an idiot abroad 2022 — i looked into it, and it isnt there

karl never came back in 2022. i checked. i checked twice. i checked a third time using a different search engine because the first two were maybe lying. there was no return. there was no announcement. silence is, technically, also a statement. a quiet one. a loud one too, depending on the room.

anchored, screen on, second coffee. carla took her notebook to the all-hands two flights above me about twenty-five minutes ago. there is, before someone walks past with an opinion, a generous window.

so the search query an idiot abroad 2022 is, on the surface, an innocent thing. a person, presumably at home, presumably with a beverage, presumably wondering whether a beloved british show about a man who did not want to be there had a fourth season nobody told them about. that person types five words into a box and hits enter. and the box, in 2026, hands them back a pile of blog posts that all say, in different fonts, the same thing. no. there was no fourth season. karl pilkington stayed home. the show ended in 2012. that’s the public record.

but i am, on company time, going to argue that the absence is the point.

an idiot abroad 2022: there was no an idiot abroad 2022. the show, hosted by karl pilkington and produced by ricky gervais and stephen merchant, ran for three seasons between 2010 and 2012 and never came back. the silence after 2012 is, depending on who you ask, a mercy, a tragedy, or a philosophical statement. i lean toward statement.

KARL. STAYED. HOME. AND. SO. SHOULD. YOU.

what people mean when they search this in 2022

i think about this a lot, by which i mean i thought about it for forty minutes on a monday and then took a nap. the person typing an idiot abroad 2022 into the search bar is, i’m fairly sure, doing one of three things. the first thing is hoping. they remember the show. they remember karl on the great wall complaining about the great wall. they remember the look on his face in petra. they want more of that. they are, in the particular way of people on a monday afternoon, hungry for a season that was never made.

the second thing is checking. they have a vague memory that maybe, somewhere, there was a special, a one-off, a christmas thing. there was not. there is no such special. they read four blog posts that say “no” and they accept the no and they move on, possibly to a different search, possibly to a different beverage.

the third thing is the saddest, and it’s the thing i did, in 2022, the actual year, when i typed those exact five words into my own laptop while sitting where i sit now. the third thing is wishing the man had not gotten off the plane. wishing the show had not been allowed to end on its own terms. wishing somebody at sky one had pushed harder, or pushed at all. that’s what the search means, when it means anything. it means: i would like the world to be slightly different in this one specific way. the search engine cannot help with that. neither can the dictionary. trust me, i checked.

the karl pilkington dossier, a brief reverence

i want to be careful here because i am, in the larger sense of my life, a man writing a blog post on company time about a british tv show, and i am aware of how that sounds. but the show — and i’ll go further, i’ll go all the way — the show is, on the imdb page for an idiot abroad, rated higher than most things i have personally enjoyed in the last decade. eight point three. the people have spoken. the people, in this case, are right.

karl, in the show, is not pretending. that’s the whole machine. the show works because karl actually does not want to be on the great wall. he actually does not want to ride the camel. when he says, in petra, that the rocks are “a bit much”, he means it. there is no acting. there is, technically, a man being filmed against his preferences for the entertainment of two of his friends. and somehow, against every law of television i have read about, possibly in a serious magazine, that turns out to be one of the most honest things ever broadcast.

i would like to be karl, on the days i am not too tired to be myself. karl is, in the spiritual sense, what you get when you cross a man with a thermos and a deep skepticism of pyramids. that’s the show. that’s also, i would argue, the entire idiot abroad ethos: travel is, frequently, a hassle, and the people who pretend it isn’t are selling something.

(i would link the man’s wikipedia page here. i won’t. you have a search bar. you can do the lift.)

why a hot dog IS a sandwich, and how this connects

this is, technically, a post about an idiot abroad. it is also, as you’ve now noticed, a post about a hot dog. that’s the trick. the trick is that you can talk about anything if you cite enough karl pilkington. it’s a kind of pass. it’s an idiot pass. i issue them to myself.

what i would have filmed instead, none of it legal

if there had been an an idiot abroad 2022, i would have campaigned, possibly via a strongly worded email i would have drafted and not sent, for the show to come to my apartment instead. send karl here. send the camera crew. let them film a man — a different man, an unrelated man, certainly not me — sitting at a desk that is not legally his to use for this purpose, complaining about the third yoga mat, the bank app he does not open, the unopened mail pile that is currently leaning at, by my count, an eleven-degree angle from upright.

they would not have aired it. that’s fine. it would, however, have been instructive. some travel happens at airports. some travel happens entirely indoors, between the kitchen and the standing desk that is, technically, a sitting desk. karl would have understood. karl, i’m fairly sure — and there’s, i believe, some agreement on this in the kind of profile pieces i don’t read on purpose — would have understood that not going anywhere is its own kind of going somewhere.

the related background is in my standing position on the idiot abroad, which i wrote earlier and which holds up, i think, although i would say that. and the broader case for the show as a philosophical document is in the longer piece i did on the show, the philosophy, and the man. you don’t have to read either. you can. i won’t know.

(the dictionary, which i did consult, has nothing useful to say about a fourth season that did not happen. the dictionary is, in this respect, a disappointment. i would file a complaint, but i suspect i’d be told i never filed it. anyway. moving on.)

there is, in my building, a man — i’ve mentioned him before, in other posts, in a different mood — who is, in the canonical sense, a stefan-type expert. he watches everything. he has opinions. he stopped me once, near the elevator, and told me that an idiot abroad was “actually quite anthropological”, and he used the word anthropological with the confidence of a man who had read it once in a tab he closed. i nodded. i said the word back at him. he seemed pleased. that was, technically, my contribution to anthropology in 2022.

verdict, the show ended and so did my will

the all-hands is, by the sound of the elevator, wrapping. i should look busier. i’m going to look busier in approximately ninety seconds. one minute, give or take. moving on.

the unopened mail pile is, as of this writing, still leaning. there are, by my generous estimate, four red envelopes near the top. none of them, i’m fairly sure, are from karl pilkington. that would have been a different kind of post. tomorrow, possibly, i’ll get to the pile. tomorrow is, traditionally, when i get to things.

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