Those who know Dave Gorman will know that he is the man who decided to set out to meet other people called Dave Gorman. A little weird but to top that he decided to set himself a series of metrics and goals (miles travelled per Gorman for example) to make it more of a challenge. The outcome of that was a particularly funny stand up show where he gave a PowerPoint presentation about his journey, showing graphs and the like to illustrate it in an engaging and entertaining way.
On this occasion he sets out to write a novel when he gets distracted by an email alerting him to the fact that he is a Googlewhack – specifically his website is the only result when two words are searched for on Google. Those words were Francophile Namesake and they start Gorman on a path to try and find people who have websites which are Googlewhacks, who in turn find him two more websites, who he will then contact and so on until he has a chain of 10, all of whom he has personally met. All against the ticking clock of a deadline of his 32nd birthday. Needless to say the novel doesn't get his full attention.
I didn't bother with this all those years ago because it did feel like a bit of a stunt (an issue he puts me in my place about during this show) rather than something that had grown organically. This feeling is very quickly left behind in this show because Gorman tells a story that really starts in the spark of wonderful coincidence and obsession – a coincidence that is so out of the blue that it would be hard to believe if I simply stated it, so I won't. Anyway the journey that it sparks is really engagingly told because Gorman puts a lot of himself into it – the joy of moving forward, the despair of dead ends and the overall of obsession of making this mostly pointless thing happen. The show spends a lot of time on the people he meets early on (where the novelty of the telling exists) and then wisely speeds up to avoid it being too samey. The conclusion is really strong as well.
It isn't always hilarious and at times it doesn't quite work; personally I didn't find Gorman as effective when he was yelling in rage at his audience because it seemed a little too forced and overly dramatic for the sake of the show, but these bits still do work thanks to the rest of it. This isn't so much a stand-up show as it is a story told with humor and energy and although sometimes it doesn't quite work, it is mostly engaging, funny and entertaining.