Greg Davies Live: The Back of My Mum's Head [DVD]

Product Information

This show is funny, but to be clear, if you're looking for insight into the human condition you'll be better off eating a bun or picking up a stick.

It’s a great conclusion to a uproarious night of anecdotes, told by a real pro, who rather than resting on his TV laurels is cementing his position of one of Britain’s finest storytelling comedians. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. He concedes that the minor details in a creepy tale from an American driving holiday make it sounds like it was written by Stephen King; while the pair of childhood mates he takes to a rock festival in a hideously misguided attempt to recapture their youth seem like a comic-book threesome: one giant, one tiny man, and one pencil-thin. Ed Gamble was delayed by a miserable rail service meltdown, and in voiceover Davies delights in the fact he’s shoving him straight on to the stage, 20 minutes later than planned, sweating and breathless after his run from the station. While the name of Greg Davies’s last, excellent, show Throwing Cheeseballs At A Dog was an accurate representation of the central anecdote, The Back Of My Mum’s Head is more esoteric.Details Star of We Are Klang (BBC3) and well known as Mr Gilbert, Head of Sixth Form in The Inbetweeners (E4), Greg Davies performs his hotly anticipated stand-up show Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog.

One of the items on the menu outlining the show is ‘discrediting children’, which he delivers as promised, along with a soundscape (largely for Davies’s own amusement that one) and ‘fun with a racist’ – a taxi-driver, naturally, whose ignorance towards different people is matched only by his ignorance towards pie composition.While many comics spin out their tales seeking laughs in the details, Davies distils many his yarns down to only their funny essence, moving quickly from one tale to the next. It's just the fact that Greg Davies sometimes starts fake laughing about a joke he's going to tell and that is a bit annoying. Davies Snr makes a couple of appearances here, perhaps to recalibrate the meter of ‘normal behaviour’ and serve as a reminder of where Davies got his eccentricities from, even if watered down over the generation. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

A vague theme of the show is that Davies resents the fact he’s had to grow up, and wants to remain that teenager confusing his mum.Is it part of a comedian’s personality that means they attract more than their share of strange experiences – or are they simply better equipped to spot them and retell them? Davies himself doesn’t shy away from similarly ikky ground, and his stories can be charmingly horrific as he sugars the pill with his easy-going charisma. A couple of times, he presents a series of tales as a Top 5 countdown – of his favourite involuntary noises, or most shockingly inappropriate lines he’s heard – the former being punctuated by the audience’s cacophonous, ill-timed attempt at the old Pick Of The Pops theme.