Dave Gorman

Faintly Ridiculous

2013-06-14T12:54:00.003+01:00

Blimey. Well the last recording for the series turned out to be a bit eventful.

The series is six episodes. Each episode is an hour long. That's a TV hour - so it's a little less when you make way for some commercials and so on but even so, that's like putting six different Edinburgh shows together.

In the late 90s, when I was first wrestling with the concept of one-man-shows and particularly with how to make one feel like a show and not just a collection of bits and pieces, I wouldn't have believed it possible to work on six of them concurrently. But weirdly, in the time that's passed, I've got better at doing that, than I am at doing short sets. These days, writing an hour is sort of easier than writing ten or twenty minutes for me. A short set seems unsatisfying because you can't weave stuff back in. It can't really be as cohesive.

With this series we've filmed two episodes in a night. We don't do that just because it's cheaper - although that definitely helps - it's also because it suits the way we want to make the show. And I enjoy the energy of performing. I prefer doing it that way.

TV-people normally like to record loads of material and then edit it down - the idea being that, that way, they get only the very best stuff. But it ignores the fact that, in a show, all the stuff is connected. It isn't a series of discrete, individual elements that can be assembled in any order and with any cuts you like. A particular sentence might have got the biggest laugh of the night... but if you take away the four sentences that preceded it and the one five minutes earlier that planted a fact in the audience's mind that's come back to hang around in the shadows of the later joke... then it just won't be as funny. And the laugh it got on the night will sound odd on the TV because the live audience wasn't just laughing at those words... but at those-words-in-that-particular-context.

I don't like the idea that the recording is where you create all the different elements but that the edit suite is where you build the show. So we set out to build the show first. Which is why I did a lot of dry runs of the show live in advance of the recordings. And I'm very grateful to the venues and audiences in Windsor, Fareham and Tring for making that possible. Doing the show, then changing it, then doing it again and then changing it and then doing it again and then... - you get the idea - means you find out so much more about the material than you ever will do by having a meeting.

And, if we got it right, it meant we'd be able to make shows that flow in the same way that live shows do. We could record about an hour in a way that had a beginning, a middle and an end and nobody would ever have to say, "can you rephrase that bit because it won't make sense if we have to cut the first part". Because we knew weren't going to cut the first part. Or any part. Because we'd already made sure that things worked and fitted together in the right kind of time.

But a consequence of that is that there isn't much slack in the system. We don't have a lot of spare time for any retakes... so if something goes wrong, we're up against it. And on Tuesday - our final recording - things wanted to go wrong.

For some reason the projection started to flicker and black out on Tuesday. It started during the first show and then appeared to be fixed. Then I started to flicker and black out too. Literally. There's at least one Found Poem in each show. They're silly moments of cod-seriousness and I tend to end them with an over the top bow and a silly, theatrical flourish. At the end of the first Found Poem on Tuesday as I took that silly bow my vision blacked out. It sounded like I was in an echo chamber and I felt my knees buckle. I tried to stand up and carry on, my vision didn't return and I felt as though my speech was slurred. So I had no choice but to stop and tell people I'd nearly fainted. Which is, I think, what had happened.

Producers came to see me as my eyes and ears adjusted. They offered me a break. But I didn't want to take one. And I didn't really want the audience to know how bad I was feeling. Because an audience wants to relax. An audience wants to trust that a performer is in control and that everything's going to be okay. It's harder to laugh if, at the back of your mind, there's a worry that the guy doing the talking might fall over. It adds a new context to things. It isn't helpful. On top of that, a big break could run the risk of disconnecting the material that has to be connected.

And besides, we don't actually have that much spare time in our schedule. So we carried on. Yesterday I saw some footage from the show. I was expecting to see an ashen-faced, hollow-eyed figure saying the words. But I looked alive. And the audience were completely switched on.

In the break between the two shows there was panic in the eyes of the production team. Water was drunk. Bananas were eaten. I hadn't had any dinner that day so a cheese sandwich was provided. But the bite I took came straight back up.

"Sit with your head between your knees." "Lie down with your feet in the air." "Drink more water." "It's very hot in here, let's take him outside for some fresh air." "Do you think you're going to throw up?"

That's kind of how the interval went. The second show started fine. But then, less than ten minutes in, the projector failed again. On tour I take my own kit. I know what the back up plans are and I've never had to cancel a show because of a failed projector or laptop. I'm very belt and braces about these things - it's what I do for a living after all. But for the series we've hired in a different projector. It's still my laptop and I've still made all of the stuff that's on it (and yes, it's still made in Powerpoint) but the projector and the screen are hired in because there are issues with projection on TV that you don't have to contend with live. Hotspots. Colour correction. Etc etc.

People started rushing around behind the scenes, changing cables, trying to work out why the signal wasn't getting through properly. The clock was ticking. I was trying to keep the audience ticking as well. As was the brilliant, Tom Price who's done warm-up for the whole series. He's bloody ace, Tom. If you get the chance to see him, take it. I left the stage - ostensibly to help with the technical side of things. In reality I was going to the toilet and, um, throwing up a little bit. And then going outside and sitting in the fresh air with my head between my knees. I don't mind the audience knowing that the projector's sick... but I don't want them to know about me and I don't want them to think I'm sulking while the fix happens. So when I feel a bit less woozy I go back into the venue and join in a bit with Tom.

