Dave Gorman And Salisbury

Yesterday I turned 44 years old. To celebrate getting through another year in which I have miraculously avoided dialysis in the way that Soccer AM has avoided cancellation I decided to take a trip to Salisbury. This choice was made for the single and only reason that it happened to be where Dave Gorman was taking his tour on the date of my birthday.

I have to tell you something straight away. This was going to be the first comedy gig that I had actively paid to attend. As far as I can remember it is only the third comedy show I have ever attended, following on from a dreadful Mick-Miller like buffoon at Prestatyn about 15 years ago and - most startlingly of all - a performance by Jimmy Cricket at Blackpool during the 80s. In the first instance I just happened to be at a Pontin’s holiday resort and so faced with a choice of the crap comedian, bingo or pool and in the second I was probably about eight years old and so not in control of the decision making when it came to evening entertainment. My first voluntary visit to a comedy gig has whetted the appetite with Ben Elton’s return to stand-up next on the to do list.

By the way if any of you don’t remember Jimmy Cricket let me fill you in. He was an Irish comedian who wore wellies with ‘L’ and ‘R’ written on them. He wore them on the wrong feet which I’m sure you’ll agree is just side-splitting. He had his own TV show in the 80s on which Rory Bremner made his first small-screen appearance. Cricket’s act was based mostly around mockery of the Irish and starting one terrible anecdote after another with the phrase ‘c’mere’. My own memories of his performance are dominated not by how bad I thought he was but of the actual physical pain that my dad appeared to be in as he sat through it. What made his experience worse was that he was sat behind a man who cried with laughter at every crap quip. This chap has never seen anything funnier in his entire life. I hope he hasn’t laughed more than that since because there’s a reasonable chance it would kill him. This was anathema to my dad who has pretty much despaired of humanity ever since.

I’d toyed with the idea of seeing Dave Gorman before. It just never seemed feasible when his tour dates were initially released due to all the uncertainty with my health. Just by chance I saw an advert for the tour, entitled With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint, when it was extended for a third time due to the demand. The Salisbury show was on my birthday and with an appointment with the transplant surgeon coming up next week I decided it might be the last chance for a while so why the Hell not? Even if it is a four-hour drive away.

The show is based on Dave Gorman’s TV show Modern Life Is Goodish. It’s basically observational comedy using PowerPoint as a demonstrative tool. At the end of the show he actually asks the audience not to give anything away on social media and since this blog sort of falls into that category (that is how you will probably have found it) I feel obliged to keep Dave’s secrets. I wouldn’t want to be that one knob-head spoiling it for others. I have to say given the knob-head ratio on both Facebook and Twitter I’m stunned that nobody has plastered it all over one or both of these platforms. Dave Gorman fans must be trustworthy, reliable types. Either way it is difficult to tell you too much about it but if you have ever seen the TV show you’ll have some idea of the sort of thing he does. If you haven’t, Google it. I’m sure YouTube has some clips. It’s better than Jimmy Cricket.

Before the gig we had a chance to see some of the local hostelries. That is after I had negotiated the obstacles in our not very accessible hotel. The Red Lion is a Best Western on Milford Street in the city centre, only about five minutes walk from the gig venue at City Hall. I’d booked over the phone and been assured that the hotel had an accessible room but that definition appears to be something that hotel chains think they can play fast and loose with without consequence.

The accessible room - such as it is - has a small step up to a security door for which you are given a passcode. I wasn’t on my own but if you are a wheelchair user who ever does find themselves staying alone at this place then you might have fun trying to negotiate the step while also trying to punch the passcode on to the keypad. It’s like fucking Takeshi’s Castle. If you can overcome that hurdle you might just be able to squeeze your wheelchair through the narrow security door then make the tight left turn to the front door of your room. If you get through all that your next challenge is the bathroom which has a carpeted ramp leading up to another narrow doorway. If your wheelchair is any wider than mine it will fall off the ramp. Except it won’t because you won’t have been able to get it through the doors to get inside the room. If you can’t stand up then you can forget about taking a shower also. This despite the fact that they asked me when I phoned to make the booking whether I’d need a shower seat. I’m sure I said yes but maybe they get confused between yes or no like Alan Partridge when he gets that message about whether he would like to continue viewing the adult channels. I thought about going back to reception to ask for one - a shower seat not an adult movie channel - but the controls were not at an accessible height either.

