Fan-led preservation practices: remastering The Ricky Gervais Show

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
John Gilmore

I’m part of a small but enduring community of online weirdos centred around The Ricky Gervais Show, a comedy programme hosted by Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and producer Karl Pilkington on and off between 2001 and 2010.¹ The show is now mostly forgotten, but it was, for a time, the number one podcast in the world, the first podcast adapted to television, and one of podcasting’s first true global successes.

Before it was a podcast The Ricky Gervais Show was a lightweight frothy entertainment show heard from 11am–1pm every Saturday on tinpot London radio station Xfm, and this radio incarnation is the show’s purest form. Gervais had not yet became the world’s most tiresome boomer comic writing 80 variations of the same “I identify as a chimpanzee” joke, and he played against his own working class origins to skewer British culture in a way that was edgy and irreverent for the time.² The comic sensibility and timing he shared with the quick-witted Merchant, which would infuse all their later collaborative projects, is present from the very beginning. You can hear them improvise and develop embryonic versions of material they would later use in The Office‘s second series, Extras, and their stand-up comedy sets.

The real joy of the show, though, lies in hearing Gervais and Merchant discover in real time the true comedic genius occupying the third chair. Pilkington was originally brought on as an off-mic producer running the desk, but in short order Gervais and Merchant began integrating him into the show, and they discovered he possessed a bottomless well of bizarre stories of his Manchester upbringing and off-kiler views on the world. (Some highlights: the horse in the house; Auntie Nora’s ripped tennis ball; “man-moths”.)

I find it fascinating that The Ricky Gervais Show still maintains a fairly large and active global fandom, full of people who listen to, discuss, and quote episodes of the show now 20+ years after they were first broadcast. Fans also actively contribute to the fandom and the maintenance of the community via unpaid labour, such as painstakingly transcribing Gervais’s infamously punch-drunk gibberish and writing fan fiction. But by far the most lasting and impactful work of the Ricky Gervais Show fandom has been in preserving and disseminating the show itself. That it still exists in listenable form today is almost entirely thanks to their efforts.

“Xfm 104.9. Five past one, of a Saturday…”

As a radio show broadcast live-to-air in the early 2000s, The Ricky Gervais Show was originally only able to be heard by those in range of Xfm’s London broadcast area. This, of course, is one of the defining features and key weaknesses of broadcast radio.³ Fortunately, fans of the show — and two in particular, Richard Hare and Ian Pile — recorded many of the show’s original broadcasts to cassette tape, and took it upon themselves to digitise them, edit out songs and ads, and upload the files online to share with the community. At the time the RSK community (as it is sometimes called) gathered primarily at Pilkipedia.co.uk, a wiki and forum founded just as the podcast was beginning in 2006. (The “Pilkipedia” name is apt: it is with some irony that the show kept the name The Ricky Gervais Show, as it very quickly became clear that Pilkington was the real draw.)

The extant corpus of The Ricky Gervais Show is a haphazard collection of mp3s combining the recordings of Hare and Pile with the so-called “Jezoc tapes“, and a few other bits and bobs, for a total of about 100 episodes.⁴ The oldest broadcast captured in the collection is from November 10, 2001, but the show actually began several months earlier. How much earlier nobody knows, as Gervais and Merchant’s return to Xfm was greeted with such resounding indifference that not a single trade publication reported on it. No recordings of earlier episodes have ever surfaced, so the collection is still very much incomplete.

These files have been passed around successive file-sharing platforms as they have come and gone over the decades — first on LimeWire and Soulseek, then in MediaFire archives, and now on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites. In terms of audio quality the files have always been rough listening, reflective of the cirumstances in which they were recorded: straight off the radio onto consumer-grade cassette tape, hurriedly edited by amateurs and enthusiasts, and highly compressed for online distribution. In some files the audio is so hot as to be borderline unlistenable, while in others Pilkington’s voice is practically inaudible. Additionally, over the years various anonymous people have for unknown reasons cut the files down from their original form, losing several minutes of audio from some copies of the collection. As a result, there is no definitive version of the files that do exist.