Word reaches me that they don't know what the problem is and can't guarantee that it won't happen again. They have a back up projector, but that hasn't fixed it. They have different cabling... but that hasn't fixed it either. They want me to just go on with the show and say that they can fix any problems in the edit. But of course they can't fix the live audience's night out in the edit. If the projection fails again, the audience won't be seeing all the information they need to understand the material. We can't exactly ask an audience to pretend they're getting a joke they're not getting. How would they know what to pretend? So I explain to the audience that if the projection flickers and wobbles we'll all just ignore it and get on with it. They'll still see the information and get the material and the TV audience won't have to know it happened. But if they wince and react to it flickering it will definitely look odd. And I promise that if it cuts out completely we'll stop and do what we can.

I was worried that the audience would have lost all their momentum. I was worried that it would be like someone had pressed the reset button and that we'd be going from a standing start, with all the little details that had been dropped in earlier now forgotten. I think a lot of TV audiences are made to feel like they're a prop for the show. Maybe they go to see a sitcom recorded and they expect it to be like watching a funny play performed. But then they discover they're watching the same scene recorded eight times and there are long breaks between scenes and what they thought might last an hour actually lasts two. Or three. Or four. When there's a twenty minute delay in filming under those circumstances, the audience grows impatient. If they think the delay is down to a fussy director, a prima donna performer or just some TV bullshit they weren't expecting they feel imposed upon. But I think the audience on Tuesday could see that this delay was caused by people trying to fix their evening. Whatever the reason, they didn't seem in the least bit resentful. Rather than resenting anything, it felt as though we had all bonded in a feeling that, while outside forces were trying to ruin our fun, we weren't bloody well going to let it happen.

We carried on. And somehow the projector didn't fail, blink or flicker once. I don't think the audience realised how sick I was. And fifteen minutes later, I didn't feel sick at all any more. And no momentum was lost. They remained switched on to every nuance and every call-back. In fact, they started finding material that wasn't there because a couple of moments became call-backs either to the delay or to the first show. I had to say a couple of things twice in order to not have some weird out of context laughter in the mix that would make the TV audience feel like they'd missed an in-joke. Which of course they had. They were, quite simply, an amazing audience. I'm very, very grateful.

For the first time the recording overran. By ten minutes. There really isn't much slack in the system. It's better that way.

Life Is Good.

2013-05-31T13:36:00.002+01:00

I'm bloomin' loving making Modern Life Is Goodish. The pace of the work is relentless (there were a couple of days last week when I had to work through the night in order to have things ready on time) but the end result has, so far, more than justified the means.

And, actually, I sort of enjoy working like that. Sort of.

One of the reasons the pace is so intense is that we record two shows in a night. We can do that because we're not following the usual TV practice of over-recording. We make two hour-long shows by filming for, um, about an hour. Twice. It's far more fun that way because the live audience gets to see a show, rather than feeling like props at the recording of some stuff that will one day be a show.

It also means that the series is nearly done and dusted. Two thirds of it is in the can, or at least, on a hard drive, already. We've just got one pair of shows to go.

I'll be fine tuning the material at the Court Theatre in Tring next week - June 5, 6 and 10 - come along if you fancy it - and then the final recording is at the show's glorious home, The Tabernacle (above) on June 11th.

Windsor, Windsor, Windsor, Tring, Tring, Tring.

2013-05-17T18:08:00.000+01:00

I can't really explain how much I enjoyed the last week. It's the kind of work that really excites me.

I'm working on Modern Life Is Goodish - a new series for the lovely folks at Dave. The thing with telly-people is that they're normally control freaks. They want to know exactly what's going to happen and exactly what's going to be said... and I don't enjoy working like that.

I've never really written a script for any of my stage shows. There's never been any words typed out and I've never learned the words. When we made the DVD of Googlewhack, people - and by people, I mean lawyers - insisted on their being a script. At first they didn't believe me that there wasn't one. Eventually we solved the problem by pointing a video camera at the show one night and having some poor sod transcribe it. The transcript was full of errors, but they didn't seem to mind that. They had a script. It might have been wrong... but it existed and that's all they needed to enable them to do whatever they had to do.

I find performing to an audience far more helpful than sitting, staring at a blank screen. The phrase that comes to mind when you're trying to write isn't necessarily the same phrase that comes to mind when you're talking to an audience. And often the phrase that comes out in front of an audience is better than the one you would have written.

And that's what's lovely about working on this show. Nobody's insisting on endless meetings where we discuss the minutiae - they're allowing me to work the material up live, which is the way my head works best. I find that if I perform some material a few times I refine the content without really stopping to think about it. The good words start to stick in place and the not so good words get replaced slowly and it all coalesces. In a meeting you'd only be guessing - but on stage you know for sure.

So, on Thursday and Friday night last week I performed shows at the Firestation in Windsor. I thought about it over the weekend. Performed it again on Monday night in Fareham and then on Tuesday night we taped it at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill. That's a six day bootcamp for the shows (I'm doing two shows each night - both of which will become an hour of TV) and it's both more fun and more productive than any amount of meetings. Exhausting. But very, very satisfying.

And now my job is to forget that material and move straight on to the next shows. So I'll repeat the pattern on May 23, 24 and 27th - but all of those will be at The Firestation Arts Centre in Windsor - before the next taping on the 28th and then again on June 5th, 6th and 10th at The Court Theatre, Tring before the final taping on the 11th.

I think the remaining Windsor shows are close to selling out although there are still a handful of tickets for those. And there are more available in Tring.

Tuesday Night

2013-04-29T13:37:00.002+01:00

So... on my last post I said we were looking for an audience for Tuesday (tomorrow) night. I've not been in the office that much since then (as well as writing these shows I'm involved in the small matter of moving house - timing's always been one of my strengths) so I've been a bit unaware of things but I'm told there's been a far greater response than anyone was expecting.

Which is flattering. Obviously.

