Comic seeks Better World

Dave Gorman: Sought ideas from the public

By BBC News Online's Festival correspondent Matt Grant

Dave Gorman's Better World
At The Pleasance

Think you could come up with a better idea for a comedy show than most of the acts on at Edinburgh? If so, then Dave Gorman wants to hear from you: [e-mail].

Gorman - the double Bafta award winning writer of the Mrs Merton Show - has set up the e-mail account because he never wants to suffer an alcoholic blackout again.

To get the concept for this year's show, he took out three friends and put £100 behind the bar for tequila. He woke up the next morning with no memory of the night before, a pierced nipple, a tattoo - and a beermat with the scrawled message, "Do a show to make the world a better place."

The next step was to send a letter to 2,000 local newspapers, asking readers for suggestions on how to make the world a better place. He received 150-odd (and they mostly were odd) replies and when he could he attempted to put them into practice.

'On the mad side'

In the middle of a sell-out run at the Fringe, Gorman says: "It worked out a treat. I don't know that it made the world a better place, but I had the most fascinating six months of my life."

He admits the letter was akin to flashing a green light before obsessives and the frankly deranged.

"I think most of the people who wrote back to me were on the mad side, but the show is not me making fun of them. That wasn't the point. The idea was whatever they sent me I would actually carry out. Every idea I could physically carry out, I did.

"Of the 150 replies, the vast majority were things that I couldn't carry out - people wanting me to change the motorway system of something like that that's beyond my control - but anything that I could do, and the letter said I'm just one man, I tried to do it."

Gorman keeps an eye on the competition at the Fringe

This led Gorman to break the speed limit and receive a £175 fine and then stand at Piccadilly Circus wearing a sign confessing his crime. Apparently one of his correspondents believed making criminals advertise their sins would make the world a better place and Gorman hoped to lead by example.

Other notable items in his post office box included a 14-year-old's project on improving the postal system, a pornographic picture of a woman and a death threat, made by cutting out letters from newspapers. It looks fairly comic, but did Gorman take it seriously?

"If it's a death threat and it's addressed to you I don't know that there's any way it can not be serious sounding one," he says. "You might not think it's a serious sounding one, but frankly when I opened it ..."

He goes on: "I don't feel that my life is in danger, but I do feel that there's a lunatic somewhere in Fulham who wants to kill me. I was frightened, a chill went down my spine, but I also thought, That'll be funny, that'll be good for the show - which, as I've said it to you now, sounds faintly ridiculous."

Absorbed in the idea

And, of course, it is in the show. In the end, Better World is an account of the past half year in Gorman's life, which became completely dominated by the idea.

"I think my friends would tell me and it's pointless for me to deny that in June I was mad. The idea becomes completely absorbing to me, which is why I like doing it.

"And it's only when I've got the show at the end that I'm a sane person telling a mad story. But when I'm in the middle of the story itself I'm just mad. It sounds like I'm going, I'm wacky me, but I don't mean it like that. If it wasn't my job then I'd be in trouble."

After that level of emotional investment - not to mention the cost of 2,000 letters to local newspapers and his speeding fine - Gorman is happy he has developed another strong show, even if he may have failed to make the world a better place. "I could say it's made the world a better place with the gift of laughter, but I'd be disappearing up my own ass. A reviewer has said that already," he laughs.

At the 1998 Fringe, Gorman also won praise for his hour-long dissection of the pop song Reasons to be Cheerful, which he took on for a £10 bet.

By asking people to send him ideas for next year's show, he hopes to receive another interesting and bizarre challenge to develop.

"The idea is to make it hard for myself not easy for myself in doing that. I'm not trying to get funny ideas from people - I want things that people thing I might not be able to do, that's the challenge. I'm trying to be interactive with people."

'The luckiest man alive'

Until Fringe 2000, Gorman will continue with his television script writing and producing and may also adapt Better World, if he gets the right offer.

"I am arrogant enough to say that I will try not to do it until I know it's going to be done well. Last year's show had people wanting it be a TV series and I said no and with this year's show I'll see what they want to do and how much control I can retain."

When he does step out in front of the camera, Gorman is certain to go from being a comedy circuit favourite to a household name in months. But he is in no rush to get there.

"My main thing is writing and performing my own stuff, because that's what I set out to do and everything else has just followed," he says. "I'm the luckiest man alive and I don't know how I get away with it."