Writing about travel and the Spinx Effect the other night put Karl Pilkington back in my head. And now I can't get him out.
Every now and then you watch a show on television that stays with you. LOML and I nearly choked laughing at An Idiot Abroad on SBS a little while back. For the sake of the children, it got to the point where, like plane travel, we considered whether it might be best if we watched the show separately.
We got sucked into what was really a very long, very involved, rather absurd practical joke disguised as a travel show. Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant sent their morose, 'everyman' mate, Karl Pilkington, well out of his comfort zone and around the Seven Wonders of the World. He's the sort of guy who you could imagine living his whole life within a 2 block radius of where he grew up. It's nice there, why would you go any further?
Clearly, he was never meant to travel. He is obviously intelligent, but he's funny because he is so utterly unadabtable to the situations he finds himself in. He's a lot like the Blues Point Tower on Sydney Harbour, actually.
I think his honesty is what makes him such an unlikely star. We're not used to seeing someone on the tele who calls a spade a spade. Doesn't want to talk it into being a shovel. Doesn't want to dress it up with a bow. It's just a spade - what's wrong with that? He is keenly observant and responds to the world without any trace of irony or filter. The world comes to Karl, he doesn't go to the world. Of the Great Wall of China he said "not that great, to be honest – if I named it, it’d be the All right Wall" and "Just goes for miles and miles....but so does the M6." You can find many other classic 'Karls' here. He's such a phenomenon that he even has his own 'Pilkipedia'.
He is indeed an unlikely poet. Karl is basically what would happen if you stripped away every trace of political correctness or cultural understanding in the world and then made the world about five years old. While most of us are adaptable chameleons, Karl is a dugong.
Karl would definitely understand the Sphinx Effect. I think Karl's whole life is probably best described by the Sphinx Effect. This is the man who decided not to walk the last 100 metres to stand at Machu Picchu because "the view is better from here". He is both refreshing and depressing in equal parts. Refreshing because it's just so grand to see someone so blatantly honest and unbound by societal convention (and he's funny, whether intentional or not). Depressing because, well, he really, really is.
Have you met Karl?
Do you find him oddly refreshing?
Do you know anyone like Karl? Can I meet them?
[Image can be found here]