Don't know if you managed to see the first episode of the new Ricky Gervais creation "An Idiot Abroad".
The basic premise is that Ricky and his writing partner, Steven Merchant, send their friend Karl Pilkington (the idiot) to visit the seven wonders of the world.
The first episode followed Karl on a trip to China to visit the first wonder.
We know it as the Great Wall of China.
Karl thought that the OK Wall of China would be a more apt description.
In his words, "It's very long, but so is the M6".
Ricky's objective was to expose Karl's 'Little Englander' mentality.
To challenge his narrow world view, and address his distrust of anything foreign.
That made up the fair share of the show's running time.
But, to his credit, Karl was also keen to challenge accepted wisdom.
He kept asking 'why'?
"Why should we do it like this, just because that's the way it's always been done?"
In a country like China, with an almost unrivalled sense of history and heritage, that kind of questioning is akin to heresy.
But I think we should all dare to ask those difficult questions.
Not be afraid to upset the applecart.
Be the idiot in the room.
Karl's hunger for understanding painted him in a different light to the one Ricky had originally intended.
Or did it?
This week's tagcloud
What's on my mind
About Me
- Kevin Jackson
- The glasses are important, since I’m almost totally blind in one eye. This means I have zero depth perception. Instead of making snap judgements, I have to think around a subject and look again to try and gain a sense of perspective. And that’s what I’m doing here - taking a different view of the trends and patterns around us to see if they’re as close as they seem, or further away than we thought. There’s not a discipline within the communications mix that I haven’t spent time in – what connects them though, is my passion for igniting advocacy and word-of-mouth. I’ve also worked on multi-platform campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, we are all on first-name terms. Ultimately, whether it’s a consumer, business or internal audience, no one is exempt from my belief in engaging experiential communications. Over the last four years ago, I’ve been busy developing relationships across the telecoms, technology, FMCG, retail and energy sectors, to name a few.
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