Dave Gorman #1

Dave Gorman is a man with many reasons to be cheerful. He has co-written, produced and starred in two successful BBC2 series, had three successful one man shows, co-written a book with Danny Wallace (now in its second edition) and is currently writing his first novel as well as touring his two most recent stage shows, playing to sold out theatres all over Britain and winning book vouchers for solving cryptic crosswords. No wonder Dave always has a smile on his face.

So let's start at the beginning. Dave's breakthrough into comedy is unlike any that of any other comedian, "I witnessed a gang land killing and got put on the witness protection programme, given the name Dave Gorman and the job stand up comedian. I threw myself in to it with gusto. Either that or die." He is joking of course… or is he? Yes. While Dave was at university there was an Amnesty International tour going round the country and every Sunday they would be in a different town. Frank Skinner was the compere and in the afternoons he ran a comedy workshop which cost £2 and also went to Amnesty International. "Three of my friends independently said you should go for that, yet I'd never once expressed any desire to do comedy to them out loud. They forced me to go. In the week before I went to it I wrote 10 minutes of material." As well as Frank Skinner who was still making his name at the time, Henry Normal was there along with 15 to 20 other people who wanted to get into comedy. "We did a 50 minute work shop, at the end of which anyone who wanted to could do 5 minutes in front of everyone else." Most people took this opportunity and after Dave took his turn, Henry told him about a gig they were doing the following Thursday and asked him along to perform.

It was Frank Skinner who got Dave his first paid gig even before he had really had any real experience on the comedy scene. "I was at a gig that Frank was on and I was at the back of the room watching. At the end of the gig Frank came up to me I was incredibly flattered because I didn't expect him to remember me and he said if I wanted, he could get me a gig in Birmingham. That is about as lucky as you can get. From then on it's the same as everyone else's story. Gangland killing."

It was at Frank Skinner's work shops that Dave also met Caroline Aherne, who he was soon to collaborate with writing on the Mrs. Merton show. She already knew Henry Normal and was there out of interest. Caroline was part of an exciting new material night in Dave's home of Manchester where other performers included Steve Coogan, John Thomson, Bob Dillinger and Henry who were all relatively established at the time. "I was the open spot who used to go down and watch them and want to be a part of it, and after about five weeks they let me join in. I was the new boy on the team." The only rules were that they couldn't perform material that they had done there or anywhere else before, making it a place to try out new ideas. " If you didn't have new material, you'd ring and say you weren't coming. Partly because I had more time than them, I used to go to that every week and do five to ten minutes every week. It's because of that, I think, that both Steve and Caroline employed me to do work on their things. It was the best audition in the world, you're demonstrating you can write."

"I recently got a flight to France for 2p. 2 pence, return. Life's great."

Dave developed a close working relationship with Henry Normal. They used to meet three or four times a week and sit and write together and just walk from one café to another. "It was very much an urban version of last of the summer wine. Just two men walking around a city instead of the Yorkshire dales, talking about fuck all," he laughs. "That was how we used to pass our time."

But luck can only have played a limited part in Dave's success. You only need to take a look at his CV to see how far his talent has taken him so far and in a relatively short space of time. He co-wrote the first three series of the Mrs. Merton show which subsequently won two Baftas, has written for Steve Coogan and The Fast Show, had production roles on two of Jenny Éclair's TV shows, has script edited a series of Harry Hill's ITV show and has more recently had a cameo in Absolutely Fabulous and played John the Postman in the critically acclaimed film "24 Hour Party People". And that is only the tip of the Dave Gorman iceberg.

Dave has no plans to go back to stand-up, in fact he doesn't miss it at all. "I've got all the good bits of it. I go on stage and when I stop talking people laugh. There's no way of doing what I do in way that fits in to 20 minutes and while I think I was an alright stand-up, I know that I'm better at doing what I do now. They think that's how good you are at everything." Dave is far more at home these days performing in a theatre, selling a thousand tickets and having people come and see something he is rightfully proud of. "I think in the last 6 months I might have written one thing that I could have used as a joke in stand up. I texted it to a friend instead. I was just as happy. He laughed. I got exactly the right Pavlovian response. Thought of it, said it, laughed. I don't miss that at all."

It's not that Dave intentionally looked for a way out of stand-up, he just got bored. " I had decided that I didn't want to do it in Edinburgh again. The minute I did Reasons To Be Cheerful I knew I didn't want to do stand up anymore. I had no choice but to carry on for a while because that's what paid the bills." He found that venues preferred to book a man they'd never heard of who was going to come on and tell some jokes as opposed to a man they had never heard of talking about a song from 1979. So as a result, Dave has effectively invented his own genre of comedy performance. "I'm sure people have done similar things but I never saw anyone doing anything similar so I feel like I own the whole thing. No matter how good you are at stand up, you never own it. You're always doing something that has been done by hundreds and thousands of people before you. There's something quite exciting about thinking I'm on my own territory doing my own thing. No one's ever going to come up to me and say 'your show's a bit like so-and-so's'."

"I'm sure I will be in touch with Duncan Goodhew again. Because he's my best friend, obviously. Don't tell Danny but me and Duncan are writing a book together."

