I will never forget that morning back in 2004 when my phone started ringing with calls telling me that Ricky Gervais had ripped off my book, Captain Pottie's Wildlife Encyclopaedia. ISBN 954820827X, 2000, (now out of print). He'd been on TV plugging the upcoming release of Flanimals but I had no interest in him so hadn’t taken much notice. It sounded crazy. Why would someone who'd just had massive hit TV series need to steal someone else's work? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing so headed down to the nearest bookshop to check it out for myself. At first glance the packaging and style were very different. Mine a pocket-sized mock-Victorian Encyclopaedia, understated and slightly bonkers, his, big, brash, noisy and garish, the only similarity being that they were both bestiaries, collections of bizarre imaginary creatures. Then I opened it up and had a look inside:
I felt physically sick, it was like a kick in the stomach. I'd put a lot of love into my book. In the end it was all a bit of a laugh, an experiment in guerrilla publishing, but I was proud to have created the silliest book ever written, educational and ridiculous at the same time. As we see, it was well received, and not just by the people it it was intended for. Flanimals was basically my work swapped around a bit and coloured in. On top of it they’d completely missed the joke, reducing my creatures to soul-less digitized monsters with Ricky Gervais’ name stamped on the cover. The whole thing was creepy.
Sometimes it was purely visual copying:
Sometimes a combination of text and image:
The whole thing stank.
Concepts were converted into an images,
....text evolved into several Flanimals, was cross-bred into a single atrocity or a unique feature copied:
It went on and on throughout the Flanimals book series with my images, text and concepts jumping around, mashed up, morphing and reappearing all over the place.
I wrote to Faber & Faber, the publishers of Flanimals and Gervais’ then management company Peters Fraser Dunlop, both of whom had received my manuscript in the late 90’s to ask them what the hell was going on. What followed is an endless round of self-contradiction, faltering legal action and unsubstantiated claims from the Gervais camp that he had somehow travelled back in time and written my book before I did. Take for example these two contradictory accounts of when Flanimals was written in response to my initial challenge:
According to a 'perplexed' Suzy Jenvey, Faber & Faber’s then editorial director, "Ricky Gervais first devised his Flanimal characters as a
teenager". But according to PFD "Ricky wrote
Flanimals in 1990”
Make your mind up guys. Gervais would have been a teenager in the 1970's so a discrepancy of some 15 years. In a later meeting with Schillings yet another account was given. They referred me to a series of scribbled sketches and notes suddenly culminating in a ring-bound A5 pamphlet-format manuscript circa 1998 but with no reliable evidence of the date. The rough sketches and notes were of very poor quality; Random, disjointed, unfunny crap. The work showed no evidence of development of ideas until in '1998' a pamphlet suddenly appeared with my work edited into it, after I had sent my manuscript to his agency in a similar format. The smoke and mirrors actually gave the game away.
Money. That’s what it was all about. Ricky'd been caught red-handed but in 2010 his first instinct was to hide behind the legs of
Schillings Lawyers, guardians of the reputations of the
rich and famous and who's first letter to me threatened
enormous legal costs if I did not desist from telling the truth. I did not have the financial resources at the time to take on the Gervais media empire so, at least for the time being, the case faded away.
Let that sink in for a minute. A millionaire who’s stolen from me threatens to liquidate me if I challenge him, and this from a guy who likes to portray himself as one of us, in his words one of the "
ordinary people".
Gervais the
animal rights activist snipes at Hollywood virtue signalling. How laudable, but keep your hands off my animals Ricky and what about some respect for
our human rights; since going public with my case I've realized
I'm not the only one.
I think I speak for all creative minds in saying that it is in the public interest to challenge this. Innovation should be protected from corporate theft by manufactured plastic celebrities like Ricky Gervais.
John Savage