But also means that more people have asked to come along than we can accomodate. Some of you will have had emails saying that you're guaranteed entry - and if you turn up on time, you will be.

Others have been told that they'll be let in on a first come, first served basis. This is one of the problems with free events. No matter what you do, some people will always say they want to come and then decide not to because, hell, it's free so they've nothing to lose. Experience shows that if we only say yes to 200 people we end up with an audience of 50 and a lot of empty seats.

But here's the thing... we want you to come along. We want it to be a fun night. And the people in charge have done their best to get the numbers so that - if the average number of no-shows happens - all will be well.

Luckily, with the series just around the corner - we have a way of rewarding anyone we do unfortunately have to turn away. We'll offer you guaranteed entry to one of the recordings instead.

Goodish Audience Wanted - This Tuesday

2013-04-24T11:47:00.000+01:00

Y'know that telly thing I mentioned recently? It's called Modern Life Is Goodish and I'm making it for the lovely people at Dave. Well we want to test out some of the technical aspects of it. We want to see that the set, lights, sound and, um, all-that-stuff works and that things flow the way we think they will.

That way we can tweak things before we get to the actual recordings when it'd be a bit late. So we're going to do a test show next Tuesday. April 30th. And it wouldn't be much of a test if we didn't have an audience. And you - yes you - are exactly the kind of person we'd like to be there. You and a couple of hundred others.

The venue is The Tabernacle, Powis Square, London W11. The doors will open at 6pm. There'll almost certainly be a drink of some kind. And it's free. There'll be a fair old chunk of a show and I'll do a Q&A... basically it should be a fun night out.

If you fancy it you can email us and let us know you'd like to come. We've set up a special email address for it: davegorman at avalonuk dot com. I reckon you can work that out. Don't worry - it's not my actual email address, so it won't be me who's trying to coordinate the whole thing. That would spell disaster.

Anyway. See you there, yeah? Yeah? Yeah. Great.

When Did We Get So Griefy?

2013-04-12T21:13:00.000+01:00

BBC2 is currently part way through a documentary series called Keeping Britain Alive: A Day In The NHS. I haven't seen it but I have seen the trailers. The whole series was filmed in one day with 100 camera crews trying to capture the enormity of what happens in the National Health Service which is, apparently, this nation's biggest institution. In the trails for it, we are told that on any given day 1,300 of us die and 2,000 of us are born.

One thousand, three hundred of us. Daily. That's a lot of dying. For each and every one of those 1,300 deaths someone, somewhere mourns. Or at least I (sort of) hope they do... because to contemplate someone passing away leaving nobody to feel their loss seems bleaker and sadder still.

When someone you love passes it goes without saying that the sadness is deep. And it is deeply individual too. But every day we hear about the deaths of strangers and in comparison it barely registers. Of course it can stir some emotions - but none of us is able to pretend that it compares to the death of a loved one. At times we all read news stories that involve the death of a stranger, tut, feel perhaps a blip of sadness and then turn the page. It doesn't make us unfeeling animals, it makes us human. Grief is not the normal response to the death of a stranger... if it were, we would all be in a permanent state of grief and then none of us would get on with living for all the death that surrounds us. Of course we empathise with those who have lost loved ones, but that's not the same thing. We sometimes raise a glass to those whose lives touched ours from afar. And we contemplate our own mortality when it turns out the pop stars we sang along to in our youth don't actually live forever. But we also turn the page and get on with things.

This is a recent story from one of our red top tabloids:

It's not just the opening paragraph... it's the whole story, as reported, in its entirety. What a way to talk about a man's death! What a way to talk about a man's life. Fifty seven years and he gets one cor-blimey-would-you-believe-it! sentence.

What are we supposed to think when we read this story? What, if anything, are we being invited to feel? Sadness? I don't think that's the writer's intention. Amazement? Maybe.
How many people do you think read this? How many of them do you think have given Herr Binder a second thought since?

But it seems that when a celebrity passes, the rules are different. Because we know who they are we feel they are not strangers. But they are. Aren't they? We seem to have become, well, something of a griefy bunch.

Not long after Whitney Houston died I was taken to task by a stranger on Twitter for the insensitive way in which I'd responded to that sad news. Which was odd to me because I hadn't mentioned her passing at all. Not on twitter. Nor anywhere else for that matter. When I read the news, I registered my surprise to a friend and then - rightly, I think - regarded it as nothing-to-do-with-me.

And that was what had upset him. It was, he thought, disrespectful of me to not tweet an RIP message. Things have come to a pretty pass when the absence of mourning is considered an insult.

I don't know when we became so griefy as a nation. (Nor do I know if it is confined to these shores). Is it trite to call it a symptom of our Post-Diana world? It probably is. But that was certainly a time when the failure-to-mourn was seen by some to be an active sign of rebellion rather than, y'know, normal. I think it's connected.

But I think things have been magnified by the growth of the internet in general and of Twitter in particular. In a world where everyone can express every nano-thought in an instant, some people do just that. Because they can. Because it's there. It might be a good reason for climbing Mount Everest but it's a lousy one for tweeting what you had for breakfast.

When Stephen Gately died there was a Twitter campaign to get one of Boyzone's singles to number one "in his honour". I suspect that was in part fuelled by the anger stirred up by Jan Moir's Daily Mail opinion piece on his passing. As insensitive a piece of writing as I can recall. The article had angered me but I couldn't begin to understand the campaign. I was asked to retweet a "let's all buy his single" message and when I didn't do so, one person told me that my failure to get on board meant I was insulting his memory. I wasn't. I just didn't want to own a Boyzone single. That's not an insult to Stephen Gately. More to the point, it's not an insult to his memory.

