Greg Davies’ bizarre new sit-com is a dish best never served with an added helping of puerile jokes. Comedian Davies gave up his career in teaching to pursue becoming a stand up comedian, which up to this point had been a resounding success. He was handed his break with a hilarious performance as head teacher in The Inbetweeners and was not long after nominated for the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy Awards during his time at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. However, his new sitcom Man Down is certainly not in the same vein.

Illustrating his versatility, Davies plays a secondary school teacher, Dan, who is incapable of acting in the responsible manner his profession requires. The storyline is a tried and tested sitcom narrative of a hopeless man sorting his life out due to relation- ship problems, yet it fails to truly engage with the audience. It certainly provides an insight into the strange sense of humour of Davies, as the sit- com opens with Dan querying whether a human would ever be able to levitate by farting. This juvenile comedy is present throughout, as Dan finds himself in many surreal, but not so funny scrapes, such as wearing women’s underwear and being accused of being a paedophile, having his dad attack him in the morning and losing his only pair of trousers.

Man Down flutters from scene to scene in a strained and awkward fashion, feeling more like a sketch show than a unified sitcom, which is only made worse by the bizarre characters. Overall, perhaps the best part of Man Down is that if you are writing a sitcom, no matter how bad, Channel 4 will probably commission it.

Freddie Gray