Greetings and welcome to another television review and this I picked something I hoped would illicit a positive review channel 4’s original sit com ‘Man Down‘ starring Greg Davies with Roisin Conaty and Mike Wozniak, This was the start of the second season and having not watched season one I hoped it would not have to many ‘in’ jokes.
I have never been a massive Greg Davies fan apart from his role in ‘The Inbetweeners‘ so I wasn’t holding out much hope for this. The main Character ‘Dan'(Greg Davies) a socially awkward oaf provides the locus of the show with ‘Jo'(Roisin) and ‘Brian'(Mike) being the supporting characters both of which provide some of the laugh out loud moments, like Mike’s disappointment at not coming from “a line of financial advisers” was genuinely funny. I didn’t have to wait long for the level of jokes to be established from the knob jokes in the opening scene to the visual gags of the aunty (Stephanie Cole) being present at the doctors meeting.
Try as I might to like this show, it is well produced and slickly performed but it is at the end of the day a ‘toilet humour’ sitcom with thinly filled out characters stumbling from one sketch to another from the pre-date hair dye scene and “pint of wine” date situation to the nightmarish club scene sketch, most of the laughs come from the visual gags of the Benny Hill and Kenny Everett ilk, few comedic gems come from the script most of it is knob jokes and the like. Dan’s family interaction with his mum and aunty is bordering on disturbing rather than comedic, I spat my Belvoir Raspberry lemonade over the screen when his mum and aunty appeared after coitus with the woman ‘Lottie’ whom he had been dating and who inevitably had a fairly bland peccadillo weird enough for mainstream TV and comedic effect I guess but left me wanting her to have something much weirder(is that odd?).
In conclusion if you took the visual humour of Kenny Everett and Benny Hill and turned it into a sitcom you’d end up with something resembling this, As well acted by the supporting cast and even Greg himself possibly the best at delivering this kind of low grade knob jokes and feces and urine gags, I am a bit of a comedy snob so it will never really appeal to me but I have no doubt it will probably be somewhat popular given it’s backing from Channel 4 with a decent 22:00 slot(eh eh slot it sounds kind of dirty) that’s the kind of thing you can expect with ‘Man Down’ It’s not one for me I’m off to YouTube John Oliver in ‘Last Week Tonight’ and have a cup of tea. Lets hope next weeks offering doesn’t disappoint as much this does.