I am unable to feel true, deep sadness about someone's death unless it is someone I know. Does that make me a bad man? I don't think so. When musicians I admire die, they live on in my record collection. I do not lose them. Their children lose a parent, their parents lose a child and their partners lose a lover and my feelings are only for those people. It seems selfish to me to think otherwise. But if you feel differently - if your connection to a performer feels stronger than that and you feel a deeper sadness, then that's fine by me. But please don't make the assumption that we must all feel the same emotion to the same degree and that anyone not doing so is being rude. That's not fair.

For what it's worth, I can't celebrate a death either. And it probably hasn't escaped your attention that this blog is appearing at a time when many appear to be doing just that. I'm as non-plussed by that as I am by those who want us all to grieve. It's nothing to do with me. But then, in truth, it's nothing to do with most of us and that hasn't stopped people weighing in on both sides.

I suspect it would have happened to some degree no matter what. But I wonder if it would have had the same focus? Some of it feels more reactive than that. Some of it feels like people cocking a snook at those who assumed the whole nation would be plunged into mourning. A sort of, "well, if you're going to demand our reverence, we'll show you just how irreverent we can be", stance. And the louder one side screams that we should all be sad, the louder the others will scream that they're happy. And vice versa.

The magnitude of one's achievements does not, for me, magnify the sadness of one's death. What it magnifies is the font used to report it and the number of column inches given over to it. Most of us will get nothing. Markus Binder got one not particularly reverent sentence. Others get pages 1-14 of every newspaper and "souvenir" pull out sections to boot. That doesn't make their passing sadder. Not really. Not for those of us who didn't know them. Not for me, anyway. It just makes it louder. Bigger. More. And if you amplify the response - you amplify all of it.

Goodish News

2013-04-02T20:27:00.001+01:00

I'm delighted to announce that I'm making a new series for Dave. That's the channel, Dave, not me-Dave. (I've already had three conversations today where I've had to clarify that I'm not talking about myself in the third person and I don't doubt there will be many more such conversations in the weeks to come.)

The show is called Modern Life Is Goodish because, well... because that's what it's about. Ish.

The starting point for the show is my last tour-show, Powerpoint Presentation. I guess a lot of the material in that show was gleaned from looking a little closer at the information (and misinformation) that we normally allow to float past our eyes unchallenged. But a lot of the material also comes from reacting to it from playing with it, experimenting and generally being a bit mischievous... and that spirit will definitely inform this series too.

So it's a stand up show. Of sorts. My sort. There are six shows in the series - each one being an hour in length - which means I can really get my teeth into things. And again, the lessons I've learned during the run of Screen Guild gigs are going to come in bloody handy. There's a big store of ideas and material right there. Phew.

We're filming the shows at The Tabernacle in Notting Hill, which is a fantastic space. I knew straight away that with a series like this, I wanted to avoid the anodyne atmosphere of a TV studio and make it somewhere special and atmospheric, somewhere the audience will feel more involved - and The Tabernacle is perfect.

We're taping the shows in pairs. The first recording will be on Tuesday, May 14th, the second will be on Tuesday, May 28th and the third and final recording will be on Tuesday, June 11th. Tickets for the shows are free and you can get them from TVRecordings.com. But then, if you're on my mailing list you already knew that.

Filled Guild. Will Build.

2013-03-31T11:56:00.001+01:00

The second season of Screen Guild shows drew to a close last night. If you came to one or more of them - big thanks.

They're hugely enjoyable things for me - but hugely stressful too. It normally takes me around eight hours to build the powerpoint elements for each of them and there are times when I've been tweaking stuff until 10 seconds before we open the doors and let the audience in. But it's always worth it. If I didn't do them, I wouldn't have another way of generating material.

And I'm really proud of the line-ups we pulled together for the shows. We never bill the shows in advance partly because things often change at late notice but also because it's nicer with a show like this for the audience to be surprised.

In this season, we've had: Ed Gamble, Steve Hall, Morgan & West, David O'Doherty, Jay Foreman, James Acaster, Lucy Beaumont, Pete Firman, Simon Munnery, Marcel Lucont, Pat Cahill, Richard Herring, Mark Smith, Gareth Richards, Ali Cook, Sara Pascoe, Phil Wang, Andy Zaltzman, Gráinne Maguire, Tony Law, Holly Walsh, Piff The Magic Dragon, Aisling Bea and Daniel Simonsen. Top notch each and every one of them.

I don't know when I'll return for a third season... but I'm sure I will. And I look forward to it.

But now the task is to see how the various bits of material hang together when it's just me. Which is why I'm doing the ~~Screen Guild~~, sorry, Screen Build shows in Windsor (May), Fareham (Sold Out) and Tring (June).

New Shows... Windsor, Fareham & Tring

2013-03-25T22:24:00.001Z

Since September last year I've been doing a monthly show - Dave Gorman's Screen Guild - at Hoxton Hall.

This is the second run of Screen Guild shows I've done there. The idea of the shows is that it gives me a place to try out any new ideas I might have on stage with an audience.

It's turned out to be an invaluable exercise. Knowing there's a show each month forces me to write and be creative. And a lot of what's come out of it has been really useful.

When I first started a run there, back in February 2011 I didn't know what I wanted to do, I just knew I had some ideas I wanted to play with.

But by the end of that run all the component pieces of what was to become Powerpoint Presentation pretty much existed and I was on my way to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time in 8 years with a show I would end up touring extensively. There simply wouldn't have been another way of building that show up.

I started this second run in a similar place. I didn't know where I was going with it... but a new store of ideas had built up and I needed to get back on stage and play some more. Now, as the run draws to a close (there's actually one more show in the season - next Saturday - but it's sold out) it's time to take stock and work out what to do with all the material I've built up.

