S9, Ep4: Dave Gorman, comedian

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:46Hello friends. You find me, as ever, lint rolling my sofa. Four cats, people. Four cats. it's an ongoing task now any minute the next guest will be here to come for eat with me always an exciting time this is a man who loomed so large on the british comedy scene at one point you couldn't move for seeing him he's most famous for taking mundane tasks and creating an Edinburgh show, a two-year UK tour, a book and merchandise mugs. Comedy alchemy. It's only Dave Gorman. You may know him from R.U. Dave Gorman, where he discovered lots of other people across the world called Dave Gorman. I remember watching that at the time in complete glee.

1:41It became a Sunday Times bestselling book. He's about to hit our screens with a reboot of Dave Gorman's Modern Life is Goodish. So if he's a man talented at making comedy out of the mundane, could he rustle up an Edinburgh show about how to get the cat hairs off my trousers? It would be about his quest to find the most multitasking, sticky lint roller on the market. It's what I've genuinely been doing for the last six years, Secret. It's Muji and it's actually the carpet system. You use it on carpets. If I was to do it, my title would be Grace Dent is, at last, unhairy. Solid hour of comedy gold.

2:26I think some of the audience might get the wrong idea. Apparently, Dave is very used to pulling all-nighters to reach his deadlines. I would hate that, to be honest. I'm wondering what he's eating at 2am to get him through. Right. Last bit.

2:47Done.

3:16We'll see you next time. Get 20 % off your first two orders with code APRON20. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blueapron.com slash terms for more.

3:30Dave Gorman, welcome to Comfort Eton. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Now, under lockdown, you developed a sideline as a cryptic crossword setter for newspapers. I did, yeah. Now, this is a hidden world of setters. Those who set the clues and solve us. Those who solve. See, for me, it's a massive ask to do the cryptic crossword. However, we have, at Comfort Eating, we have written a cryptic question for you today. I don't want you to feel... Let's put pressure on now. I like to put pressure. I like to see, I like to make my guests incredibly uncomfortable at the beginning.

4:12Well, you've succeeded in that. Go on. Right. Okay. What classic British comfort food is this the clue to? Caught sight of Moby. Caught sight of Moby. A spotted dick. Ah! Thank you very much. It was lacking a definition, but the wordplay was all there. Not only did you solve it, you criticised it. Well, you know, a cryptic clue should have wordplay and a definition together. So this is the thing that a lot of people who want to get into them, but have felt shut out from them don't get, is that you could basically divide every clue into two parts, and one part is a definition exactly like a quick crossword.

5:07and the other part is the wordplay. So actually you've got two clues to give you the answer. So my point of view is it's easier than a quick crossword. I've always hated quick crosswords. I grew up in a house where my mum did quick crosswords, you know, puzzle page in the newspaper, open, byro, always there, always did them. And you get clues like girl's name, five letters. You see, that's the kind of clue I like. But I hate that clue because there are 100 answers. Beryl! It could be, but it could also be Naomi. It could be all sorts of things. But a cryptic clue will say girl who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

5:44And that wordplay means I've nailed exactly which girl's name it is. See, now I'm feeling like the balance of power has now swung.

6:02Right, now, this is the moment of the show. where you reveal to me the food that you eat that cranks up joy, stokes your comedy muscles, settles your soul. I do not know what is under this tea towel. Beneath the comfort eating tea towel. And what I want you to do is reveal the snack and we'll eat it together. Are you ready? Do it. There you go. Ta-da! It is. You're not happy. It is a tin of sardines in a spicy tomato sauce. End of recipe. That's it. That's it. I take these because they're very small, very compact. This is from Lidl. Oh, Lidl ones. I take these with me when I'm on tour. And they go because they're so small and adding nothing to your luggage.

6:53And then when I'm in a hotel room, because touring is weird and eating on tour is weird. So you have a hotel breakfast and then you might have four hours in a car. And we never stop for lunch because we've had a hotel breakfast and we're feeling all right. and you get to a venue and there's no, everyone imagines you've got a rider and lots of lovely things are provided for you. And you don't have one of those because what happens when you have one of those is you have to pay for it all. And you say, can we have some fruit, please? And they give you a week's worth of fruit. And what you meant was it'd be nice to have an apple.

7:21Yeah. So you kind of, you don't have all this stuff provided because you end up paying a hundred quid to have an urn providing tea for two people, which is completely irrelevant. So what you're saying is that as a cost-cutting exercise and the practicality, you're literally eating sardines out of a tin. There's not even a bowl or a plate. No, what I'm saying is I work an odd hours. You don't eat very much before a show. You get back to a hotel room. You're wired. Your head's still spinning. You're awake at one in the morning. And then you just sit in your pants eating sardines. I hate room service.