Currently Dave is touring the UK and Ireland performing "Reasons To Be Cheerful" and "Better World" both of which we insist you go and see immediately when they are in a theatre near you. "It's lovely. I'm enjoying it hugely because I don't get bored of either of them. I feel slightly parental about them." Just 4 and 3 years respectively after they were first aired they are finally getting their due reward "I thought it might be a struggle to have them both in my head, but actually because they're true stories, I've never written them down anyway, and I don't struggle to remember them." In one town Dave performed both shows on consecutive nights and got much the same audience at both which made for a really great atmosphere. "It felt like they had a greater understanding of why I do what I do and how I arrived at each of them." The two shows themselves haven't changed a great deal but Reasons To Be Cheerful now runs to 90 minutes and Better World at almost two hours. "I have no idea how that's happened, it's a mystery to me. They must have changed. I can't tell you how."

Things just seem to happen to Dave. "A long, long time ago I came to a conclusion that what I do for a living is make documentaries about my life, and so I owe it to myself to have an entertaining life." Dave has a refreshing outlook on life and throws himself into his adventures wholeheartedly whether anything comes of them or not. "Everything has started off with these whimsical notions and then a few days later it's more committed and then a week or two later I'm in the throes of it." Dave goes on many adventures that we never even hear about. "I recently got a flight to France for 2p. 2 pence, return. Life's great."

"There's an absolutely incredible thing happened to me recently, that I can't tell you about. Something that is at least a one in 2,500,000,000 chance happened to me very recently, a couple of weeks ago. Sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up. I don't want that to sound like I'm being churlish. In a while I'll probably tell you about it."

"Things happen to me, and the next day if I wake up thinking about it, then it might well become something."

We don't want to dwell on Dave's TV shows as they are comprehensively covered on Dave's website and in the press and we're presuming most of our readers have seen them. Having said that, we will be putting up details of who to contact to ask whether there will be a video release for both of the series. Fans will be disappointed to hear that Dave has no immediate plans to make another TV show, "I'd quite like to not put myself through that [stress of making a TV show] very soon. But I would like to do it again in the future. It does take up a lot of your life."
"When you do a TV show you have to keep justifying yourself to people, and what I do is extremely hard to justify until it's over and only when it's over do people go, oh, we get it now."

Dave and Danny were producing the shows themselves so they did have a certain amount of control of them but there are always people asking questions throughout. Obviously due to the nature of the shows (more specifically Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment than The Dave Gorman Collection as the latter was never intended to be a TV show) things have to be done in real time and usually on the spare of the moment. " We can't just put the Dubai Desert Classic off. You have to have a bit of leeway to do that. We work with a good small team who react really quickly to things going on." Not only that, but Dave sets rules for his adventures which must be strictly adhered to. "The whole thing falls apart if you don't. I love the fact that on day 40 you get us at the Dubai Dessert Classic, because you can check when the horoscope's written, you can check the dates, and there's no way of faking it. It's exciting working that way."

The next thing in the pipeline for Dave is the novel that he is currently writing. He's keeping the details very much to himself at the moment because sometimes his army of fans can be a little too helpful at times. "I can't tell you what it's about, I'm afraid. I'd suddenly get a thousand emails about it and it's not going to help. Purely so that it can go round and round in my head without a thousand people saying 'if you're writing a book about that, why don't you write about this?' And it's going so slowly that I'm slightly embarrassed that I've told people I'm doing it," he laughs. Although idea has been in Dave's head for a long time he only started putting pen to paper in October when he started his current tour. "It's a novel, it's fiction. It's meant to be a work of fiction. And it will be. I'm slightly scared of fiction. I like the truth."

Other plans for the future hopefully include a return to the Edinburgh festival because let's face it, it just not been the same for the past few years. "It's been a huge sadness to me to not be there. I have to keep reminding myself that the reason I'm not there is a good reason, that things that I really want have happened to me. The first time I get a chance to take a show there then I will. If I can afford it."

As you'd expect from such a laid back man who enjoys taking life one adventure at a time Dave doesn't have any particular ambitions for the future. "I'm very bloody minded. My ambition is only to continue to be creative and to do things of my own and have control of them. It doesn't matter in what genre. I don't care whether it's on TV, in print or on stage. I want to fight to continue to have this little team that we work with, which is really unusual on television where a lot of things are made by committee. That's as far as it goes." He's turned down US deals and previous to The Dave Gorman Collection turned down two other offers for TV shows. He's taking it all in his stride. "There's no target. I know I'm going to write more books, and I'm going to continue to work separately and together with Danny, I'm going to hopefully make more TV and stage shows. I'll see how much progress I make on the novel first."

"I know I sound like a hippy, with my beard, but I just think do your own thing and try and do it well. It seems like a nice way to be to me. Does that make sense? Don't make me sound like an arse."

If you'd like to join Comedy Lounge in asking the BBC to release "The Dave Gorman Collection" and "Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment" then start here http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/contact/com_email.shtml and check the updates in the diary for any further details.
And join the online petition

www.davegorman.com