Anyone who has seen a previous Dave Gorman show or his television series Modern Life Is Goodish knows what to expect: a show that's part lecture, part conversation, all pedantry, done with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation – clicker, laptop and onstage big screen as important as the patter, the text on screen often providing an addendum gag to the one he has already told, or increasing our anticipation of a payoff yet to come.
Which is not to say that his latest show, With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint, is more of the same-old. Yes, there's more of his forensically detailed analysis of everyday matters that for most of us go unexamined, but there's also more personal stuff here too, with an extra dash of cynicism about how television goes about its work and the inequities of social media.
Gorman updates us on what's happening in his life. He and his family have upped sticks from London to Bournemouth, so cue jokes about ageing and being in God's waiting room, but in trademark style the comic has a bunch of data and graphs to upend any stereotypes about the lovely South Coast resort. He may be 47 but he's not the youngest dude in town, and he can prove it.
His cry about so much of modern life - 'Can we stop factory-farming news?' - is genuine
He does, however, allow that the extra grey hairs in his beard nowadays (and a comic's unusual working patterns) have given him a taste for daytime television, and he starts on a examination of two programmes, The Chase and Cash in the Attic, which feature heavily in the show. While the material about the former seems like an elaborate concoction to have a dig at poor old Nigel Havers, the latter leads to an insightful but very funny takedown of the shameful fakeness of much of modern media.
But his arguments are never heavily applied, and he interweaves his more serious points with disarming domestic detail. Starting from a minor quibble with his wife about toiletries – why does their conditioner run out before the shampoo? – Gorman, by drilling down into the numbers, creates a solid argument to prove that his theory is, of course, correct
He frequently works himself into a lather (sorry), but his cry about so much of modern life – “Can we stop factory-farming news?” – is genuine. Should that happen though, Gorman, nitpicker extraordinaire, would be out of a job – and that would never do
At 100 minutes, the show feels slightly overstretched, but Gorman throws in a couple of crowd-pleasers, his “found poems” compiled from moronic online comments, and the longer set pieces are beautifully constructed.