Even acknowledging its inferior audio quality, this is a remarkable and historically significant collection of audio recordings. And if it weren’t for the efforts of the Pilkipedia community to record, preserve, and distribute what was originally intended only as a local radio broadcast, this huge collection of comedy would have been lost to the ether.

Xfm, for their part, have shown little interest in making the show available to modern audiences, which is a surprise considering how rare it is for a show to maintain a fanbase so long after the demise of the show itself. The station made a cursory attempt to capitalise on their connection to RSK once the podcast version of the show became an international success, but their offerings were rather paltry and did not add anything to what was already available in the community. Acting on persistent rumours that the show’s complete Xfm run had been preserved on DAT and placed in long-term storage, fans have reached out to station management over the years only to be continuously rebuffed. For nearly two decades now, the only way to listen to the original Ricky Gervais Show has been to find and download the mp3s held by the RSK community.

Recent developments

In the 2010s, Pilkipedia was one of countless forums that fell victim to the great migration of fan communities to Facebook and other giant social media websites. Newer users preferred congregating in Facebook groups, which offered the convenience of access via a website they already visited regularly, and the forum was overrun by spam and eventually abandoned.

Many scholars dislike Facebook’s colonisation of fandom, as its walled-garden approach means that groups are invisible to search engines and the Wayback Machine, posing significant challenges to the preservation and analysis of communication in fan communities. It’s not great for the communities themselves, either: since fan groups cannot easily be discovered by newcomers, communities become spread across several competing groups and never coalesces into a single mass. There was a period of about five years where the RSK community was without a single point of congregation, so the community itself became fractured.

In recent years there has been another great migration of fan communities, this time to Discord and similar real-time chat platforms. This is where most of the activity in the RSK community now takes place. Discord retains and exacerbates many of Facebook’s most restrictive attributes — like its walled-garden design — and introduces several of its own; the ephemeral nature of real-time text and voice chat makes it exceedingly difficult to study and write about communities on Discord. But, at least for the time being, it has led to a significant revivification of the RSK community’s preservation efforts.

As I write this, a user going by the name of Rhondson is close to finishing a complete audio remaster of the Xfm Ricky Gervais Show. He has consolidated all known surviving recordings of the show from various sources, saved the versions that avoided being subjected to unexplained edits, picked the best sounding version, and is normalising and levelling the audio to be consistent across the series. He has posted draft versions of the files as he’s gone along, and the improvement is astounding.

Meanwhile, fans have been scouring the Wayback Machine and archives of newspapers and the Radio Times to piece together the show’s broadcast history, which is mostly lost to time. The date of the first Xfm broadcast has been triangulated as occurring in either August or September of 2001, with September 1, 2001 being the current front-runner.⁵ This is the sort of in-depth archival research you expect to see when a print of a long-lost film is discovered in an attic or at a flea market somwhere. But this work is not being done in a lab by white-coated boffins with information science degrees, it’s being done on Discord by untrained but passionate volunteers amid a torrent of memes about Stephen Merchant’s eyes. This work would of course be so much easier if anyone involved at Xfm in the early 2000s had written a book or even a social media post about their experiences. But absent that, it’s up to the fans to put research, collect, and maintain this information themselves.

The state of the community’s knowledge of 2001. (Image by Mark177)

Fan-led preservation work of this kind is incredibly important, but still widely underestimated. It remains one of the best and most reliable ways our cultural history is preserved when rights holders and capitalists fail, which is often.

We have long been promised a utopian digital future where the world’s content would be at our fingertips, unlimited and on-demand. Instead, we have fractured silos of content due to byzentine rights agreements, completed films being shelved or removed from streaming services for financial reasons, and content that depicts problematic characters being removed or edited without warning (even if those problematic characters are satirical).

