‘I know exactly why I learned to be funny’
Ahead of Man Down’s return, Greg Davies, 49, talks leaving fatherhood too late – and why he won’t be telling Brexit jokes
Greg Davies, the 6ft 8in goliath of an actor and comedian, is relaying the ignominy of being told his running technique makes him look as though he’s having a cardiac arrest. He had been trying to get fit, using the NHS running plan “Couch to 5K”, until a word from someone who worked in the café of his local park stopped him in his tracks.
“He said that a few of them had been talking, and decided I needed to stop,” Davies says. “They were really worried I was going to die. I think it was because I was sweating and purple in the face. People were laughing at me. Now I try to go for a walk most days.”
The 49-year-old – who became a household name after playing Mr Gilbert, the deranged head of the sixth form in Channel 4’s comedy
The Inbetweeners – has instead given up meat and cheese, a tactic that has seen him shift a stone in three weeks (previously, Davies has weighed in at 20 stone).
“It’s an irony that, with the physical decline of age, comes more mental wellbeing,” he says. “It’s life’s cruel trick. You’ve settled down as a person, you feel happier with who you are and then you get a massive swollen prostate and have to go for a test every two weeks. It’s life’s way of saying the struggle isn’t over.”
In person, Davies is warm, selfdeprecating and laugh-out-loud funny. Yet, if he has made a career out of poking fun at himself and wringing comedy out of every situation with a sense of humour that’s as puerile as it can be surprisingly touching, there’s one subject he won’t go near.
“I don’t find Brexit funny,” he says, serious for the first time when we meet in a London café over breakfast (him: vegetarian fry-up). Unlike his contemporaries, who have turned Brexit into their bread and butter, Davies doesn’t allude to the B-word on his current tour, You Magnificent
Beast. “I find it depressing, so why remind others of it? I offer up some escapism.
“The state of the world petrifies me as much as it does everyone else at the moment. Anyone who comes to my show expecting incisive political analysis will be deeply disappointed.”
Instead, he sticks to a relatively safe comedy diet of love, death and education. But it’s the fourth series of
Man Down that we have met to discuss today. The Channel 4 sitcom, written by and starring Davies, is loosely based on his own experiences as a schoolteacher for 13 years (he taught secondary school drama and English in south London and Berkshire).
It centres on teacher Dan, a man-child who stumbles through life ruining most things and upsetting most people. Although, Davies insists, the script isn’t an exact re-telling of his own former career, “the truth of the character – someone who is ill-equipped to cope with life – is absolutely based on me.”
Rik Mayall played Dan’s father in the first series, before the actor passed away in 2014. It was an annus
horribilis for Davies, as his own father – who he was close to and on whom Mayall’s character had been based – died just a couple of months later.
“I have thousands of stories about him when he made me roar with laughter. I am still talking about him now and he has been dead for three years, the poor sod.
“It is nice to talk about. I talk about reframing him, rather than him being the man who was ill for a long time and now the dead dad. By talking about someone in a different context, away from six years of illness and death, you can reframe them.
“If you start talking about them in different terms then they are back with you. Talking about him on stage is quite cathartic. I like it.” The new episodes see Dan staring down the barrel of fatherhood. But, unlike his protagonist, Davies has never had children. “If I had had one when I was a teacher in my twenties it would have been an absolute disaster. I would have raised someone with fundamental problems,” he says.
Approaching 50, does he feel better equipped to raise a family now?
“I don’t know. I love my nieces [his sister has two daughters] and they are wonderful, but I get to say goodbye at the end of the day. I am leaving it a bit late. I can’t imagine it.”
Davies’s last known relationship, with Labour politician Liz Kendall, ended in 2015 just before the general election and her bid for party leadership, which she later lost to Jeremy Corbyn.
After eight years together, the pair parted amicably. But it taught Davies not to speak publicly about his private life. He says that they are still friends but politely declines to elaborate on his, or her, current relationship status. “Not that it is exciting,” he assures me. “It isn’t. I just find it easier.”
Davies was raised in Shropshire but has close ties to Wales, after his father Bob, also a teacher, drove his Welsh mother Pauline 45 miles over the border to ensure his son was born there and could therefore play rugby for the country. But it wasn’t to be – on one of their first rugby club outings, a young Davies ended up in floods of tears in the car park, overwhelmed and unwilling to play.
Instead, he studied drama and English at Brunel University, then drifted into teaching to impress his father. “He said: ‘You should probably get a real job’. I blinked and 13 years had gone by,” he says.
Davies finally made the jump into comedy after having an epiphany following a session in a flotation tank. “I was embarrassed talking about it for a long time, but I’m not now. I couldn’t stop crying afterwards. For four days I was waking up in tears. I had to stop the car on the way to work because I was crying so much,” he says.
A natural storyteller with booming voice, Davis’s first solo stand-up show, called Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog, debuted at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010. It was nominated for the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy Award, the Malcolm Hardee “Act Most Likely to Make a Million Quid” award, and went on a thrice-extended national run.
Being cast in The Inbetweeners in 2008 was his golden ticket and Davies has since sold out national arena tours, appeared on numerous panel shows, fronted BBC Three sitcom Cuckoo (for which he was Bafta nominated) and currently presents Taskmaster, where he challenges other comedians to undertake hare-brained tasks.
Davies is resolute that none of this is down to luck. “The whole idea of someone being intrinsically funny is nonsense,” he says. “Humour is learned behaviour and I know exactly why I learned to be funny. I did it from a very early age. My dad was a hilarious man and the way we interacted was being silly together. It was a way to hold his attention.”
Making people laugh was also a way for Davies to combat his crippling shyness at school, an early trait shared by many other funny men and women.
“The only difference between a comedian and someone else? We need to make people laugh more,” he says, poker-faced.
It would probably be unfair to give Mr Davies anything other than full marks for effort.
‘They were worried I was going to die. I was sweating and purple in the face’