The Corridor (a cricket blog)

This has nothing to do with cricket. England are rubbish. Next.

If there’s one person in comedy or film that I’d really like to meet, it’s Ricky Gervais. I’ve followed his career from the 11 o’clock Show days, and always enjoyed that he linked much of his comedy back to his roots in Reading, near where I was brought up and where I went to school. In fact, he has a film coming out next year, Cemetery Junction, a road in Reading that anyone of teenage years will know as a matter of course. It’s part of yoof’s vocab.

The Office was set in Slough for similar reasons. It’s a shit dump on the whole, but those who live and work there, as I did, can’t help but grow a strange attachment to it. It’s a generalisation I know, but the friends I made in Slough were almost overwhelmingly hilarious, tough, in-your-face characters. They knew Slough was a hole, but very few aspired to move away from it. The fact London was a short 30-minute journey away wasn’t so much tempting, as irrelevant. That always surprised and impressed me, as I boarded the train every Tuesday to get my London fix.

Gervais strikes me as a bit like some of my Slough friends, which either explains or contradicts the frankly amazing fact that he has managed to court so many Hollywood celebrities. In Extras – if you haven’t seen it, do so immediately; it’s better than The Office – he got Ben Stiller and Kate Winslet on board, and not just to swell their egos, but to encourage them to make fools of themselves. Winslet’s performance is pure brilliance: dressed as a nun, pretending to have phone sex. Watch it now.

And Gervais has done it again. His latest film, The Invention Of Lying, has a cast of dozens of leading lights, including Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Patrick Stewart, Jeffrey Tambor, Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Rob Lowe, Louis C.K., and John Hodgman.

Not bad for a fat bloke from Reading.