It’s been on the cards for a while now. First it was The Beatles, then we had Monty Python and more recently Adam and Joe and JLS (the latter of which being the most inconsequential of them all), but now the Gervais, Marchant, Pilkington axis of mean spirited travel comedy has come to an end as Karl Pilkington goes solo in Sky 1 HD’s The Moaning of Life.
Much in the same way that Robbie Williams and Ronan Keating did before him, Karl has broken away from his weaker brethren to forge his own path in the world. This time around, instead of being sent to places he doesn’t particularly fancy going to by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to do things he doesn’t really want to do, he’ll be calling the shots, choosing the travel itinerary and picking out fun things to do.
The new show will focus on the fact that Karl is now 40, which means he’s officially middle aged and needs his very own brand of journey of self discovery to welcome in his naughty forties. With fresh eyes he’s about to go back out in the world to reassess his standpoint on things and discover how different cultures deal with the big turning points in life.
If that’s not enough of the deep and meaningful from the person that Ricky Gervais refers to as a “little round headed buffoon”, he’s also setting out to start planning for his own future time left on the planet. Having been on the planet for four decades now he’s apparently clueless in terms of what it’s all about, so hopefully by the end of it he will have solved the meaning of life (42).
Alternatively, he will have spent another series worth of episodes travelling around the world moaning. Either way, the casual viewer will probably be all the wiser for it. There’s no news on where he’ll be heading as of yet, but if at least one of either Bognor, Gibraltar, the Star Wars sets in the Tunisian Sahara Desert, The Lord of the Rings locations in New Zealand or Patagonia aren’t in the mix we’ll eat something highly inedible and preposterous.
Karl Pilkington’s The Moaning of Life will be coming to Sky 1 HD in Autumn 2013 following on from the success of An Idiot Abroad Series 3 The Short Way Round, in which Karl had buddy Warwick Davies along for the Gervais and Merchant inspired twisted ride following Marco Polo’s journey from Italy to China. It’s hard to say how much his time on An Idiot Abroad contributed to his new found introspection and search for the meaning of life, but surely all that hardship has got to have jostled a few grey cells.
