Afterlife Stolen from Submitted Manuscript In yet another case of mind-burgling robbery from your favourite celebrity thief it can now be revealed that aside from Extras , Flanimals , The Office and all the  other examples ,  Afterlife is also a rip-off. Back in 2021 during a relaunched plagiarism claim  against Gervais for his awful Flanimals imitation, it came to our attention that Afterlife  had also been stolen from a submitted manuscript. As the unintentional collator of Gervais’ thievery, aspiring scriptwriter known Ben Russell contacted me via my lawyer with a similar account of how he had submitted a work, only to have it re-appear without permission as major Netflix production  Afterlife,  supposedly 'authored by Ricky Gervais’.   Yes, you read that correctly, we are talking about Afterlife . At first this seemed too crazy to believe. Another one? Must be some crank jumping on the ‘ripped-off-by-Ricky’ bandwagon. But when we ...

Commenting on sexual harassment allegations against Noel Clarke in an interview with  Variety  earlier this year, After Life producer Charlie Hanson said that abuse of power in the entertainment industry is “learnt behaviour that is not confronted enough”. So let’s confront it now: According to widely published reports at least eleven women have claimed that 'hands-on' Hanson has “promised them a starry career under his wing, and then exploited their trust in creepy and illegal ways”. Among the alleged victims is a woman who says she met Hanson in 2008 to discuss a script   and ended up having non-consensual sex with him - in other words, that he raped her. Another accuses him of plying her with drinks and then molesting her when she was semiconscious on a sofa after they met to discuss a script she had written. The pattern repeats itself. A foot in the door in exchange for a hand down the pants seems to be the  modus operandi. The lack of witnesses, of cours...

It doesn't take Columbo to uncover numerous clear examples of light-fingeredness by disabled-mocking TV unfunny-man Ricky Gervais. Far from writing and producing all of his own material, as he claims, Mr. Gervais appears to be a bit of a kleptomaniac. Taking inspiration from past works happens, sometimes with a respectful nod to the original but this is ridiculous. He's been directly and deliberately stealing original material submitted to publishers or production companies . Alongside the blatant rip-off of my manuscript in the making of Flanimals, question marks hang over the originality of virtually all of Gervais' productions. Past thievery includes Extras, which was directly stolen ; concept, title and setting from award winning Australian pilot The Extra , conceived by Adam Wells and directed by Darren Ashton in 1999, and pending pre-action litigation it has also emerged that Afterlife was also stolen from a submitted script . ...

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. 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 ...