8:01especially when you get to the early hours of the morning because you order room service at 1 o 'clock and it turns up at 2 o 'clock and it's cold. Or they say there's nothing we can do or we've got a cheese sandwich. What about cut porridge, though? You could have cut porridge. You know, like that stuff that you add water to? Yeah. Cereal. You could have a little, just one solitary pint of skim that you carried about in your bag, it wouldn't go off. As you can see, I'm giving you a lot of alternatives. These are alternatives, but none of them are as tasty as the sardines in a spicy tomato sauce.

8:32I swear to God, Dave Gorman, if there's a spine in one of these when I put it in my mouth, you're going to be the first person I've ever thrown out of this podcast. There will be. You have provided these lovely forks. I've brought with me what I would normally eat them with, right? No. I have a little camping cutlery set that folds up like this. How are you married? Like a Swiss army knife. And look at that. I get a fork and a spoon. if I've had to go to another supermarket and get other sardines. This also has a blade I can use to open the tin. Works as a can opener. Oh, I have learned so much about you already.

9:10This appeals to my aesthetic nature. I do not want people waiting on me. The worst thing you can have on tour is a semi-posh hotel. I'm okay with posh hotels and luxury. That's fine. But what happens on tour is someone thinks you want things of a certain standard and they book you into these hotels that are like country houses, 20 minute drive from the venue, middle of nowhere. and you get to the hotel and you check in and then you walk through a series of corridors that takes you out of the grand country house into a breeze block annex at the back where it's just like a standard hotel except that you can't go for a walk anywhere because there's no shops and there's nothing going on outside so you're in the middle of nowhere room service is awful Room service is gone.

9:59Room service involves servants, and I hate that idea of anyone doing anything for me. And this appeals to my ascetic nature of self-sufficiency. Sardines are lovely. That is gorgeous. You love sardines. That's genuinely making me happy. It's a great source of protein. You know, if you are in a city centre, what can you do? Go down and get a greasy kebab at one in the morning? Or would you rather have this? I suppose the fact is that if Armageddon does come, almost everything, it wouldn't really be different for you, would it? because I'd be absolutely fine.

10:39You've done comedy in all manner of guises, books, TV shows, films. So it's stand-up that you like best. Absolutely. Is that your crack? It's the shortest feedback loop. If you write something and record it and it goes out months after you've done it, you're getting your feedback months later and your head's already moved on. Everybody wants to do stand-up. Everybody thinks they've probably got a set in them, but then there's that, there's a transfer in from that moment when you're at the side of the stage to actually walking on. And I think that people like you are wired differently. How do you even get on?

11:21How do you get on? Are you nervous? No, I'm really lucky. I've got friends, one of my friends, I won't name names, he throws up before most gigs. He then goes on stage and loves it. And I just can't understand how you've done thousands of gigs in your life. And you know that when you're on stage, you love it. So what is the throwing up bit about? Haven't you told yourself this is going to be fun? Because it always has been. But because it's not a natural state. I've been doing it since I was 19, so it is a natural state. But you don't know what you're going to get when you go out. But you do. After a certain point, you do.

12:02The dying happens much more often when you're young and learning your trade and whatever. By the time I get to touring a show, I've got a thousand people coming to see me. Yeah. They've chosen me. There are genuinely sometimes one or two people out there who thought I was going to be Dave Grohl. That has genuinely happened more than once.

12:33They have the right to go home disappointed because I was not what they thought they'd bought a ticket for. But for the vast majority of people, they've chosen you. yeah right so when you're starting out you are constantly playing to people who've decided what they think comedy is and you might or might not confirm their bias and sometimes you can overcome that and sometimes you can't and they go but i really like so and so and he does a load of knob gags and why aren't you doing that or i really like so and so yeah whatever it is you've either brought to the table what they were expecting or not and it can be challenging i heard that you had some kind of connection with Frank Skinner when things were beginning.

13:20And he has that about him where he's got this immense confidence in what he's doing. And was that an influence on you? I love Frank and Frank is responsible for my origin story. I always loved comedy. It was like it was a huge it was as big in my childhood as music but it didn't happen I grew up in Stafford small town West Midlands there wasn't a gig in town comics didn't come and play there it was stuff that was on telly and the radio and that was it once once when I was a kid Rick Mayle played at our local theater and it hadn't sold very well and so because I was in the local youth theatre, we were told, oh, you can come in and bump the audience up, right?