So I've got some one man shows lined up in small venues that aren't too far from home. I didn't want to keep the name Screen Guild, as that might make someone think it's a mixed bill rather than a one man show, so these shows are called Dave Gorman's Screen Build instead. Well, they had to be called something. There's a reason the shows are all relatively close to home - it's because, when I'm building up a show of some kind I like to put the material through a sort of bootcamp - trying it one way, one night and then another way the next and so on. That means I spend the day in between hunched over a laptop, changing the powerpoint and that means I can't spend the day travelling across country to a different venue. Which is why the shows are clustered the way they are.

I'll be trying out the first batch of material in shows on May 9th, 10th and 13th. Those shows happen in Windsor, Windsor and Fareham respectively. The next batch of material I'll try out on May 23rd, 24th and 27th. All of those shows are in Windsor. And finally I'll try out a different batch of material on June 5th, 6th and 10th... and all of those shows will be in Tring.

All the details are on the Live Dates page of my site...

Bookaboo

2013-03-13T22:36:00.001Z

I mentioned last July that I'd met a famous Brit while I was in Montreal...

It was, of course, Bookaboo... the book-playing-dog who needs "a story a day or he just won't play".

SPOILER ALERT: I read him a story. He played.

It's on ITV/CITV on Saturday morning at 7.25 if you're interested. Y'know, if you've got a young child or two and they're not scared of beards...

The Real Thing

2013-02-19T08:01:00.000Z

I was in my local supermarket last night. It was that or a takeaway. In my basket were the ingredients for a quick meal (veggie stir fry, since you ask).

I thought I'd chosen which till to approach wisely - all of my shopping was on the conveyor belt and ready to go - just as the last item of the people in front of me was beeped through. Perfect.

The people in front of me were twins. Identical twins. Their last item through the till had been a two-litre bottle of coke. As was the item before that. And the one before that, too. Pretty much the whole of their trolley was occupied by two-litre bottles of coke. But not the whole trolley. The little end section of the trolley was full of bread. There were at least twelve bottles of coke, probably more, and five loaves of plain white bread.

All they had to do was pay. They produced a wad of vouchers.
"Really?" said the man behind the till.
"Yeah, this'll work," said the Alpha twin.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm a checkout manager... I'm 100% sure."

Young Master Till started keying things in and scanning vouchers.

"No. Hang on, you've made a mistake," said the Beta twin. "You've done that wrong." He turned to Alpha. "He's made a mistake. He's done that wrong."
"You've made a mistake," repeated Alpha. "You're doing it in the wrong order. I'm a checkout manager. Void that. No, that. I know what I'm talking about. I'm a checkout manager. I'm a checkout manager, man... I know what it's like... I'm a checkout manager, man, I don't eat... I only eat when I'm hungry, man... here... do you want me to do this for you?"

Tilly didn't have a chance to accept or decline the offer of help. Alpha twin was already leaning over the counter, craning his neck so as to see the screen that customers don't normally see, and tapping away at the keys. It was quite an invasion of space.

"This is going to work, man," he said as his fingers tip-tapped away, "I'm gonna get all that coke... it'll work... right, there you go... now scan that voucher... y'see... I told you..."

"That'll be £4.80, please" Tilly looked confused and just a little suspicious.
"I'll have £10 cash back as well"

There was a pause - perhaps Tilly was expecting Alpha to present a magic 'free £10 cash back' voucher as well

"You've got to work the system, man," said Alpha to nobody in particular. "You just gotta know how it works."

And with that, the twins left, jabbering excitedly about how brilliant they were to get all that shopping for less than a fiver. They strode cockily, with swagger. They were bank robbers who'd managed to pull off a heist without even breaking the law. They were proud. They were just a little bit smug. And it was just a little bit impressive.

A little bit.

Because, of course, it was let down by the fact that they now owned twenty four litres of coke and five loaves of white bread. Bread that - I imagine - Alpha won't even eat. Least not until he's hungry.

A Polystyrene Cup

2013-01-23T09:22:00.001Z

A Polystyrene Cup, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

Have you ever wondered what Laurel & Hardy would look like if they each had the other's nose and mouth?

2013-01-15T08:12:00.000Z

I have...

It's sort of right. But you know it's wrong...

It's Not What You Say, It's What You Don't Say

2013-01-14T13:58:00.001Z

On Saturday night I was a guest on the Radio 4 show, Dilemma. As I made my way home that night I was sitting on the tube chatting idly with Mrs Gorman when the man sitting across from us leaned forwards with something of a conspiratorial look in his eye.

"Strip clubs are wrong," he said.
I paused, unsure as to how best to respond. I shrugged my shoulders, "I just don't get them," said I,

And then the train pulled into a station, he stood up and left.

That was it. That was our entire conversation. There wasn't any preamble. There had been no hellos. There were just those two sentences.

"Strip clubs are wrong."
"I just don't get them."

The woman sitting next to his now empty seat had clearly overheard the exchange and was looking more than a little bemused by it. As well she might. We must have looked like spies.

Fortunately it wasn't that cryptic to me. Odd, yes. But not cryptic. I knew what he was on about. Or at least I could work it out.

In December I'd been a guest on another Radio 4 show, I've Never Seen Star Wars. (Radio 4 shows are like buses to me, you wait ages for one and then two come along in the space of two months. Oh hang on... that's not buses is it.)

On I've Never Seen Star Wars the idea is that the guest takes on new experiences - things they've never done before that maybe they should have done, or that most people might expect them to have done - and then discuss them with the host, Marcus Brigstocke. For example - and I know this is hard to believe - Les Dennis had never eaten cheese. I know.

