Educating Karl

Educating Karl was a Series 1 feature where Ricky would set Karl a different task each week, motivated by Karl's poor GCSE performance. He was presented with his results on 02 March 2002, however Ricky instantly felt bad for Karl who was disappointed with them. This gave Ricky the idea of the feature(he also offered to pay for Karl to take history again, but Karl refused).

Feature Details

He would have to go home after the radio show and read up on someone famous. The following week on the show Karl would have to recount to Ricky and Steve what he had learnt about the person. Examples include Hitler (much discussion was focused on the fact he only had one bollock), Rasputin (Karl did not see why he deserved a book as he reminded him of his tank-stealing, womanising brother Mark) and Che Guevara (Shake Guitara). The last in the series was Winston Churchill, Karl's favourite of the historical figures. Karl noticed a connection between all these historical figures, in that they all had unusual or troubled childhoods. The feature, in a way, helped Ricky achieve his goal of consoling Karl about his results, as most(but not all) weeks, Karl did come in with a few good or believable facts, unlike other features such as Educating Ricky where Ricky and Steve would be angered by Karl's lack of detail.

After Gervais had run out of the autobiographical series he presented Karl with the Oxford book of Quotations which Karl turned down off-air, instead opting to purchase a quote book featuring quotes presented by popular children's television characters Eric and Ernie of Sesame Street. The following week Karl attempted to prove that anybody could construct a quote by issuing a challenge where he inserted one of his own quotes next to two correct ones, challenging Ricky and Steve to identify the Pilkington quote.

Karl's quote was as follows: "Catfood (cue raucous laughter from Gervais and Merchant), it stinks a bit but if you don't put up with it then the little kitten will die." Karl later explained that it referred to tolerating something out of love, as he did when taking Suzanne shopping. Ricky and Steve unsurprisingly guessed correctly.