Dave Gorman’s PowerPoint Presentation, St. George’s Hall, Bradford, Saturday 15th October 2011
Supported by Jay Foreham
My road to seeing Dave Gorman live has been like a story about the worst ever stalker. I’ve been a fan of the comedian since watching his ‘Astrology Experiment’ on television many years ago, then picking up his books, and keeping up with his work through his writing, stand-up DVDs and shows like ‘Genius’.
Come last year I finally got the opportunity to see him live but, due to a combination of a burst ear drum, a brain infection, bells palsy and being admitted to hospital (I’ll put my violin away in a minute) I had to miss his tour due to being locked up inside Leeds General Infirmary and my ticket going to waste.
Fast forward fourteen minutes and, in full health, I finally managed to catch up with Dave at the Student Radio Awards in Hatfield where I finally got to talk to him about radio and finally meet someone on my list of people-I’d-really-like-to-meet. (Next up Rowan Atkinson, Nick Park and Danny Wallace if anyone knows there addresses).
Move forward another six months and I see that Dave is due to perform at St. George’s hall, about ten minutes from my front door: an opportunity not to miss! Unfortunately I knew I’d have to miss it because I was off to Wales with a friend to DJ with manager’s best friend’s wedding in a field in Wales, so I didn’t bother getting a ticket.
It was only two hours before the gig when I was surfing on Twitter with a pint of cider while two friends soldered some XLR cable (honestly I’m not making any of this weird intro story up yet) that I realised he was in Bradford on the night and, now not having to visit the land of our fathers, I was free, so a quick call to the theatre bagged me a ticket. All that was left to do was stumbled to KFC an hour before the doors, wolf down some fried chicken as all the other proper restaurants were full, and head over to the theatre.
Amazingly, as I am a sad individual who goes to the theatre on his own (last night’s excuse was I’d only bought the tickets within a film’s length away from the start), I actually managed to bag a decent stalls seat at the end of a row so got a good view of the two hours of comedy.
The gig was opened with a thirty-five minute set from probably the best comedy support act I’ve ever seen. I always enjoy seeing the support acts as they can bring something new to the table; I even bought tickets to see Al Murray just to see Chris Ramsey support, but found the main act just as good of course. I’ve not quite reached the level of some people who bought tickets to a film just to see the new Harry Potter trailer before it, as has happened.
The opening act was comedy singer Jay Foreham who performed a dozen or so comedy songs plus some other small skits, all of which were fantastic, especially ‘Stealing Food’; his musical take on the Royal Wedding which opened the set; and closer ‘Moon Chavs’, which he promised would stick in people’s minds for ages and ruin their week. Yes, it’s still circling in my head. It seems that I’m late to the game with Jay as, posting ‘Moon Chavs, Chavs on the Moon’ on Facebook during the interval gave my friends the opportunity to post the successive lyrics on my profile. Clearly someone who is popular with a lot of people.
Though it was a basic set-up of just him and a mic, there was a smattering of interesting extras thrown into his set, from lighting changes to a song-duet with a member of the audience, and though not all the songs was massively laugh-out loud funny, they were some of the best original comedy songs I’ve heard in a long time and all brought a smile to my face, up there with Weird Al and the Barron Knights. Plus, he was selling his CD during the interval for a fiver, one of which I snapped up – bargain! – so I’d recommend you grab one of them if you see a tour date.
Jay Foreham was a fantastic opener to the set; at thirty-five minutes it was far more than you’d expect from an opening act, the songs were catchy, funny and memorable, and he was a likeable person, even going out to meet people in the lobby.
After a twenty-minute interval it was time for Dave Gorman to come on stage, possibly one of the funniest Jewish comedians around. And if you don’t get that then go and see his show!
Armed with nothing more than a large screen, a clicker for swapping slides, a laptop and a lapel mic, Dave jumped straight into his PowerPoint Presentation, though arguably it really should be a KeyPoint Presentation as his laptop was by Apple, but calling it by that name would make it sound like it’d be a businessman showing off pie charts and graphs on economic strategy development. I also knew it wasn’t PowerPoint as there was no animated GIFs to be seen.
It is difficult to describe the show for two reasons: firstly, not to give away the hilarious jokes, which I won’t; secondly because, like surfing around on the Internet that makes up the basis of the show, the stand-up routine jumped from topic-to-topic so quickly it was like one of those conversations you have in the pub that you can’t remember how you got onto it from talking about something unrelated. It’s a tribute to the structure of the show that the majority of the topics came from him listing his vital statistics such as facial hair, religion and marital status.
There are too many topics to mention but his takes on Twitter, mobile phones and comments on Internet news articles were amazing, and because of the way he laid them out everyone leaving the theatre will be observing things as they go through their daily lives and these triggering memories of the show. I don’t think I’ll be able to look at a mobile phone advert, in particular a HTC one, again in the same way.
His stand-up was supported by great screen shots, graphs, videos and photos and all combined to make it a visual and engaging show and, though themes would jump from one to another, he’d written in lines that harked back to completely unrelated stories and it all gelled really well. Plus, it’s a show connected to real-life as a lot of it spanned from his actions on Twitter and out there in the wide world and, yes, after the show I found the posts he would refer to, showing it was indeed all based in truth. Observational, and real-life, comedy, after all, is the best.
I really enjoyed Dave Gorman’s stand-up on Googlewhack and, if you enjoyed that, you will love this even more. At just over an hour it was maybe a little shorter than I’d like but he’d packed in plenty of observational humour into that time and I can’t complain as it was one of the best stand-up performances I’d seen, even if at times the speed of his delivery meant it wasn’t always easy to follow what he was saying. Plus, the timing of the show was crucial for one more joke which was possibly the best planned ending to a show ever and tied in nicely with everything, continuing the theme of tie-ing up as Jay Foreman was brought back onto stage during the show to support the encore.
If you can still get tickets to any of the later gigs on the tour I would highly recommend you do. A laugh-out-loud two hours from a solid support and excellent main act that, through the choice of subject matter and its relation to our everyday life in 2011, will stay with you for a long time. I just hope they bring it out on DVD so I can share the laughs with other people who may miss this.
9/10
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