Circuit Training 24: Greg Davies

Say what you like about the modern stand-up scene, it's anything but ageist. While your average aspiring pop star should really think about retraining if they haven't made it by, ooh, 23, the big break for comics can come at any time. Rhod Gilbert is the prime recent example, having only started gigging in his mid-30s, and now one of his regular sidekicks is making similar strides.

You'll probably recognise Greg Davies as The Inbetweeners' Mr Gilbert, as one third of We Are Klang and from BBC panel show Ask Rhod Gilbert. The freakishly-tall comic, now into his 40s, only embarked on his first solo Edinburgh show this summer, however, and was the talk of the fest. His Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog garnered rave reviews, was almost impossible to get a ticket for and won a 'Best Show' nomination. Which surprised him as much as us.

Now he's touring it and, like our last Circuit Trainer, is intrigued to see who's out there every night. Lots of kinky Inbetweeners devotees, demanding discipline?

Our last interviewee, Isy Suttie, reckons her tour audience is mainly Peep Show fans. How does yours pan out?

I haven't quite worked them out yet. People afterwards will say that they've seen me do bits of my own on telly, some people will be diehard Klang fans, and other people are there because of The Inbetweeners. I'm a bit lucky really that people from different backgrounds are coming to see me talk rubbish for a living.

Remember after Phoenix Nights took off, the various comics in it did their characters on tour...?

Did they?

Dave Spikey did an encore as Jerry St Clair...

I've not been coming on and shouting at people in Mr Gilbert's voice. Maybe that's something I should bear in mind.

Did any of you have any inkling how big The Inbetweeners would become, early on?

Not in the slightest. I got given my part in a pub after Iain [Morris] and Damon [Beesley] had just had the pilot commissioned. They went "Oh, we've had a pilot commissioned. Do you want to be in it?" That was the formality of it. I mean when I read it I thought 'this is really funny,' and when we filmed it I thought, 'yes, this is funny,' but I had no idea that it would strike such a chord with so many people. Certainly the writers didn't either.

So you knew them already then?

I'd been in to talk to Iain and Damon about a different idea I was working on with a friend, just in the early stages of their production company. I'm just amazed by the response. I'm even amazed by this series, how much bigger it's become.

That must be a new experience, being in the most talked-about thing in the country.

You know it's a hit when there's lovely posh adverts being made of people walking in slow motion. It's an intriguing world because the people who make the promos for it are an entirely different team to the people who make the show itself. It's really exciting. What I find intriguing is that people of my generation and older come up to me and say they like it. I think it's struck such a chord across so many generations. For the simple reason we were all stupid teenagers.

You were a teacher for 13 years. Did any of that end up in the script?

I chatted to them about my experiences of being a teacher, definitely. I don't know how much that fed into what they did. The honest truth is, I've said many times that certainly in the last few years of being a teacher I was really unhappy. And I did my best not to do the kids a disservice but I just didn't want to be there, and that certainly makes it easy to play someone like Gilbert.

He doesn't want to go into stand-up, does he?

I can't imagine him harbouring those ambitions. I always think of him as wanting to be anywhere but there. That's what's going on in my head. Certainly when I walked back into a classroom for the first time when we were filming I got a shudder down my spine, and walking into my first staffroom. I feel really bad though. I've taken the angle that my teaching years were this awful torturous period of my life and they weren't. I met some of my firmest friends and had some of my best times. There was just that underlying feeling that I should be doing something else.

What's happening with Klang now? Is it just on hold?

Exactly that, yes. It's on hold while we're doing other things and as far as we're concerned we're still very much a thing in the future.

It's an interesting contrast, the universal popularity of The Inbetweeners compared with the, er, mixed response to the Klang series.

I know, yes. I think I may have, when the series was out, had a look on your forums. It's certainly brought out some strong feelings. And why not? We didn't set out to divide opinion and have some people want to kill us, no, but that's the joy of comedy isn't it? They'll either buy into something and think of it as being special to them or absolutely passionately loathe it.

What's your opinion of it now?

I think all of us would say it was a steep learning curve making the series and we knew going into it that making a television programme was a very different discipline to putting on a live show. I suppose we tried to capture the spirit of it.

I remember being utterly bewildered by Vic Reeves Big Night Out, until it was repeated.

Our first instinct was to very much do that, go down the Big Night Out route, and to hire a nice theatre and stick a camera in front of us, and whether that's what we should have done I don't even want to think about. What we were encouraged to do was to turn it into a sitcom so that's what we did. I think we would all say now we recognise that it was flawed, but increasingly as time goes by and I re-watch it now and again I like it. And I'm pleasantly surprised by the amount of people that come up and say they liked it as well.

Any new projects on the go, post-tour?

There's another telly project that I'm potentially going to be involved in, and The Inbetweeners film I hope I'll be involved in. I hope that next year I can extend the tour a bit while developing some of these other ideas that are whizzing through my head. It feels very strange at my age. I feel like a child in a sweet shop.

Comedy is very different from rock and roll. You can be the next big thing at 40.

People in the comedy world seem far less concerned about aesthetics. That's probably the reason why the band I was in 10 years ago didn't get anywhere.

You were in a band as well?

Oh yes, we were hideously ugly.

Did you not get anywhere?

No, we didn't get anywhere at all. I think it's probably best that it didn't work out. No amount of future generation technology could have disguised our ugliness.