Nov 12, 2022
Review: Dave Gorman — Powerpoint to the People
Middlesbrough Town Hall, 11 November 2022
After a three year hiatus Dave Gorman returns to a slightly different Middlesbrough from his last visit. For starters, it’s about 10 degrees warmer, and a whole lot less pissy wet. Another significant difference this time is the lack of a support act, perhaps to shave costs in an increasingly expensive business environment. No Jay Foreman, or Nick Doody this time out to ease us into proceedings. For whatever reason it seems to be increasingly common even for bigger names to make things more “one-man operated”, in proper bus driver fashion, and Dave tonight is another who’s made that move.
What this means is that, to me at least, this feels like a show with two distinct halves. The first half feels like it’s got more laughs per minute, partly because feels like it covers a wider range of subjects, though it is used to set up things for later, including a couple of nice gags about crisps and Muller Lites¹. The second half goes for fewer targets, and spends more time developing themes and letting things unfold.
But the first significant order of business is asking how it IS possible for a man in his fifties is able to hoof himself in his (for him, worryingly increasingly pendulous) balls, which caused him significant embarrassment with his GP. But, Dave being Dave, you know just how much effort he will take to find out. It also gives him a nice hook to set a running gag going, which he deploys at points through the evening. Lots of the focus was being a stay at home dad, homeschooling during the lockdowns, which meant, to his consternation, that, to his own chagrin, he has turned (as a result of the phonics he’s been doing with his son) into a man who pronounces “H” as “haitch”. But that only set him wondering about how weird the alphabet is, and how it is not written in alphabetical order. So that clearly needs fixing. Be prepared for singing at this point.
It’s odd the things that annoy him. Other than his own pronunciation of the letter H, he seems to be particularly excised by the continued existence of Salt and Shake crisps, and the fact that Walkers have somewhat querulously decided to have both their own and Smiths, branding on the packets. He follows this with a discursion on the phenomenon of billionaires and their rockets: Bezos, Branson and Musk. At this point he rather testily, and quite correctly reminds us that though Branson is hailed as the first to do the journey, he didn’t actually go into space². There was no comment about Jeff’s cock shaped rockets, which shows that Dave will quite happily avoid the obvious, and oh so easy targets. And it’s this subject that forms the basis for the now obligatory (and hilarious) Found Poem that rounds off part one, before he takes a well earned 15 minute breather.
The second half begins with another look back to the lockdown, and an explanation of how, as a younger man, he though he was odd for liking a quiet pint, a game of darts, and a cryptic crossword. Now, he appears to have reached his “natural” age where all of these pursuits are entirely reasonable and he’s perfectly happy for it to be so. But the lockdown meant that he couldn’t tour, and he had to find other means of generating an income. So it was that crossword fan Dave began life as a crossword setter. But he also gained a nemesis! And he tells us about his tussles with “Jane”, and how things worked out there.
Finally comes what is effectively the centrepiece of the show, which I can’t really talk about, because, for a number of reasons, Dave specifically has asked us not to. But it’s delicious, joyful and silly, is entirely Gormanesque³ in its construction, and uses many very specific callbacks to earlier in the show. But all of that starts from musing about the notion of celebrity, which itself was occasioned by him trying to convince us that Tom Hanks, far from being the “nicest man in Hollywood”, is actually a dick. And he makes a fairly convincing case for it too⁴, but not for the reasons you might expect.
Over the years, Dave Gorman has honed the use of PowerPoint as a performance tool to a fine edge, and again he deploys it deftly. You know what you’re going to get in terms of the loose form, but the fun is always in the details and the journey, even before you hit the end point. This one is another (mostly) amiable ramble through the mind of a very interesting chap indeed. Long may he continue.
¹ Make sure you don’t arrive late, because you’ll miss the setup for at least one of those.
² The Branson journey only got to around 53 miles up, a significant distance below the actual Kármán line, as it happens. It still didn’t stop the bearded tit banging on about it, did it?.
³ I’d say it’s kind of like Heath Robinson in comedy terms, but not quite in the realms of bricolage. It’s something more … engineered, in the best possible way.
⁴ Which also drags in Harrisson Ford.
