An Idiot Abroad : the travel diaries of Karl Pilkington

with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant

Are the Seven Wonders really as wondrous as everybody says? Karl Pilkington doesn’t think so, but then Karl is no Michael Palin. He hates travelling and prefers throwing sand at crabs or, at a push, eating English food in Spain. In his mind, Pisa is ‘badly built … it’s a hazard’, the Pyramids have ‘a crap design … all the space at the bottom and nowt at the top’ and the Taj Mahal ‘is probably shit at the back’.

Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant are outraged, goading Karl to broaden his mind and visit each of these famous sites for himself. Will a close encounter with Christ the Redeemer in Brazil or a trek along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu be enough to change their friend? For Ricky and Steve it is a genuine social experiment.

The book is a rich, fact-filled and hilarious travelogue, written with all of Karl’s unusual observational skill and counter-intuitive logic that the millions of Ricky Gervais podcast fans have learnt to love.