Dave Gorman's comedy show presses all the right buttons (From Times Series)

Dave Gorman's comedy show presses all the right buttons

9:51am Friday 11th November 2011 in Interviews By Melanie Dakin

Technology may not be to everyone’s taste but self-styled gadget man and award-winning comedian Dave Gorman is rarely to be seen on stage these days without his laptop and a projector screen. After an eight year absence, Dave returned to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year with his sell-out show Dave Gorman’s PowerPoint Presentation, which arrives at Watford Colosseum this month, halfway through a national tour.

I ask Dave if his equipment is still holding up.

“It’s doing very well, thank you,“ he says. “On a tour like this it is important to look after it but the laptops I use on stage are my slave children. They do nothing but run the show, they never go online. What people normally do with their laptops is to use it as a way of dealing with the world for everything from downloading YouTube videos to sending emails and that makes them clunky and slows them down. Mine is just an extension of my projector screen.“

Dave tells me he displays a staggering total of 850 images at each outing but he’s offended that audiences believe there is someone else behind the scenes pressing the buttons.

“Almost every night people ask me whose operating the slides and I tell them it’s just me and the projector – we’re a double act. I’m putting up new slides every three minutes or so; the longest is a 20 second video, so I’m choreographing the images and talking constantly. They think I’ve learned a script word for word but I’ve never written it down. I try and let things develop that don’t appear important early on but later become so; it’s like a big load of scaffolding around the material that only I can see.“

Dave started his career as a stand-up at the age of 19. He went on to write for Caroline Aherne on The Mrs Merton Show before starting his series of one-man narrative shows for Fringe audiences that began with Reasons To Be Cheerful – a 90-minute musing about an Ian Dury song.

It’s just me and the projector – we’re a double act

Dave Gorman

His utopian odyssey Better World followed and the hugely successful Are You Dave Gorman?, which began as a nationwide search for namesakes and spawned a national tour, book, TV series and international appearances.

His next show, the internet-based Googlewhack Adventure did three UK tours, two trips to Australia and Canada, an off-Broadway run and a tour of the States. His work has won Best One Person Show at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival (twice) and the Barry Award at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, as well as nominations for the Perrier Award, South Bank Award and the American Drama Desk Award.

During 2005-2008 he took a break from live shows to write about and film his US adventure, America Unchained. From 2009 to 2010 he returned to the stage with a comedy bike tour around the UK, which saw him cycling between gigs up to 70 miles a day.

“The first week of the tour I thought I’d made a terrible mistake I was so dead at the end of every night. Then suddenly the adrenaline kicked in and I could just do it and felt I could do anything at all. It was certainly a good fast-track way to fitness.“

A busy 2011 has seen Dave release his fourth book, Dave Gorman Vs the Rest of the World, host a radio show on Sunday mornings and headline Dave’s One Night Stand for channel Dave. His monthly comedy night, Dave Gorman’s Screen Guild at Hoxton Hall is on hold while he’s on tour but the projector screen comes out for those gigs as well.

“It’s become the way I style my material, anything I write in my notepad I can visualise how to make it funnier with extra detail and analysis in PowerPoint. I don’t write it, I have to perform it in front of an audience with a screen, it’s my creative space; my playground for new ideas.“

Dave Gorman’s PowerPoint Presentation is on Thursday, November 17 at The Colosseum, Rickmansworth Road, Watford. Details: 0845 075 3993