Dave Gorman: Modern Life Is Goodish

Dave Gorman: A serious message about our media overkill

It's the information age - so why is there so much misinformation around? Dave Gorman searches for the truth.

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I've loved making Modern Life Is Goodish for Dave. Instead of shouting at the telly, I get to shout on the telly.

Modern Life Is Goodish (Dave) reckons Dave Gorman, and he's probably right.

Gorman was having a pop at the lunatic fringes of the web, chanelling the Grumpy Old Men franchise and selling himself as a Grumpy Youngish Man.

It would have made a neat 15-minute sketch but fell into the trap of its own title. Given a whole hour to play with, Gorman jovially ranted on and on, squeezing every last drop of his ire until it all became a tad wearisome.

He got really worked up about Alan Sugar, leap years and the way that clocks for sale always point to 10.08 because it makes the clock face look happy.

If ever there was an indication of a man who's got too much time on his hands, then this was it.

Gorman is a funny guy but he could do with pointing his anger at some bigger targets.

Gorman's new series appears on the channel that bears his name. For a man who has focused a chunk of previous shows on instances of serendipity, one would think this fact would give him some pleasure. He has been a little spikier in his previous slide show-heavy flights of fancy, but there's still something about the obsessive pedantry of his quests here that has the power to amuse, as he takes on Lord Sugar's use of social-media marketing and the endless T&Cs that plague modern life.

The twinkly-eyed yet mildly cynical Gorman, comedy chronicler of life's absurdities, turns his perceptive attention to our obsession with all things technological in his latest series. Have smartphones, apps, laptops, flatscreens. sat-navs and so on and on and on really made our lives better - or have they just turned us into a breed of techno-slaves unable to think for ourselves? Over to you, Dave, on Dave.

Dave Gorman: TV's sometimes arrogant about the Internet

It's called Modern Life is Goodish and I guess it's more about the -ish than the good.

Dave Gorman has turned the 'Powerpoint Presentation as Sketch Show' into something of an art form, getting comic mileage out of some pretty flimsy premises. Modern Life is Goodish is no exception, encouraging us to look a little closer and pay a little more attention: to terms and conditions, to pernicious marketing campaigns and, above all, to the internet.

Adam Buxton may do it darker and Alex Zane dumber, but they leave Gorman to plough the reasonably fertile middle ground of mocking idiots online, in this case as they debate Leap Years and non-news stories. Gorman's mounting incredulity becomes a little exhausting over the course of the hour and his climactic 'Found Poem' is overlong, but there are still plenty of laughs - and any time spent scrutinising Alan Sugar's doomed E-Mailer phone is never wasted. Goodish is about right.

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The presenter, comedian and serial Googlewhacker on his TV predilections.

Modern Life Is Goodish review

All in all, Modern Life Is Goodish is a very smart and entertaining programme - exactly the type you'd expect from Dave Gorman. I for one can't wait for the rest of the series to see what other modern life-isms Dave will tear apart.

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