Oddly, the strangest thing about Man Down, Greg Davies’s Channel 4 sitcom in which he plays a teacher, is not the far-fetched set pieces or the ludicrous characters. It is the fact that the school drama studio in which his character works, while hating his job, is the very one Davies used to teach in for real – while hating his job. Out the back, you can find a blackened hole in the bricks where he used to stub out cigarettes while commiserating with the equally miserable music teacher.
Doesn’t it feel odd to be back there? It is, he says with a laugh, “almost therapy. Every time I wrote a school scene I thought of that drama studio, because that’s where I was a bit lost at sea. I often run teaching down in my standup, but I had some great years and it’s a great job. It represented a place where I knew what I wanted to do but didn’t have the courage. So it’s nice to be back in that room remembering myself. It’s not somewhere I’ve had profound revelations, it’s just a fairly warm feeling. I sat in that room dreaming of doing something like this.”
This is two acclaimed solo standup tours, his own sitcom, appearances on panel shows and, perhaps most famously, his role as another teacher, Mr Gilbert, the head of sixth form in The Inbetweeners. There are times when he regrets not being brave enough to try for a career in comedy earlier, but what would be the point in worrying about that now?
We meet in a cafe in south London, near where Davies, 47, lives. There does not seem to be much of a distance between his stage persona and who he appears to be in real life – he is a generous talker, a talented storyteller.
Man Down, in which Davies plays Dan, an inept fortysomething manchild, is about to start its second series. One of the best things about it was the casting of Rik Mayall as Dan’s dad – Davies looks like an overgrown version of Mayall – and the cruel, anarchic pranks he played on his son. Mayall’s sudden death last year feels like a huge loss to the show.
Working with Mayall, whose comedy The Young Ones had been a massive influence on Davies as a boy, was a dream, he says. “He was a force of nature. His appetite was not blunted, and his enthusiasm and his ambition were huge.” And so professional, he adds. “He often asked me: ‘What’s my motivation for this scene?’ ‘Why am I sitting on your toilet having a shit?’ was a question he genuinely asked me, and I had to say: ‘It’s … fun? There’s nothing deeper than that, I’m sorry’.”
Davies grew up in Wem, a small town in Shropshire. Comedy was a big feature in his house – his dad was the funniest man he has ever met – but until his late teens, he had no idea that comedy could be a career. His father, a lecturer, was teaching in the US, and Davies, his A-levels finished, went out to visit. Because his dad was at work, Davies spent all day listening to the two tapes he had brought for his Walkman: the Smiths’ The Queen is Dead, and Eddie Murphy’s live show Delirious. “It’s a hugely offensive piece of work now,” he laughs, “but there are elements that are such great storytelling. It was the first time I thought: ‘You get paid for this? For telling silly stories?’”
Davies had been involved in amateur dramatics, and went on to do English and drama at university. He took his final third-year piece, a silly, one-man play, to the Edinburgh fringe, performing at lunchtime for three days, “to about four people”. One reviewer came and though “he definitely fell asleep during it”, he saw enough to write: “The young man ruined a perfectly good autobiography by pulling silly faces.”
“It was the first time I’d been into the big wide world and it horrified me,” says Davies. Properly? It put him off? “Yeah. I was a very young 21-year-old. I was very scared. I spent three years at university in west London and I went into central London three times. I came from Shropshire, and just having travelled that far was enough ambition.”
His father suggested he get a proper job so Davies spent the next 13 years teaching. “My dad was wonderful but that was his one piece of terrible advice, although my mum and sister think I needed to toughen my hide before I entered this world and they were probably right because I would have crumbled back then. I wouldn’t have had the guts for it. I’ve barely got the guts now.”
At 33, sure that he would turn into a teacher like one of those he had seen sitting miserably around a table, moaning about a child, he had “an early midlife crisis. I had a very pragmatic girlfriend at the time, a remarkable woman who said: ‘I don’t understand. You don’t want to do teaching, stop doing it; you want to do comedy, start doing it.’”
