an idiot abroad 4 — i looked into it, in the sauna

the sauna at the gym is, technically, the gym. you walk in, you sit down, you sweat, you leave. nothing was lifted. that is season four of an idiot abroad: nothing was lifted, and yet you tell yourself you participated. beach vacations are punishment. saunas are, depending on the day, parole.

it is a thursday. 1:42pm. the boss (the_boss, in the cast notes i keep) is in another meeting on the third floor — annual planning, supposedly, though no one i trust has confirmed this — which gives me the rest of the lunch hour and a tab i have been meaning to investigate. the tab in question is a search bar that asked me, last night at the gym, whether an idiot abroad 4 was a real thing.

the gym, to be specific on this point only, was the sauna. i did not lift. i did not run. i sat in a small wood room and i looked at my phone, which the sauna people would prefer i not do, and which my karl pilkington watching habits have made a kind of weekly tradition. let the men around me deadlift. i was, in my own way, working.

writing this from my desk. the boss is in another meeting on the third floor. i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the lunch hour and possibly the afternoon if the meeting balloons, which meetings do.

1. what an idiot abroad 4 refers to (or doesn’t)

here is the part where i tell you, plainly, what an idiot abroad 4 is. it is a search query. it is a query typed by people who finished season three and assumed, the way you assume the elevator will arrive eventually, that there was more. there was not more. ricky gervais and stephen merchant sent karl to a lot of countries. then they stopped. the show on imdb lists three seasons and the short way round. that is it. that is the entire arrangement.

so a fourth season is a fan theory at best, a typo at worst, and a kind of wishful thinking on a wednesday night in the middle. people google it the way they google “is there a sequel to” anything they liked once. the algorithm rewards the wishfulness with results. the results, in this case, are reruns and forums and one man named idiot writing about it on the lunch hour because the boss is upstairs.

i am not karl. let me say that now. i would not survive a week of being karl. karl was sent to china, to mexico, to brazil, to peru. karl complained. karl ate things he did not want to eat. karl, in a hotel he did not pick, said something about a wall and i, in the kitchen, laughed for nine straight minutes. dave laughed for nine straight minutes once, at a different thing, and i still keep his record on file mentally. karl’s record is longer.

2. the sauna theory, a complete defense

here is what i think a fourth season would look like, if anyone asked me, which they have not.

i pitched this, briefly, to a coworker — call him stefan, because every office has a stefan, and a coworker who corrected my pronunciation of chianti at the wine night last month qualifies. stefan said “but that’s not really the show.” stefan also said the wine had notes of leather and forest floor. i no longer take stefan’s notes on what is and is not the show.

3. why beach vacations are punishment, and saunas are not

now i need to make a small distinction, because someone always asks. the holler, first, in case you were skimming.

BEACH VACATIONS ARE PUNISHMENT WITH SAND.

i stand by this. i submit it for the log of my own writing, which is, as far as i know, the only log being kept. “beach vacations are punishment” with sand in the sandwich, sand in the bag, sand in the car three weeks later when you sell the car. the sun, on a beach, is doing a job no one asked it to do. the water is salt. the umbrella costs more than the lunch. and you go home with a sunburn and a story you have to make sound fun at the office.

the sauna, by contrast, is parole. the sauna is hot on purpose. the sauna does not pretend to be a vacation. you sit, you sweat, you leave. there is a clock. there is a small wood door. there is a stranger two benches over who breathes like a kettle, and you are united, briefly, in the suffering of paying for it. and then it ends and you go to your car and you drive home and you eat a microwave meal — the seventh microwave, by the way, is doing fine, thank you for not asking. season four of an idiot abroad would be saunas. season four would be the smallest possible show. that is why it would be perfect, and that is why it does not exist.

4. examples of fourth things that never were

i have, in approximately twelve minutes of focused thought between emails, assembled a small list of fourth things that people google despite the fact that they are not real. consider it research. consider it the kind of thing a leading expert provides at no charge, between meetings he was not invited to.

one. the fourth indiana jones movie. there are five. people google a fourth because four was the one with the fridge, and the brain repressed it. two. the fourth season of fawlty towers. there are two seasons of fawlty towers. two. that is it. people google a fourth because the show was so good they assumed there was more, and there is not more, because basil faulty is dead and reality is a kind of cruelty. three. the fourth volume of any trilogy, ever. trilogy means three. people google it anyway. four. the fourth yoga mat. people do not google this, but i think about it, because the third yoga mat is still under my couch from 2023, doing whatever it is doing, and i will not buy a fourth, probably.

five. the fourth idiot abroad. which is the post.

this is the family of fourths. they are imagined. they are demanded. they do not exist. and yet the search box accepts them all and offers, in return, a long list of pages explaining why. one of those pages is now this one. you’re welcome.

5. verdict, the tie i own steamed

here is the verdict, which is a word i use because investigation implies one. the investigation is over. the verdict is small.

i went to the gym. i went to the sauna at the gym, technically, which is the gym in the same way that this post is journalism. i wore the tie i own — i was wearing it because the morning meeting required it and i forgot to take it off — and the tie steamed in the wood room like a small flag of surrender. it has a wrinkle now in the middle that no iron will fix, because “ironing is a class war i refuse to fight”, and the tie will be retired to the drawer with the unopened envelopes from the bank, where useful things go to think about what they did.

the show, meanwhile. an idiot abroad has three seasons and a special. that is the canon. there is no fourth. the people who google the fourth are not wrong to want it. they are wrong only about the arithmetic. and the comparison i would draw, before the boss comes back and i have to look like a man processing q3 numbers — annual planning, sorry, that is the new euphemism — is to a famous chart about confidence and competence. the chart has a peak. the peak is called mount stupid. the chart is real and the dunning effect it documents is also real, in the sense that things printed on charts have a way of becoming real. people who think there is a season four are at the foot of mount stupid, looking up. the people who say “there is no season four” with a small superior smile are halfway up the other side. i, in the middle, in the sauna, am the chart’s flat valley. nothing was lifted. nothing was learned. and yet here is a post.

the tie i own steamed, briefly, like a small flag of surrender. i don’t think there is a fourth season of anything. i think there are three seasons and the small wood room and a man two benches over who breathes like a kettle, and that is, in the right light, enough.

the boss came back from “annual planning” looking like she had not been planning anything annual. i minimized this. she walked past the desk. she said nothing. that is, depending on the day, a good sign.