14:07So the only live comic I saw in my hometown, in my childhood, was Rick Mail. Did you go, I could do that? Didn't for a minute think I could do that. And then how did you meet Frank? I went to university, I went to Manchester, and suddenly I was in a place where there was live comedy. So I went to every gig I could go to, like eating it up. I never told a soul that I wanted to do it. I didn't even know if I knew myself I wanted to do it. But there was a tour that went around the country. It was raising money for Amnesty International. It did a different university town every Sunday. The two biggest names on it were Frank Skinner and Joe Brand, but they were not yet people my mum would have heard of.

14:47And Frank, being a massive fan of comedy himself, he used to raise more money for Amnesty by running a comedy workshop on the afternoon of the gig for aspiring comics and my flatmates at university basically frog marched me to the bus stop and said go to that get it out of your system let go and find out yeah and i can imagine you back then because i know you from that era did you have the i didn't have the chops yet i didn't have the sideburns but i went down to that uh 25 people afternoon france getting very kind of practical i still quote bits of it to people when a new comic asked me for advice i will still quote what did he say what's the thing you quote that he said he talked about constructing a set and thinking of your your material as a as a series of lampposts and the bigger laughs cast more light for longer and what you're trying to do is have someone who's walking along the street never appear in darkness and you construct your set in a way that you still think that now sometimes when you're on stage.

15:52Yeah. And walking along. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we're never in darkness. Except now, also I get to a stage an hour ago, sometimes I'll be brave enough to go into some darkness knowing I'm about to blind you. So did you get up and perform in front of him in the end? Yeah, I did a bit. Two weeks later, I went to a gig. Frank was headlining. It was a small room, about 150 people. I was on the back row. And in the interval, Frank came up to me and went, it's Dave, isn't it? Oh, yeah? Because you did that workshop a couple of weeks ago, didn't you? Yeah. He went, you were all right, actually.

16:26Gave me a phone number. Said, this is for a guy called Malcolm. Give him a ring. Tell him I said to call you, and I'll get you a gig for 10 minutes and 50 quid. So I just landed on my feet with a paid gig, like having done nothing. 50 quid? Yeah. What did you spend that 50 quid on? Fish and chips.

16:47Oh, gosh. That is the ultimate in my head. That is indulgence. Fish and chips.

17:03In my childhood. In Stafford. We never ate out. I've got three brothers. It's a family of six. We could not afford to go to restaurants. It just wasn't a thing. I didn't go to a restaurant in my childhood. This is 1970s Stafford, and me and you are about the same age, about the same kind of similar background. So when I'm asking you questions, I almost feel like... You know the answers. I know, but I'm going to say, 1970s Stafford, you've said you were brought up in an identikit house. Yeah, it was like all the others. It was on an estate. It was one of those things. our house actually had a slightly bigger garden because it would be built there was a big oak tree my parents chose it because the oak tree meant there was a slightly bigger plot of land and they might be able to extend the house and did they ever do it they did extend the house because they intended to have uh less children than they had they had two boys and then they thought let's try again for a girl and then me and my twin brother turned up and uh and destroyed the family by going from two to four, which is the worst time to have twins.

18:19You can have twins first and go, right, let's stop. We got two. That's all right. That's absolutely flabbergasted me trying for a little girl and ending up with two more boys. Yeah, I know. What's the house like when there's all these boys? Paint a picture. Rambunctious. This tells you something, So we were, that's four children under six. I'm getting hives. That's a form of hell. I find it hard. That house is just full of Lego. Yeah. Just people standing on Lego. Lego and little plastic toy soldiers. You know, those little sort of inch high things. Snipers. So much foulness. Farley's Rusk smeared on things.

19:02And this tells you something as well, because I always find it really hard to just picture this has happened in my own lifetime. We didn't have disposable nappies. We didn't have disposable nappies. So my mum had three children in nappies at the same time having to wash and launder them. And one occasion, my dad's mum was visiting and she told my mum off for hanging laundry on the line on a Sunday because that was the God's day. And you should not be doing that. And the neighbours would judge her for working on a Sunday. She needs to get all of that poo sorted out. Meanwhile, there's three babies.

