Ricky Gervais Life’s Too Short

Ricky Gervais Life’s Too Short, Let’s get to the good stuff first. The funniest part of Sunday’s premiere of Life’s Too Short on HBO occurred at the end when Liam Neeson (playing himself) forced comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (also the show’s creators, writers, and directors) to teach him how to do standup. If seeing an imposing Irish actor who’s known for heavy dramas and dark actioners try his hand at improv by saying “I’ve got full-blown AIDS” sounds risible to you, then you were in for a super treat. But if you’re a diehard Ricky and Steve fan because of The Office and Extras, or even just a TV buff who’s watched television comedy flourish over the past decade mostly thanks to them, then you might have felt that they were feeding you stale cake.

Short follows a fictional version of real-life 3′ 6″ actor Warwick Davis (also playing himself) as he hustles to make a buck in the entertainment biz, repay his massive tax bill, and put the squelch on his divorce. He refers to himself as “the U.K’s go-to-dwarf” because he’s appeared in both the Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises, yet that work has obviously dried up since. Warwick also sidelines as a talent agent who manages little people — but he treats them horribly, claims they have very little acting ability, and lazily only finds jobs for them in obvious projects like Snow White.

Warwick, in Short, is a bit of a d—. Yet, he still considers himself both employable, bankable, and one hell of a guy. “I’m a bit like Martin Luther King because I too have a dream that one day dwarves will be treated equally,” he claimed in the debut. “Sure, the dwarf wasn’t taken from his homeland, enslaved, whipped and forced to change his name but I’ve never seen a black man fired from a cannon.” He also thinks he’s a catch, even if he hasn’t “dipped his wick” in forever. (He does have a nice smile, if only there wasn’t so much rubbish coming out of his mouth.)

In the debut, we watched Warwick fall out of his expensive SUV, go unrecognized on the street, disparage his perfectly attractive wife (he’d walked out on her looking for a “younger, taller model”), and repeatedly visit Ricky and Steve (whom he’d worked for in Extras) uninvited, despite their attempt to keep him out of the building by raising the doorbell and intercom beyond his reach. These were the show’s better parts, especially when British actor Sean Williamson appeared as himself working for Ricky and Steve as an errand boy because he hasn’t found work since Extras, in which he played himself working as an errand boy because he hadn’t found work since EastEnders.

But the coup d’état came when Neeson entered Ricky and Steve’s office and so deliciously deadpanned a story about Steven Spielberg casting him as Oscar Schindler because he liked to make lists. When Neeson wanted help with “improvisational comedy, ” Warwick suggested he and Ricky pretend to be a hypochondriac and a doctor, which gave birth to the sequence mentioned above. And it really was quite funny — if utterly tasteless — but it certainly wasn’t original.

Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais, In the end, it was Kim Kardashian and Eddie Murphy who came in ahead of the favourites Russell Brand and Katie Perry for those betting on who would be picked on at Sunday night’s Golden Globes ceremony in Los Angeles. No, they may not have won any awards, but they were the first celebrities in the firing line of the “controversial” host Ricky Gervais’s “hotly-anticipated” opening monologue.

Despite the absurd fallout from the ribbing last year of Hollywood glitterati – in particular of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie for their box office failure The Tourist – which saw the British comic treated as if he’d just taken a machinegun to the entire Beverly Hilton Hotel ballroom, he was invited back again in a remarkable act of masochism (read: shameless PR ploy to attract attention to awards considered largely meaningless in film industry).”The Golden Globes are to the Oscars like Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton. A bit louder. A bit trashier. A bit drunker. And more easily bought,” was Gervais’s first celebrity swipe, before questioning the importance of the Academy Awards after Eddie Murphy had turned down the hosting job. “When the man who says ‘yes’ to Norbit says ‘no’ to you ”

But this time it seemed as if the disobedient dog had been muzzled, and the organising network NBC’s bark about him being “the host they can’t control” was considerably worse than Gervais’s actual bite on the night. Kardashian and Murphy were easy (and absent) targets, but he appeared too timid actually to go after the A-listers in the room. He barely bothered Madonna, who was in the audience (and won a Best Original Song gong for her appearance). He steered clear of Jolie, whose hair was tied back so tight her nose looked in danger of being pulled up to her forehead. He was positively cooing over George Clooney. Instead, the “meanest” host delivered a somewhat lacklustre performance, littered with the self-congratulatory smugness that has become standard in his more recent television output. “Tonight you get Britain’s biggest comedian, hosting the world’s second biggest awards show on America’s third biggest network. Actually fourth,” was an opening gag that had clearly been OK’d with NBC first.

But hosting disappointments aside, the evening proved a success for one Harvey Weinstein and the black-and-white romance The Artist. The Weinstein Company led the pack of studios with six wins, with Harvey undoubtedly the most thanked person on stage. “The Punisher”, “the Boss” and, even, “God” were the numerous titles bestowed on the veteran executive by award winners eager to please their master.