Dave Gorman is a documentary-comedian
and humorist. He performs comedy shows on stage in
which he tells true stories of extreme adventures and
presents the evidence to the audience in order to prove
to them that, unlike in most other stage presentations,
it is a true story. He is a former stand-up comedian.
Dave Gorman shot to fame following a drunken bet
with his friend Danny Wallace. The bet was thus: Dave
claimed that he shared the name "Dave Gorman" with
the assistant manager of East Fife F.C. and that there
must be "loads" of others around. Danny disagreed
with him. So the two travelled to East Fife (from London—several
hundred miles), with a video camera, to meet the assistant
manager, whose name was indeed Dave Gorman. More trips
followed to meet more Dave Gormans.
Thus far the bet was fairly vague, but on the way
to meet Dave Gormans numbers four and five, they debated
what "loads" meant. Danny decided on one
for every card in the deck. That is 54 (including jokers).
To aid the search, which by his own admission became
scarily serious, Dave created a stage-show about their
travels that was also used to appeal for further Dave
Gormen to come forward. The show was called Are You
Dave Gorman?. This acquired something of a cult following
and several people helped Dave in his quest, which
he did eventually complete. (Five even changed their
names by deed poll to Dave Gorman).
All this came to the attention of the BBC, who gave
Dave a series, co-written and co-produced by Danny,
entitled The Dave Gorman Collection, which took the
form of televised lectures, in which he explained what
he had done. Later a book entitled Are You Dave Gorman?
was written by the two of them.
Once the TV show existed Dave stopped touring the
show in the UK, instead taking it to several overseas
festivals and later running the show for 3 months off-Broadway,
a run which saw Dave appearing as a fully-fledged guest
on The Late Show With David Letterman.
Two Australian soap operas have named fictional characters
Dave Gorman as an in-joke and the comedian has been
bombarded with so many e-mails about it that he has
had to publicly appeal to people to stop sending him
details of other Dave Gormans. He was, after all, only
trying to meet 54. At the time of writing he has met
107.
His second television series was entitled Dave Gorman's
Important Astrology Experiment, and was quite a novel
and unexpected idea for a comedy show, being based
upon the idea of a controlled scientific experiment,
although naturally not a serious one.
The premise was that it would test whether or not
astrology really worked. Over the course of forty days,
he would try to follow any instructions given to people
with his star sign in a selection of horoscopes, while
his "control experiment" (his twin brother,
Nick) ignored them. Each would record the events of
each day, and how they fared in each of three areas
of life: love, health, and wealth. On each episode
of the show, Dave would show footage of the amusing
situations he got into by trying to follow his horoscope,
and then asked a panel of "experts" in the
studio to assess how he had fared in the three areas.
Following an audience vote, Dave would display on a "happiness
graph" the difference between how he and his twin
brother had fared that week, and whether it showed
that astrology had produced a positive effect, a negative
effect, or no significant effect at all. To reveal
its conclusion would perhaps spoil the ending for anyone
who has not seen it, and would in any case not add
greatly to human knowledge, as it was all just a bit
of fun.
In 2003 he toured Britain with a show entitled Dave
Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, and published a book
of the same name. It is another true story. While pretending
to write a novel for his publisher (Random House) Dave
became obsessed with Googlewhacks and travelled across
the world finding people who had authored them. This
show was premiered at the Melbourne International Comedy
Festival and then went on to sell out for a two week
run at the Sydney Opera House (albeit in its smallest
venue: Studio Theatre). It also sold out in a major
venue at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe before embarking
on a major UK tour of 75 shows in the space of 3 months.
It won Dave the award for Best One Person Show at the
HBO US Comedy Arts Show in Aspen, Colorado, an award
he had previously won for the show "Are You Dave
Gorman?" He ended up writing a book about his
Googlewhack Adventure which went on to be the Sunday
Times Number One Best Seller. During his "Googlewhack
Adventure", Gorman had a nervous breakdown which
he discusses frankly in the show.
Before his solo successes, Dave was in demand as
a writer, having co-written three series of The Mrs
Merton Show as well as writing for many other TV series
in the UK. In 2003, he was listed in The Observer as
one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy. |