For my episode I tried my first water-cooler conversation, went horse riding, read some Dickens and visited a strip club. While it was recorded in December it was broadcast just last week (it's still on the iPlayer and is available to download for the next 7 days so you can listen to it if you like).

So when the stranger leaned across a tube train and said, "Strip clubs are wrong" I knew that what he meant was, "Hello. I heard you talking about strip clubs on the radio recently and I'm inclined to agree with you. They're weird aren't they?"

But because he didn't say that... I had to fill in the blanks and work it out. It didn't take long - (of course I had to consider the possibility that it was just a coincidence, that he hadn't heard me on I've Never Seen Star Wars and was just that-man-on-the-tube-who-starts-weird-conversations-with-strangers but I checked his shoes and both sets of laces were tied so I figured that was unlikely) - but it was long enough to make our two-sentence conversation appear just that little bit more stilted.

As the doors closed and the train continued on its journey Mrs Gorman said, "That must have sounded very strange to anyone else."
"It did," said the woman sitting opposite. "Yes. It did."

I thought about trying to explain it to her. But leaning over to explain it would involve explaining what I do for a living - or worse still, assuming that a stranger knows what I do for a living - and that would make me sound like one of those don't-you-know-who-I-am? twonks. I mean, what if the person next to her hadn't overheard the weird strip-club conversation but had heard me trying to contextualise the weird strip-club conversation? It doesn't bear thinking about.

So I said nothing. I hope she thinks I was spy.

Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad

2013-01-10T11:20:00.000Z

I've been watching a lot of Breaking Bad recently. This has been bugging me.

Dennis Hopper x Gollum = Mike Ehrmantraut

Merry Christmas

2012-12-23T23:18:00.001Z

Merry Christmas, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

Colin Hughes

2012-12-23T17:10:00.004Z

At this special time of year I think it's nice to pause and remember what - or who - it's really about.
Colin Hughes.

Thanks Cliff

Gastro-Cartography

2012-12-12T23:19:00.004Z

Mrs Gorman and I were out for dinner this evening. Part way through the meal I looked across at her plate and noticed that she'd managed to cut her steak up to resemble a map of the United Kingdom.

She claims it wasn't done on purpose. I'm not sure that explains the small bit of potato so handily positioned to represent Northern Ireland, though.

I'm suspicious. Very suspicious.

Blimey, The Duke of Cambridge Really Is Looking Patchy On Top These Days

2012-12-11T14:09:00.001Z

Spamazing

2012-12-07T17:56:00.000Z

Not so long ago I had to abandon an email address because it was getting upwards of 30,000 spam emails a day. The idea of filtering through that inbox to find the odd legitimate email was obviously a bit ridiculous.

I don't get 30,000 spam emails a day any more... but it's regularly into the hundreds. And as much as I detest it, it is kind of fascinating.

When I first encountered spam it seemed to be that it was related to a limited number of things: "Rolex" watches were quite common. As were inkjet cartridges and home loans etc etc. (The old, "I need to smuggle some money out of Nigeria and you are the man I trust to help me" emails aren't spam as such, they're a different kettle of con entirely).

I understood the mathematics of spam in those days. If your email at least appears relevant to someone there's more chance of them falling for it. So sending designed to appeal to the needy and the greedy made sense.

If you send it to a million people you only need a tenth of a percent of them to fall for it to have 1000 mugs in the game. And it doesn't matter what it is you appear to be selling because you're not actually selling anything. I'm told that spam is - for the most part - just trying to get your details. It's your name, address and phone number they really want. Information is valuable in today's economy.

But recently the spam I've been getting has been incredibly niche. And this confuses me.

I've had spam telling me about "great deals on forklift trucks". Really? What percentage of people would even read beyond the first line? How many people actually buy forklift trucks anyway? It's not exactly an impulse buy. "I only came in for some paint but they'd put the forklift trucks by the counter and, well... yellow is so my colour, so I just had to get one."

Likewise premium grade aviation fuel. Surely the people charged with buying aviation fuel are a) limited in number and b) pretty wise to spam.

Aren't the spammers just cutting the number of potential dupes down before their evil words have even hit our inboxes?

This spam arrived today.

There's no guess work required here. I can speculate as to how many people buy forklift trucks or aviation fuel... but really I'd just be plucking numbers out of thin air. But I can find out how many people are in the AICPA.

According to the AICPA website, there are 370,000 members. So in the whole wide world, there are only 370,000 people who can genuinely fall for this spam. And how many of them are actually receiving it in the first place? If I'm getting it, it's not as though this email has been sent to a highly targeted list of addresses. It's the same scattergun tactic as all other spam.

But surely accountants are the kind of people who regularly deal in formal documents that contain legalese. Surely they're the kind of people who will read a sentence like, "we have received a denouncement about your recent involvement in income tax hustle" and spot that it's a bit, y'know, shit.

"The rejection to provide the clarifications within this term will finish in end off of your..." what's that? Really? Will it. If I reject to provide clarification you'll do what now?

I'm really struggling to believe that anyone on earth has fallen for this. If you're not an American Certified Public Accountant the "threat" from the AICPA to end (off) (of) your career is a bit of an empty one so there's no reason for anyone else to respond to it.

And if you are an American Certified Public Accountant you're surely equipped to spot that this isn't legit. If you are and you do, I'd suggest you need a change of career.

But put yourself in the crook's shoes. Imagine creating this email. You've bothered to steal the logo and the colour scheme from the AICPA website. You've formatted the graphics and made it look nice. Would it really not occur to you to, just maybe, find someone who has English as a first language to proof read it first? Are the spammers so stupid they think Google Translate is good enough?

