Catching up with Dave Gorman

The other day we had a friend over for a tremendously low key evening of dinner and complaints about job hunting. After a bit, the consensus came to be that we should watch a video to cheer up the mood, and pulled out Dave Gorman's Googlewack Adventure (UK). It did the trick.

Dave Gorman, after a few false starts, is starting to catch on in America, thanks to his intermittent appearances on The Daily Show. I am happy to see that his television show called "The Dave Gorman Collection" is being released on DVD (The stage show and book were called "Are You Dave Gorman" so the DVD has that title). I'm not linking to Amazon for this one because Dave Gorman has a link to a pre-order from his site. It is advertised as a region free NTSC and PAL DVD. I've never seen a DVD that is both broadcast systems simultaneously, so I'm looking forward to tinkering with it.

We saw the Googlewack show live a few years back. When we travel, we try to see who is playing where, and saw that he was touring. We extrapolated our path with his, and decided that the most convenient place to try and see him was in the town of Aylesbury (We were stopping by friends in Oxford). After the show we stayed to get an autograph and
Dave seemed completely baffled that we would come from America to see him in Aylesbury. After two hours of him explaining how he impulsively travelled around the world to meet random people who found each other on the internet, we thought this a bit odd.

We thought it was a very good show and it seemed that the audience around us was really getting into it. This is what Dave said on his site about the show we attended (ours was the Friday night):

Two very different shows in Aylesbury. The Friday night show was probably the worst one of the tour so far. I don't know if it was me or the audience or ... or anything else, but there were so many things that usually elicit gales of laughter that were getting a smattering, if that. If you were in that audience and I wasn't on form; my apologies.

Well, OK. On behalf of the audience, sorry Dave.

Eagle-eyed readers of this site will have noticed that I occasionally poke a little fun of Aylesbury. I grew up in a city very much like it, near as I can tell. It's the sort of place where everyone either wants to leave as soon as possible, or stay around and make the best of it or kick things. There were a number of very kind people at the town museum, the Civic Centre where the show was, and various shops and pubs who seemed a bit baffled when we showed up. I understand this bafflement. If British tourists suddenly appeared in my home town, I'd have been a bit weirded out too.

Three stories about how I learned more about Aylesbury:

1. There is an underpass between a shopping mall and the train station. As we were wandering around, we found our way there. I thought that it seemed oddly familiar. Turns out that this is the spot where they filmed the scene from the beginning of A Clockwork Orange where Alex and his Droogs beat up the old bum.
2. A couple of days after our visit, Aylesbury was in the news. An old age pensioner who was selling poppies for November 11th was intercepted by a group of youths who bashed in his head with a claw hammer.
3. A while later, Danny Wallace, the co-author of the Are You Dave Gorman book, was in town on a book tour. We showed up for a reading and came up afterward to autograph our copies. After the initial miscue (Danny's first reaction when he saw Dave's autograph was "Are you one of his Googlewacks?") we explained that we were just fans. Then we mentioned where we saw him. The guy who was hawking about a book about how he accidentally started a cult (US UK) was looking at us like we were nuts because we had gone to Aylesbury.

I also notice that the most recent post on Dave Gorman's site indicates that he is up to something, but won't say what. Good luck to him, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it.