They’ve given me a 20% refund after I pointed out these flaws to them but as you can see that hasn’t stopped me from savaging them on these pages and telling anyone who might be reading who also uses a wheelchair not to book a night at the Red Lion Best Western in Salisbury. Suitably unimpressed we set about exploring those hostelries. We were hungry having skipped breakfast but of course the first decent place we found was a non-starter. There were two lads outside smoking, presumably members of staff, and they told us that the hot food kitchen was not open and to try the cafe just a few metres further on. The closed cafe just a few metres further on. Memories came flooding back of that trip to Prestatyn when we turned up at a pub in a place called Criccied on the one day of the year that they were not serving food. Running out of both ideas and drinking time we inevitably ended up in one of Brexit Wanker Tim Martin’s cheap booze dens known colloquially as Wetherspoons. The King’s Head is your bog standard spoons and we ate your bog standard burgers just to fill a gap.

The next pub was far more interesting. The Golden Mill is opposite the King’s Head, set back from the road across an aesthetically pleasing bridge which crosses the stream outside the pub. Inside it appears to lack character, looking like a fairly common garden variety sports bar with TV screens on every wall. It has high tables on the bottom level which I always find infuriating. This phenomenon is the absolute scourge of disabled people. Trying to transfer in to a chair three feet above my head height is the fastest way to end up in the local hospital so Emma and I end up trying to have a conversation at different heights like Jermain Defoe and Peter Crouch. Hearing each other becomes impossible.

The good news is that The Golden Mill has lower tables on the second level AND a fully functioning lift to that second level. This was a game changer for us so we could finally settle down with a drink. Despite its apparent lack of character The Golden Mill is noteworthy as one of the places visited by Sergei and Yulia Skripal before they fell ill as a result of the now infamous Novichok spy-poisoning affair in March 2018. There is still an argument raging about whether the Russian government was responsible for the attack. Well, I say argument. What I mean is that the UK government of dubious reliability claim to have proved that it almost certainly was the Russian government of equal if not greater dubious reliability, who for their part maintain that they had nothing to do with it. Their state-controlled media hardly referenced it before or since to the extent that a Russian newspaper claimed that 20% of respondents to an independent poll had heard nothing about it. The alleged perpetrators are officers in the old GRU, which is the English translation of the acronym for the Russian Intelligence Directorate. I learned this while watching an episode of brilliant-but-tacky ITV espionage drama The Americans a while back. It was a piece of knowledge that gave me a greater appreciation of the genius behind the makers of Despicable Me and it’s comedy villain.

Our next stop was just next door. The Bridge Tap is another pub which looks nice on the outside but is a plain old sports bar on the interior. If you are looking for somewhere to watch a sports event in Salisbury you are very much in luck. The Rugby Union World Cup is on at the moment so the Bridge Tap is hammering that in terms of advertising. They have a great big Guinness-sponsored rugby ball at the end of the bar to constantly remind you that you are only ever a day away from another kick-infested snooze-fest played out in front of bafflingly huge crowds. England rugby shirts are prevalent here to the extent that they probably call the barman ‘barkeep’ and hold their £50 notes folded between their fingers to attract his attention when they are thirsty in the several hours of down time during a rugby union game. The Bridge Tap also has a prize-winning pointless line in punnage, a red neon sign that says ‘Bridge It Bardot’. Geddit? I get it but I am still working on the reason someone thought it was funny or cool.

Last stop was City Hall for the gig. Just like the Best Western they had assured me over the phone that it was fully accessible. So you can imagine my cocktail of scepticism and anxiety as we trundled down there fuelled by a few pints of lubrication. Thankfully they were true to their word. All one level, no steps, accessible toilets. The only minus point was that they didn’t serve Guinness in the bar so I had to make an emergency switch to vodka and lemonade. I bought a book which I was reliably informed Dave would be signing copies of after the show. Actually there were several books available one of which was a collection of found poems (watch the show, these are a highlight), one was an account of his quest to meet as many other people called Dave Gorman as possible and then the one I bought which was an account of his trip round America in which he set out to buy products solely from independent retailers and avoid all the big chains.

I didn’t stay behind to queue for the photograph and the book signing. I’m not really one for photographs or queueing unless it’s Tommy Martyn or Justin Holbrook. Regardless, the book themes give you a further insight into the type of comedy Dave Gorman does, supported by Nick Doody who also worked on Modern Life Is Goodish. Doody himself was Goodish, peaking with the assertion that Donald Trump is ‘a sex offender who has been rolled in Wotsits’ but rather losing me when he took to his keyboard to sing a song about Batman. I’m not a superhero fan. Neither is Dave, who I will tell you denies that the title of the show - With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint - has anything to do with Spider-Man. Where that phrase originates is one of the many things you will learn if you see the show because as we know I’m not allowed to reveal it here.

I’m not going to be that one knob-head.....