Words by Katy Roberts
Back by popular demand, comedian and actor Greg Davies brought his hugely successful stand up tour, The Back of My Mum’s Head, to Sheffield City Hall this month. Davies’ brilliance as a comedian lies in the fact that he is, for the most part of the show, the butt of his own jokes, and for those who missed this tour the first time round, get tickets, because this show is an absolute hoot.
Split to a series of sections, such as Audience Participation (which involved Davies walking up to an audience member, asking, “How are you?”, before walking straight back to his flip chart to tick that off the list), Fun With A Racist (it’s a lot funnier than it sounds), a Soundscape and A Moving Song and A Powerful Message.
The Soundscape that Davies creates is one of the show’s highlights, created through a series of anecdotes (at his expense, of course), from his struggle to keep his decency while watching a religious festival in Spain, breaking a toilet and thwacking a friend across the face with a family pack of pitta breads. It sounds completely ridiculous, and it is, but it works superbly.
Before he became a comedian, Davies was a school teacher, and his lesson here is that in fact, there’s no such thing as normal and he laments the fact that an adult “filter” comes into play once we’ve grown up. However – he reminds us that this is only the illusion of normality. “We are hanging onto sanity by our fingertips”.
This is demonstrated best through Davies’ telling of a family trip to Florida, which sees an outburst from his bad-tempered and oft-tormented (by him) teenage sister, seeing off a gang of would-be murderers, which almost brought the roof of Sheffield City Hall down with laughter. Thus, making the case for leaving the filter off occasionally (“it might save your life”), and is a nod to his mum’s oft-heard refrain to him of “it’s not normal, love” – another fantastic section which hammers home the message that we’re all just a little bit weird, really.
Full of the dry, witty, self-deprecating humour that makes him so brilliant, Greg Davies’ return to the Sheffield stage is a hugely welcome one. If you can get tickets for the tour this second time round – go, you won’t regret it.
A special mention should also be included for Ed Gamble, Davies’ support act, who was brilliant. Warming up the audience, he talked candidly about having diabetes (and how, after losing a fair amount of weight, he still didn’t fit into River Island clothes but instead nearly got cut in half by one of their belt buckles), a lad’s holiday to Tenerife (which featured so many posh people, out of a group of 30, there were 3 Ruperts), and an unfortunate incident which saw his best friend’s fancy dress costume go from hilarious man-dressed-as-Catwoman to a terrible misunderstanding incredibly quickly. Wonderfully energetic, and like Davies, Ed Gamble is not afraid to make fun of himself – this guy definitely one to look out for in the future.
Now touring. For ticket information and more details, visit www.gregdavies.co.uk.
