Rik Mayall

Man Down Series 2 will explore Dan's dad relationship

Man Down fans - good news: the second series of the Channel 4 comedy will see a lot more of the popular madcap dad played by Rik Mayall, who spends his whole time devising cruel and unpleasant practical jokes to play on his son Dan.

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.

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.

Penultimate episode of Greg Davies's by-the-numbers debut comedy, in which he plays newly single, perennially chaotic drama teacher Dan. This week, he gets help from strait-laced buddy Brian while preparing for an unexpected date, and his dad offers him a scary insight into his own former love life. Despite a brilliant turn from Rik Mayall as Dan's father, the series has relied thus far on cheap, un-PC gags and surreal moments that don't quite reach the pandemonium of Davies's last project, Cuckoo.

Clueless Jo and Pringle tube-man lookalike Brian leave Dan kicking his clumpy heels for a weekend. He's so mind-numbingly bored he finds himself angling for an invite to his niece's birthday party, to which ex-girlfriend Naomi just happens to be invited. Obstacles in the form of a colossally impractical cake, an ultra-defensive community support officer and a Renault Scenic stand between him and the promise of free jelly. A gradually improving sitcom, with Rik Mayall stealing the show yet again as Dan's malevolent dad.

Dan (Greg Davies) is still in deep denial about Naomi's departure. But what isn't clear at this stage of this wilfully quirky sitcom is why she was with him in the first place. Dan is a boisterous, selfish, puerile child in a large man's body. Despite earning his living as a teacher, he addresses bespectacled pupils as 'four eyes'. He performs tricks with his cock to impress women. In fact, the only aspect of Dan to attract sympathy is his even more loathsome father (a gleefully well-cast Rik Mayall).

Man Down is clearly meant as a real life cartoon of sorts. The scenarios are ridiculous, the humour basic and broad and the performances exaggerated. But to stick with the show, we'll need someone to root for. And Dan just doesn't feel like that man until the final frame of tonight's episode where he realises that a plate of over-cooked mince isn't going to woo his sweetheart back. Despair for Dan, but a glimmer of hope for the series perhaps? Either way, Man Down needs a little more of this to avoid one-trick-pony ignominy.