tends to work." He giggles to himself at this admonishment, at the idea of unhappiness, and, as ever, you cannot help but join in.

Extras starts on ABC, Wednesday, August 16.

News: Gervais films cameo in De Niro movie
Chortle.co.uk
July 31, 2006

Gervais films cameo in De Niro movie:

Ricky Gervais is to make a cameo appearance opposite Robert De Niro in a new fantasy film.

He has just recorded a scene as Ferdy The Fence in Stardust, an adventure story based on Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel which is due out in cinemas next years.

The film was shot in Pinewood Studios, where Gervais has just finished working on the second series Extras – days before the fire that gutted the giant James Bond sound stage there at the weekend.

In his latest video podcast, Gervais said: ‘My scene was with Robert De Niro. How could I turn that down? Just think of that, the world’s greatest actor – and Robert De Niro – in the same scene’

Gervais’s character is an unscrupulous ‘occult salesman’ who draws the wrath of a sorceress, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.

A scene showing Ferdy arguing with De Niro’s Captain Shakespeare was screened at the Comic-Con convention in San Diego earlier this month. Director Matthew Vaughn said: ‘This is really raw footage,’ adding he was ‘so proud of the content,’ that he wanted the comic-book fans to see it.

Boosh star Noel Fielding and Little Britain’s David Walliams also appear in the film as members of the ‘chorus of ghosts’, while Green Wing’s Sarah Alexander plays Empusa, another sorceress.

Capital Radio: Click here to find out more about Help A London Child

Help a London Child smashed its £1million target during an on-air fundraising appeal this weekend.

A cast of celebrity supporters joined the special weekend of programming including Ricky Gervais, Elizabeth Hurley Sugagbabes, Rooster, Jade Goody, Claire Sweeney, Aldo Zilli, Martin Freeman and Jake Maskall (aka Danny Moon – Eastenders) plus Capital Radio presenters, Craig Doyle, Margherita Taylor, Johnny Vaughan and Jeremy Kyle.

Some of the auction prizes donated included:

A shopping trip with Elizabeth Hurley (sold for £5,500)
Chelsea Football club once in a lifetime experience (sold for £38,500)
Meet and Greet with Westlife (sold for £4,500) , Sugababes (sold for £610)
Behind the scenes trip to the Extras set with Ricky Gervais and Chris Martin (sold for £1,000)
A lunch date with Tara Palmer Tomkinson and Duncan James (sold for £3,000)
A round of golf with Jeremy Kyle and Johnny Vaughan (sold for £4,500)

One package which generated the most interest was the Breakfast Show itself. Johnny kicked off the bidding on Friday morning and by the end of the show Pimlico Plumbers were the proud owners of the breakfast show after bidding an astounding £36,500 out bidding a local bailiff company after a fierce bidding war.

A spokesperson for Pimlico Plumber commented: "Events like Help a London Child make you realise that there is still a strong community feel to living in the capital and we are delighted to be able to put something back into the capital to support local causes."

This year the Appeal focused on the shocking fact that 1 in 3 children in London live below the poverty line. This means that many children living in London cannot afford a hot daily meal, clothing or haven’t even got a roof over their heads. Capital Radio’s Help a London Child (HALC) improves the lives of these vulnerable children and this year we need your help more than ever before.

Johnny Vaughan said: " I am so proud of our city for raising such a staggering amount of money which will go a long way to improving the lives of children and their families."