The setting isn’t London. I suppose it’s Reading. We get Gervais’s love for working-class Brits, but also his frustration with them, watching reality TV in the morning etc.
It’s funny that Twitter discourse can now find its way into appointment TV. (Bosh.)
The cats are human, of course: ‘We’ll all be dead soon.’ ‘Yep.’
The background art is quite beautiful – contemporary UK, warts and all (up to a point). (Incidentally, did you see his Dutch Barn Vodka ‘ad’, which said ‘THE SLOW RETURN TO SANITY IS SENDING SOME PEOPLE ABSOLUTELY MENTAL’?) The garages where Gus’s mum dies look like Scenes from the Passion: Late (2002) by George Shaw.
Gervais is Gus, but he’s Ponce too, with his natural history facts.
Obsessions became entrenched (‘full-blown AIDS’) and idle thoughts residing concerns many years ago. But I’m sticking with my comparison with Martin Amis, of whom someone in the London Review of Books said, he ‘could chuck more or less anything on a piece of paper and it would look good and seem to be interesting, up to a certain point.’ It doesn’t sound like a compliment, but the thing is you have to be that writer in the first place for someone to pay you such a backhander.
The first series of The Ricky Gervais Show on XFM – peak radio – ended with ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by the Smiths, so it’s nice to hear it here, in Episode 4 – problematic Gervais and he who must not be named on 6 Music, even though he invented them, problematic Morrissey, who will bury his undertakers. And it’s a clever use of the song: ‘And if a double-decker bus crashes into us’ etc. Gus and Lara get run over by the bus, and the ten-ton truck, but they’re OK because they’re cats with nine lives.
Even Gervais is acknowledging the passing into history of New Atheism by having his feline avatar pray.
The ending is surely inspired by ‘Karl’s Mam’s Dog Story’, from S02E43 of XFM! ‘The [story] that was really good was about a kid who gets a dog, but it’s quite an old dog, and he’s playing with the dog, and that, but it starts to get a bit old – about fifteen, or whatever – and he goes, “Oh, it’s rubbish, this dog […] I’m sick of it.” […] So she [his mam] goes, “Oh, all right, then. We’ll get you another one.”’
This is an addendum to my essay arguing that Gervais is a modern-day Dickens.