Even physical media releases are not immune to this, as fans of MTV’s The State, Beavis & Butthead and Daria are well aware. Home video versions of these popular shows had almost all of their original music removed and replaced with generic approximations for licensing reasons, completely butchering what fans enjoyed about the show in the first place. (This also happened to Ed, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Wonder Years, among many other shows.) Beavis & Butthead is a particularly interesting case in this respect, as the show in its original form largely consisted of sequences in which Mr. Beavis and Mr. Butthead watched and snarkily commented on music videos then airing on MTV. Home video releases cut almost all of these music video sequences out of the show, leaving only the comparatively less interesting narrative storylines intact. For later generations of viewers, Beavis & Butthead was a narrative cartoon with very short episodes, not the Beavis & Butthead fans loved. The fan-created “King Turd Edition” of Beavis & Butthead collects these music video sequences from the best available source — which, unfortunately, is often a VHS recording of the television broadcast — and restores them to their rightful place in the show.⁶

With no financial incentive, Xfm/Radio X/Global Radio have no reason to make The Ricky Gervais Show available to the public. It is effectively orphaned media, and is in real danger of being lost forever once the rumoured DAT backups of the show held in long-term storage deteriorate, if they even exist to begin with. Whatever you think of Ricky Gervais’s embarrassing recent slide into reactionary politics, this would be a genuine loss for comedy history.

Piracy is necessary for the continued survival of our culture

It goes without saying, of course, that RSK fans preserving the show is illegal, as the community has no right to distribute these copyright works on the internet. But this is a case — one of many — where copyright law and the so-called free market have failed. Copyright laws were originally written to preserve the artist’s ability to control the distribution and monetisation of their own work. Copyright was supposed to encourage the spread of culture and art by ensuring any profit generated by an artwork went to the artist whose labour produced it. The usual argument in favour of copyright is that this situation benefits not just artists but also the public at large, as copyright holders are encouraged to increase the availability and access to their works. But of course this is not the world we live in. We live in a neoliberal hellscape in which gargantuan media conglomerates slurp up intellectual property and sit on it, with no intention of ever letting it see the light of day, like dragons hoarding piles of gold coins.

What are we to do in such a situation, when a rights holder has made clear their intention not to exploit their exclusive right to capitalise a copyright work? There are countless historically significant radio programmes, television shows, and other media that simply cannot be enjoyed by modern audiences, because they represent too small a potential profit for the copyright holder to bother. But, surely, the preservation of our cultural history cannot, and must not, depend on its profitability.⁷ Should there be a carve-out in copyright law to allow the preservation and distribution of quasi-orphaned works such as these? Of course, I don’t expect anyone will ever be prosecuted for downloading episodes of The Ricky Gervais Show, or making them available on a new torrent tracker. But they could be, and that is a problem. There must be more we can do at a policy level to encourage the preservation and distribution of important works of our cultural history.

For now, in cases where rights holders are unwilling to do so, fan communities must preserve the objects of their fandom or no one else will.

Footnotes

1
There was an earlier incarnation of The Ricky Gervais Show that went to air on Xfm in 1998, featuring Gervais and Merchant but no Pilkington. There is debate in the fandom about where this series sits in the show’s canon, leading to its unofficial designation as “Series 0”.
2
This was a period in which the term “edgy” wasn’t wasn’t necessarily code for racist, though The Ricky Gervais Show does occasionally draw on lazy cultural and ethnic stereotypes and racist accents.
3
“Ephemerality has been a major problem across radio’s more than a century long history: as a live broadcast medium, much radio programming was never recorded.” Andrew J. Bottomley, “Podcast Archeology: Researching Proto-Podcasts and Early Born-Digital Audio Formats” in J.W. Morris & E. Hoyt (eds), Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 29–50.
4
In December 2008 a Pilkipedia user posting under the name Jezoc uploaded audio from cassette tapes recorded during The Ricky Gervais Show‘s original run in 1998.
5
As a scholar interested in the intersection of media and culture, I am desperate to get my hands on the broadcast from September 15, 2001.
6
Similarly, the Daria Restoration Project takes video from the series’ official DVD and re-inserts popular songs that had been cut out and replaced, sourced either from the original broadcast version or (if there was no dialogue layered on top) by manually inserting the song.
7
I was so pleased to read Senses of Cinema‘s excellent recent issue on cinema and piracy, which dealt with the issue with considerable nuance.