Dave Gorman

Dave Gorman (born March 2, 19--[?]) is a stand-up comedian who shot to fame following a drunken bet with his friend Danny Wallace. The bet was thus: Dave claimed that he shared the name "Dave Gorman" with the assistant manager of East Fife FC[?] and that there must be "loads" of others around. Danny disagreed with him. So the two travelled to East Fife (from London - several hundred miles), with a video camera, to meet the assistant manager, whose name was indeed Dave Gorman. More trips followed to meet more Dave Gormans.

Thus far the bet was fairly vague, but on the way to meet Dave Gormans numbers four and five, they debated what "loads" meant. Danny decdided on one for every card in the deck. That's 54, including jokers.

To aid the search, which by his own admission became scarily serious, Dave gave his stand-up show the title Are You Dave Gorman?[?]. This gained something of a cult following and several people helped Dave in his quest (five even changed their names by deed poll to Dave Gorman), which he did eventually complete.

All this came to the attention of the BBC, who gave Dave a series, co-written and co-produced by Danny, entitled The Dave Gorman Collection[?], which took the form of televised lectures, in which he explained what he had done. Later a book called Are You Dave Gorman? was written by the two of them.

Since then, Dave has had to appeal to people to stop sending him details of other Dave Gormans.

His second television series was entitled Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment[?], and was quite a novel and unexpected idea for a comedy show, being based upon the idea of a controlled scientific experiment, although naturally not a serious one.

The premise was that it would test whether or not astrology really worked. Over the course of forty days, he would try to follow any instructions given to people with his star sign[?] in a selection of horoscopes, while his "control experiment" (his twin brother, Nick) ignored them. Each would record the events of each day, and how they fared in each of three areas of life: love, health, and wealth. On each episode of the show, Dave would show footage of the amsuing situations he got into by trying to follow his horoscope, and then asked a panel of "experts" in the studio to assess how he had fared in the three areas. Following an audience vote, Dave would display on a "happiness graph" the difference between how he and his twin brother had fared that week, and whether it showed that astrology had had a positive effect, a negative effect, or no significant effect at all. To reveal its conclusion would perhaps spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't seen it, and would in any case not add greatly to human knowledge, as it was all just a bit of fun.

External links

• Dave Gorman's website (http://www.davegorman.com/), which contains sections on:-
  • The Dave Gorman Collection (http://www.davegorman.com/collection)
  • Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment (http://www.davegorman.com/dgiae)