How many levels of stupidity does this reveal? Someone's stupid enough to send this spam. And someone, somewhere, might - just might - be stupid enough to have fallen for it.

Or is there something I don't understand about how this works?

PS: Just as I published this, another, almost identical email arrived.

This time, I think I might be in trouble. They're on to me and my tax return crook business. I hope I don't waiver to submit exposition within this term.

PPS: And then another...

... is it just me, or isn't it even less convincing when they send three in such quick succession? Isn't it just three times as unconvincing? Wouldn't one, well written, email have been more effective?

December 10 version: income tax refund shady transactions:

S.P.O.T.Why?

2012-11-28T15:56:00.002Z

Every year it happens... and every year it leaves me feeling confused.

People - rational people, many of them people whose opinions I value - start talking about the Sports Personality Of The Year.

They ask who you think will win it, they tell you who they think will win it... and all the while, the assumption seems to be that this-is-important. That the competition matters. That it is the prize that people crave.

And I don't get it. I don't think it's important and more than that, I don't understand how any sportsman or sportswoman could think it was important either. It seems to me to be the antithesis of what sport is really about.

Sportsmen and women compete. In events that have tangible outcomes. They strive to be the best at what they do. And when all is said and done, the outcome speaks for itself.

If you set out to be a great cyclist, then world records, gold medals and yellow jerseys are surely your ultimate goal. What could possibly be more meaningful to Bradley Wiggins than winning the Tour de France? That's the proof that he was the best of the best in his chosen sport.

Sport isn't about being popular. It's about some combination of being the fastest, the strongest, the most accurate, having the best technique and/or the most tactically astute. It's about strength of will, determination and above all else, ability. It has nothing whatsoever to do with who we like.

Usain Bolt is a likeable character. But that would count for nothing on the global stage if he wasn't the world's fastest man. And if the world's fastest man just happened to be an out and out jerk that wouldn't matter either. We would admire his athleticism all the same.

I don't understand how anyone is supposed to compare the achievements of the twelve nominees - or indeed the achievements of those who could just have easily been nominated but weren't. It just seems ridiculous. And actually, just a tiny bit insulting. As if our opinion matters more than the sport itself.

Tennis players measure themselves against tennis players. Heptathletes measure themselves against heptathletes and swimmers competing in S6 events, measure themselves against other swimmers in S6 events. Anything else must surely be meaningless to them. Mustn't it?

Saying to those people, "I know you set out to achieve something huge and you succeeded, which is lovely... but now we're going to have a vote and let you know whether you were the best at being the best" makes us seem a bit full of ourselves doesn't it? Why on earth would they care? "Yep, being the best in the world at your chosen event is all well and good... but is it really good enough... we'll have a vote and get back to you." It's a bit cocky isn't it?

Maybe it's all just a bit of fun. In which case, can people stop talking and writing about it as if it was important. And when I say that I don't care who wins, can people stop saying, "but it's the Sports Personality of the Year!" as if I hadn't understood the question in the first place. I know it is. That's why I don't care.

Absolutely Final

2012-11-19T09:17:00.000Z

Well that was an exhausting weekend.

I had the second of the current run of Screen Guild shows at Hoxton Hall on Saturday followed by the final show of my time at Absolute Radio on Sunday morning.

I love the Hoxton shows but there's nothing I do that's quite as nerve-wracking and/or time-consuming. It's always all new material - which means that I have no idea how it's going to go - and I start building the powerpoint for it at about 7am and finish, some 600-800 slides later at around 6pm... at which point it's time to head out to the venue.

The acts - Jay Foreman, James Acaster, Lucy Beaumont and Pete Firman - were all great - the line-ups are always strong - but the show didn't quite take off for me in the way the last one did. But overall it was a good night. And incredibly useful. Every bit of new material had legs. So nothing will get thrown away as useless, but all of it will need honing if it's to survive in the big bad world of stand up.

Which, I guess, is the point of these shows.

It was followed by an early start and our final show from Absolute Radio. Which was difficult for completely different reasons. I blogged about the reasons a wee while ago so I won't retread the same ground now suffice to say I've loved working there and know I will miss it hugely. We wanted to avoid getting mawkish and overly-sentimental about it all so I hope the final show wasn't wallowing in it's final-show-ness.

Michael wasn't there this week - he had a show in Moscow - so I took on the angry mantle and did a Dave Gorman Isn't Michael Legge But Is Angry feature in his stead, while all the other regular features were in place with a final Ward's Weekly Word and a not-really-final Found Poem.

I say not-really-final because Found Poetry found its way into the last tour show, exist in cheap-and-cheerful pamphlet form, I regularly put one in the Hoxton shows and I did one on stage when I guested at the Horne Section recently.

I won't continue to put one together every week - I'm looking forward to not spending quite so much time wading through the insanity that is the bottom-half-of-the-internet - but I will still compile new ones from time to time because they provide a really useful change of tone and pace to a live show - so I'll keep them in the mix for future projects.

There were two very different songs from home this week. The first is folky, the other all electronic. But both of them are fantastic and if the final show's music hadn't involved a ukulele and a stylophone something would have been amiss. This is Stand Up Show by Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell from the album, Kite.

And this is The Robot Heart by Alto45 who describe what they do as "homemade pop music from three men in labcoats". You can find this track on the album, The Spectrum Sings.

I've added these two tunes to my Spotify playlist of (nearly) all the songs I've brought in from home this year. It's here... and the podcasts for the show - which contain all the talky content from the Sunday morning as well as loads of extras - should be here.

