Greg Davies (I)

Another debut sitcom that was awarded a Christmas Special is Channel 4's Man Down. Having not been a fan of the series I approached Man Down with trepidation and mainly watched it as I couldn't find the remote control after Alan Carr had finished.

Man Down can best be described as a surreal sitcom which gets laughs from the absurd situations its characters find themselves in. Greg Davies is perfectly cast as the hapless hero while Rik Mayall provides incredibly absurd support as he revels in dressing up in a number of costumes to surprise his son. Best of all though is Mike Wozniak as Dan's only sensible friend Brian and gets to deliver a brilliant speech about this year's must-have toys for kids.

I have to say Man Down was the biggest surprise of the Christmas season as I was expecting not to laugh at all while watching. It may well have been I'd had too much to eat and drink at this point, but I still found Man Down to be a comically surreal slice of festive fun.

The more it went on, the more we came to love Greg Davies's beautifully tasteless sitcom. His character Dan may be a towering oaf of a teacher who swears at pupils, insults his own parents and exploits his friends, but we still want things to go right for him. And as it's a sitcom, they never do. Tonight, Dan tries to impress head teacher Amy by putting on a Christmas play. But his practical joker of a dad (Rik Mayall) has inaugurated the "12 Scares of Christmas", one of which is properly nasty: Hitchcock would be proud.

A certain Christmas spirit was in abundance on Man Down here thanks to Rik Mayall's demented turn as a father whose festive regimen focused solely on terrorising his son, including shoving Greg Davies's Dan headfirst into a Christmas tree and rigging his car with a rowdy seagull. That's my kind of Christmas spirit, right there. And any show which can come up with a kids' school nativity called Scrooge 3000 (sample lyric: "Look at the tasty futuristic geese/ you can't afford a goose to eat") is all right in my book.

Channel 4's sitcom Man Down has settled into a pleasingly puerile groove, and joined BBC One's hit Mrs Brown's Boys in representing slapstick comedy. Here, teacher Greg Davies gave the nativity play a contemporary twist with the nightmare robotic future of Scrooge 3,000, but it was Rik Mayall as his dad, working his way through the increasingly unpleasant "12 scares of Christmas", who stole the show - and, potentially, planted ideas for potentially fatal practical jokes in the minds of cooped-up families everywhere.

Radio Times review

At first, Greg Davies' debut sitcom, about a teacher called Dan who is much less mature than any of his pupils, seemed like it would merely be very funny: Davies the disgusting, massively overgrown clown, larking about amid a cast of oddballs including Rik Mayall as Dan's bonkers dad. As the series went on, though, we began to see that the storylines, characters and relationships had been carefully constructed, so that at the point where most sitcoms start flagging, Man Down just got funnier and funnier. Davies says it took him six months' full-time work to write series one - the hard work paid off.

Greg Davies: I stil feel a ludicrously tall, fat man

Man Down star Greg Davies talks self-humiliation, telling people off and delivers a message for Michael Gove.

Greg Davies review

Greg Davies's show, The Back of My Mum's Head, focuses on his inability to be a proper adult.

We've seen Greg Davies play a teacher before, of course, and the workless, foul-mouthed truce struck between him and his flock here does smack a little of Jack Whitehall's Bad Education, but Man Down's shortcomings in originality are nulled by a relentless volley of gags, all at Davies's expense, and with many arriving courtesy of a brilliantly cast Rik Mayall as his sadistic prankster dad. Crude, silly and very funny.

This week's new live comedy

Previews of Greg Davies, Trevor Noah and the Chortle Book Festival.

Massive man-child Dan (Greg Davies) secures a date with the mother of one of the kids in his class during parents' evening. But he's so out of practice with the ladies he dragoons best mate Brian into going on a "mock date". Thanks to Dan's social tin-ear and pathological lack of charm, he has a meltdown in a Chinese restaurant that shouldn't be funny but it really is. In fact you could say that about every second of Man Down. It's puerile, silly, crude and offensive but it's so daft it's hard to resist even the twitch of a smile. And comedian Roisin Conaty is monstrously awful as Dan's brassy friend Jo, who sets up a gig for the mysterious "Mickey Two Face." Don't ask.