MOPPING-UP OPERATIONS
This glass-is-half-empty guy hopes to make his drama comedy funny, writes Tymon Smith
The hulking 2.03m frame of comedian Greg Davies is familiar to legions of fans of British comedy who’ve been loyal followers of his successful standup career, his distinctive roles in the sitcoms The Inbetweeners, Man Down and Cuckoo, as well as his numerous television comedy-panel show appearances and hugely popular role as the man in charge of the competitive comedystar shenanigans of Taskmaster and now host of the reboot of the seminal pop-music quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
Now Davies has written and stars in The Cleaner, a BBC adaptation of a German comedy series, a six-part dramatic comedy series of standalone episodes that recount absurdly hilarious interactions from the life of his character, crime-scene cleaner Paul “Wicky” Wickstead.
Before we talk about ‘The Cleaner’, is it true that when you were born, your father drove your mother across the Welsh border so that she could give birth to you there and ensure that you would be eligible to be a Welsh national team rugby player?
Fact. Absolutely true. The poor woman was driven 45 miles into Welsh territory when she could have been driven seven miles to an English hospital and he put her in the back of the car to ensure that he would get a Welsh international rugby player. He ended up with an asthmatic comedian and, I think, got what he deserved.
Had you heard of the German series before you were approached? It’s a cliché, but many of us don’t exactly celebrate the Germans for their sense of humour ...
I’d never heard of it, no. The company Studio Hamburg who made the original contacted the BBC and asked if I would be interested. It was just for me to play the cleaner but once I said I’d be keen at having a go at adapting it as well, they were keen so it worked out really well.
It’s kind of a cliché and internationally we all think that the Germans are dour, organised, serious folk but there’s a very definite sense of humour there. If anything, in watching the original series — and I watched many, many episodes of it because there are seven series over there — the thing that surprised me is that it’s actually quite slapstick, there’s a lot of people falling over and banging their heads as well as the more nuanced things.
What attracted you to the premise?
It’s quite an old-fashioned drama in many ways; it’s like a two-hander play most weeks. I really loved that and I really loved minimising the number of characters because it means you get to know them properly and it becomes an exercise in writing character.
My standup and a lot of my previous roles are quite maniacally energetic. He loses his temper a little bit, this character, but he can’t really freewheel in the way that I have in a lot of other parts and he has to earn his authority and so I think it’s a bit more nuanced than things I’ve previously done and I welcome that and I hope that we get more series and as the series goes on we really explore him as a bloke, because I find the original guy that I was presented with really interesting.
Did you write the series with particular collaborators in mind or did you just hope that they would be interested enough to participate when the time came?
I’m very much a glass-is-half-empty man in life — I always presume that everyone’s going to say, “I don’t want to work with that tall, fat guy.” But then the production company phoned me up and said, “Well Helena Bonham Carter’s doing it.” I didn’t really allow myself to imagine who might say yes, apart from David Mitchell, who’s in the second episode. I know David and I knew he was perfect for it but the others were all a surprise to me.
What do you hope audiences take away from the show?
I just hope that it’s funny, I think it’s funny often, but it’s also a little closer to drama than I’ve ever done before and I hope that people take away the human stories from it. I hope they’re nice, rounded comedy dramas, that’s all.