If you've listened to the shows - whether live or in podcast form - then we're proud that you chose to join us and appreciative of your company. We wanted to make the show not be about us - and we were always really proud of how smart and funny the audience would be. Thanks.

Absolutely November 11th...

2012-11-11T12:57:00.000Z

Two great songs-from-home this week - at least I hope you'll think so.

I can already hear some of the cynics amongst you dismissing my first choice. "When you've heard one French, pop-punk tune about greyhound racing," you're saying, "you might as well have heard them all." Maybe you're right. Maybe you're wrong. In any case, here's another. At least I think it's about greyhound racing... I mean, it is called Greyhound Racing so it probably mentions it somewhere. It's by Concrete Knives:

Concrete Knives - Greyhound Racing by Sky Walker_

When I read the blurb on this CD I was put off a bit. I don't know why the words, “...has recorded 9 albums in his bedroom in the last 4 years” would do that... I only know that they did.

I also know that when I put the CD in, I really, really liked what I heard.

The band are called Sheepy - they're a three-piece from Liverpool and they're the outlet for the obviously-very-prolific songwriting talent of Luke Jones. This track's called Another Day and it's ace:

Sheepy - Another Day by Blang

I've added these two tunes to my Spotify playlist of (nearly) all the songs I've brought in from home this year. It's here... and the podcasts for the show - which contain all the talky content from the Sunday morning as well as loads of extras - should be here.

Of course it would be odd not to acknowledge that this morning was Michael's last show with us. It's a real shame that he's not available for next week's last hurrah... but that's just the way it's panned out.

I've thought of Michael as the show's unofficial lodger. When he first turned up I think he was only meant to be doing a couple of weeks... but everyone liked him being there so much we all just carried on. Which is surely the way these things should be.

And now we only have one more week left to go. I hope you can join us for it. 10 til 12. Sunday morning. Yeah?

Yeah.

Ace.

Y'know... like... if you're interested and stuff...

2012-11-08T14:11:00.002Z

This is one of those blog posts that's only really of interest to some and might appear a bit presumptuous to others. Apologies if you're one of the others.

One of the comments I've had a lot since we announced the impending end of the radio show - there are still two more weeks that we hope you'll join us for - is "please tell us about whatever it is you're up to next?"

Which of course, I always try to. After all - there's little point in performing live, publishing books, making TV or radio shows and not telling people about their existence.

But one of the things that twitter makes very apparent is that it's incredibly easy to miss things. When I was on tour earlier this year I would tweet my tour dates. No matter how many times I did so I would always get tweets from people saying, "I wish I'd known you were coming to [wherever] I'd have come if I'd known." Twitter is a fast moving thing... you're either online at the time or you're not.

Anyway... a far more reliable way is to sign up to my mailing list. You can do so here:

I can't add addresses personally... you have to do that yourself. It sends an email to the address in question with a link you click to confirm that you want in. That way I can't be accused of spamming people with stuff they haven't asked for.

I don't use it often. I only use it when there's something to say and of course I don't share your email address with anyone else. But it does mean you definitely get to hear about tour dates and stuff and when it comes to tickets for recordings etc - which are normally free - I always try and give the mailing list a day or two's notice first.

Anyway. It's there. Y'know... like... if you're interested and stuff...

Absolutely November 4th

2012-11-04T19:19:00.000Z

If you listened to this morning's show then you'll already know that we're going to end our run on Absolute in a couple of weeks.

I'll explain more - not that there's really much more to explain - further down, but our attitude to the show is that it'll be business as usual for the final two weeks and it's business as usual here as well, so first of all I'll run through the show and the songs-from-home as per usual.

First up, was this track, Never Knew Your Name, from Madness's new album, Oui, Oui, Si, Si, Ja, Ja, Da which came out on Monday.

The fact that Madness have returned, not just to reunion gigs but as a creative force turning out great new material is a source of great joy to me - and I feel very much the same about the return of Dexy's Midnight Runners - or Dexys as they're now known - whose latest incarnation has been a triumph.

We were thrilled to have two of the band - Jim Paterson and the amazing Kevin Rowland in the studio for an interview. Facinating, charming, funny men the pair of them and the new album, One Day I'm Going To Soar is a thing of magnificence.

Incapable Of Love is the latest single from the album... here it is:

And finally... a second tune from the band, Grouplove who were also on the show a few weeks ago. This is Tongue Tied.

Of course the hardest link of this morning's show was the one where we broke the news that the run was going to come to an end in two weeks' time. It's difficult to pitch that kind of thing in the right way because we know that all sorts of different people are listening in all sorts of different ways. If we act as though it's a tragedy of some kind - which it isn't - we come across as self-regarding egotists of the highest order. The very thought makes me shudder. At the same time, it would be weird and kind of impolite to just not mention it.

I don't have a bad word to say about Absolute - it's been an amazing place to work. The last three years have been a blast and I know I'll miss it when it's gone. But it feels right to move on all the same. I don't know what will happen next... but then I've always enjoyed not-knowing what life has in store. I think a bit of uncertainty is good for a comic.

So the story is simply that there is no story... just a bunch of people deciding that it's time to bow out gracefully in order to see what new challenge will come along.

As it happens, Michael won't be available for our last show so next week - November 11th will be his last appearance... and the week after - November 18th - will be the last for me and Danielle. We don't want to get mawkish about things so it'll just be business as normal for our last couple of shows. It'll be more fun if more of you join us. After all, the show was never about us.

My Spotify playlist of (nearly) all the songs I've brought in from home this year can be found here... and the podcasts for the show - which contain all the talky content from the Sunday morning as well as loads of extras - should be here.