Davies took a comedy course, which gave him the courage to start gigging. Soon he was doing three gigs a week, while still teaching, though when a friend got him a job writing for the children’s TV channel CBBC, he gave his school, where he had just been made head of drama, six months’ notice.
What did it feel like when he left? “Amazing. And petrifying.” For the first couple of years he thought about walking away from it every day, he says. “It was so frightening. Once you’ve dared put your head above the parapet the idea that you’re not going to be good enough to progress, to me, was terrifying.” Did he have a career plan? “No. It was only ever: ‘Could I earn a living out of comedy?’”
He was in the sketch group We Are Klang (they had a shortlived series on BBC3), but it was the Inbetweeners that really raised his profile; he followed that with two successful standup shows. There have been parts in other things, the comedy Cuckoo for instance, and when Channel 4 commissioned Man Down he must have felt his career change was justified. Even so, he says his mother still worries about how his career is going, and his father regularly asked if he needed any money, so accustomed was he to bailing out Davies.
His father, Bob, died last year. How has that affected him? I don’t mean in the obvious sense – he was incredibly close to his father, and will have been devastated. But not many of us are so tightly bound to our parents in our work. Bob Davies is almost certainly the reason his son became a comedian – “I always had my dad’s full attention when I was being funny, so it’s no surprise that I’ve gone on to see just how much attention I can get by being funny” – and he featured often in his material. So much of Mayall’s character was inspired by Bob, for instance.
“By any stretch of the imagination, it’s a peculiar set of circumstances to lose a fictional father and real father in the same year,” says Davies. “It’s very difficult and I miss him terribly. We were a good father and son, we had a lot of fun together. I laugh with my mum and sister regularly, we are still reduced to fits of laughter remembering him. And I’m really glad he got to see what I did. Even when he was poorly and in a wheelchair, he was wheeled into gigs, and was of the opinion that he would have done a much better job – and rightly so.”
Will he be able to get out on stage and talk about his dad again without dissolving? “I suppose you try and compartmentalise the way you’re feeling. If I’m remembering great times we had together … It’s very simplistic but I don’t feel sad when I’m laughing. It’s easy to separate the two feelings. The joy of comedy is that you’re absolutely in control of what you reveal of yourself. People say I have talked about my dad for years, and I have, but I haven’t touched on our relationship really, I’ve just taken tiny aspects of his personality and profited from them.” He laughs. “Much to his irritation.”
He reminds me of this idea of being in control of what he reveals of himself when I ask him about his former relationship with Liz Kendall, the MP who was first to put herself forward for leader of the Labour party (they were together for eight years, and remain good friends). Was he wary of her career and how the things he said on stage or on panel shows might affect her? There is a long pause, then: “I’m really not comfortable talking about my personal life.” But it’s more a question about your work, I say. “I think,” he says, after another long pause, “if you’re creative and trying to do something that comes from a place of honesty, you can’t clip those wings for any reason. But that’s not to say it wasn’t something I was concerned about. Of course. But I do what I do. What is the point of pretending to be something other than I am? It would be ridiculous to start behaving differently. So, yes, something of concern but I’ve never modified what I do, and nor have I ever been expected to.” He is quiet, but smiling, his mouth clamped shut.
If Man Down gets a third series, he will spend most of his time on that, but he wants to do another standup show and tour next year “because I miss it. I haven’t done a gig for two years.” It will be interesting to see what he comes up with, partly because the more successful he becomes, the harder it is to pull off the conceit that he’s a tragic, middle-aged loser. “Yes, but I’m still a mess,” he says with a laugh. “Look at how fat I am.”
What does he love when he is standing there, in front of people? “I love to make people laugh and that will come from trying to make my dad laugh,” he says. “I love it in a visceral sense – it fills me full of hope. It’s instant gratification. It’s a group of people going, ‘Yes, you have done well, it’s funny’ straight away. It’s just joyful to see people laugh.”
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