19:40The idea that that's happened in my life and that anyone had those values in my lifetime. Is she the one that's cooking as well? Is she cooking? Always, yes. When you're coming home from school, there's all four of you around the table. What's an ideal meal? It would be Sundays, always proper, very formal Sunday roast. There would all be meat, potatoes, a couple of veg, a little jug with squash in it and some ice cubes. A bit of Chiara. And we would always be, oh, never. Never Chiara. Own brand. Own brand. And we would want to pour the jug. We're like desperately competing to be the one who got the ice in your glass of squash because that felt like a luxury.

20:24And my dad would take us swimming in the morning while my mum worked on a roast. And it took me adulthood to realise that my mum was a reluctant cook. She had no choice. She's never enjoyed it. It was just all I knew. And I just assumed. She kind of held hostage, really. She was. As women we were. She was. There is a famous Christmas in my childhood. I don't actually remember this. I've just been told about it often enough that it now feels like a memory. We used to be the hosts at Christmas. We would have all the families visiting, all the grandparents, both sides, everyone in our house. and my mum as a fairly, they married young and they had kids really young.

21:03So she was like basically out of her depth, 14, 15 people for Christmas dinner. My dad's mum came in, started telling her what she was doing wrong. And my mum went sod it and she went to her friends and got pissed. And I think she's a hero and I love her all the more for doing that. Just went, you cook it then. Did she cook it? No, my gran had to cook it. Yeah, yeah. Get a little bit teary eyed even thinking about it. because I just think what a wonderful thing to have done. The strength to do that in that day and age. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, they divorced when I was 10. Yeah. Well, she divorced that woman as well.

21:39She got rid of that woman as well. Well, they came as a package. How was that? How did that fit into the whole, fuck, all the kids? Did you stay in the same house? We stayed in the same house. It was the most civilised divorce in Christendom. My parents were amazing about it. How did you find out? They very much were able to. It was over one of those formal Sunday lunches and an announcement was made. And we would have to, it would be no elbows on tables and things like that. And we'd have to say grace before the meal. My dad was pretty churchy. And after all of that, there was a, we've got something to tell you.

22:16Mummy and daddy have decided they're no longer going to live together. And we're going to split up and your dad's going to move out. And there was a kind of silence. And my oldest brother, I don't remember what he said, but he said something vaguely sarcastic and got a severe telling off. And then we ate the rest of the meal in silence. Oh, God. And I remember the silence. My main takeaway from it was feeling guilty years later for my lack of emotion. I was too young. I didn't process it. It was just what life was. I was completely untroubled by it. What I do remember, and I find this absolutely mind boggling, because they were going to split up, that meant that my mum needed to also have a job now in order for everyone to, for us to financially get on.

23:05And so my mum went to do teacher training and they stayed together so that that could be completed and then separated. And I don't know if they told us they were separating partway through that. I can't really remember. Did any of this at all affect your enjoyment of just eating roast dinners and Sunday dinners? Oh, no, that was always... Never. The enjoyment was slightly tempered by the saying grace and no elbows on tables and the kind of formality of it. What were the Anglicans? My dad was pretty high church, Anglican high church. He just brought a lot of baggage with him that came from his mum.

23:44So we stayed in the house with my mum. Then my mum couldn't cope, so she moved out and my dad moved back. into that house. So they decided that house was the thing and whoever was going to have the kids would do it. It is the reason why I remember the first time I ever ate pasta, but apart from spaghetti hoops, but spaghetti hoops don't count. So we were going on a holiday to France. It would be in a caravan and we were going to drive and it was going to be my mum and the four boys taking us. And so all of a sudden there was this kind of, well, what are we going to eat? And she decided, We needed to take supplies with us and we'd be cooking in a caravan and it wouldn't be great.

24:22So how about pasta? Pasta's small and it's dry and it won't go off and I can put that in the car, put it in the boot and we'll have a supply of it. We'll try that. Smaller than potatoes. It does the job of potatoes and it's not having potatoes with us. Okay, fine, we'll do that. And so there was this kind of, we're going to try something different today, everyone. We're going to try some pasta to see if you'd like it. While we were in Stafford. And my brother put one fork to his lips and went, oh, don't like it. And tears were shed by my mum and something got thrown. He was rebelling and whatever and we were kind of...

24:54It wasn't the pastor that he was unhappy about. No, no. Anyway, the upshot of it all was that my mum decided she couldn't take us on the holiday and so she didn't take us on the holiday and my dad took us instead. But your mother saying that she was going to take you all to France, again, that's pretty badass, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I've heard people say, when you've got so many siblings, you've got to really think before you speak that it's actually worth saying or no one will listen to you. Yeah. Were you funny? Were you the funny one? No, I think I was just quiet and observing it all.