Greg Davies Live: Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog

In Between Days by The Cure

LAUGHTER

This programme contains strong language

and adult humour that some viewers may find offensive.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Greg Davies!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

How lovely. Thank you very much.

Hello, hello, hello, all right? Hello. CROWD: Hello!

Thanks for coming, nice to be here.

Erm... Yes, well, there we are.

A quick flash through my childhood

and there is the horrific up-to-date specimen.

Nice to have this immortalised.

LAUGHTER

Hello. CROWD: Hello.

I'll apologise before we start properly for this shirt.

As you can see, it is clearly for a man three feet shorter than me.

I thought I'd got away with it because I've done that classic

fat-man thing of combining an ill-fitting shirt with a T-shirt,

not realising that this clearly also doesn't fit me.

LAUGHTER

I can only apologise to you and the people at home, indeed.

As I get more animated during the show, as I surely will...

LAUGHTER

I don't know what that was.

..you're going to see a lot more of me than you bargained for.

I'm very sorry. The only thing I can offer to put the ladies at ease

is that I am of no sexual threat whatsoever.

I'm 42 years of age, I literally have to hit it with nettles.

LAUGHTER

Sex with me these days is akin to thumbing marshmallows

into the anus of a cat.

Thought I'd start low, build it up.

There's kind of two versions of the show - clean and dirty.

I'm going to go with dirty, based on that reaction.

CHEERING

My show, ladies and gentlemen, is called Firing Cheeseballs At A Dog.

Why is that, Greg? Why is that, Greg?

I'll tell you.

I went on holiday last year with a friend and colleague of mine,

Marek Larwood. He's a small bald man. Yay! There we are.

Some people know him. He's hilarious. We decided...

And this is an insult to every person in the country with a job.

We decided last year that through our work,

we had become incredibly stressed.

Now, look at what I do for a living. It's not hard work, right?

But we thought we were terribly stressed.

"We will have to go and discover ourselves!"

So we hired a remote cottage on a mountainside in Andalucia in Spain.

Two things happened in the remote hideaway

that gave the show its title.

Number one, day one, I almost died. Right?

QUIET LAUGHTER Thank you.

I got electrocuted. I genuinely got electrocuted.

I picked up a wire in this cottage,

thinking it was just an innocent wire. It was live.

I took 300 volts through my fat carcass,

I danced off the end of that wire

like an out-of-shape epileptic Michael Flatley, right?

It was one of the more humiliating sights you will ever see -

a 6'8", 20-stone man screaming like a child.

I was going, "No, please! Please!

"Let me live, let me live!" LAUGHTER

I finally freed myself from the thing, I ran round to find Marek.

I went, "Did you not hear me?" He went, "What?"

I said, "Did you not hear me screaming?

"I've just been electrocuted!" This is a side point, really.

He said, "Yes, I heard you screaming.

"I just thought you'd seen a spider."

To make me scream like that,

it would have to have been a giant spider

with Peter Mandelson on its back, wanking.

LAUGHTER

It's horrendous.

So I managed to calm myself down and waited for what I think is

a God-given right for anyone who's almost died -

I waited for my epiphany.

The moment where I would understand life,

cos if you almost die, that's what happens, right?

You suddenly understand life better.

I waited for ten hours. I gave up in the end and fell asleep.

Day two, incident two,

Marek and I, we came down the little winding concrete track

from the house on the hill in our hire car

to buy provisions for the whole week away.

Now, I am an adult, right?

I am 42 years of age, hard to believe.

LAUGHTER

Marek is an adult.

After one hour of shopping for seven days away,

we returned up the mountain track with two things.

I had bought a massive bag of these - Cheeseballs.

They're a round, Wotsit-like snack, they are nutrition-free,

they will sustain a human being for six fucking seconds.

If you think that's pathetic, Marek had bought a catapult.

LAUGHTER

That's it, right? For a whole week away.

We were driving back up the mountain track going,

"Yeah, that'll do! We'll survive on that for a whole week!",

when we met the first character of my story.

We met this character here. A dog.

LAUGHTER

It was the dog. It was sitting in the middle of the track,

blocking the path of the hire car.

If I'm honest with you, it pissed me off straight away.

LAUGHTER

I gave it a little beep on the horn. In my mind, the dog did this.

LAUGHTER

What the fuck is this?

I gave him another little beep and in my mind, the dog did this...

LAUGHTER

Oh, my God.

So I gave him a third beep and in my mind, the dog did this...

"Yes! Yes, my friend!

LAUGHTER

"I block your path!

"I will...

"I will not move for you!

"And, yes, that's right - I am a Mexican dog!"

"You weren't expecting that in Spain, were you?

"If any of the other shows on my tour are anything to go by,

"I could become French in a minute!"

LAUGHTER

"I will not move for you!"

I'm pretty French already.

"I will not move for you!

"I will block your path!

"And I will flagrantly lick my penis and testicles...

"..without so much as a hint of a bad back..."

LAUGHTER

"Unlike you when you were 14...

"..and you only managed to get the tip in." Right!

Deal with it. It happened. LAUGHTER

It wasn't going to move. It wasn't going to move.

Then we realised...

..we had everything we needed.

I got the massive bag of Cheeseballs out. Marek got the catapult out.

Not a word went between us. We knelt down and, one by one,

we fired a whole family bag of snacks

into that arrogant prick's face.

Ladies and gentlemen, I laughed my bollocks off.

And that's when it happened.

That's when I got the epiphany that I should have had 24 hours earlier,

because as I fired crisps into that confused animal's face,

I thought, "Oh, my God...

"..this is as good as life gets."

LAUGHTER

Because when I was firing crisps into a dog's face,

I wasn't worried about my past, I wasn't worried about the present,

about health, about my parents, about the future.

I was just thinking, "If I hit him in the nose often enough,

"it will turn orange." LAUGHTER

It was liberating.

I was laughing for an hour afterwards.

After one hour I was still, "Hee-hee-hee!"

Two hours, "Ooh-ha-ha-ha!"

On hour three, I thought, "This isn't normal.

"You shouldn't be laughing at this any more. It's not that funny."

So I did a bit of psychoanalysis on myself and I worked it out.

I've worked out that I inherited two things off my mum.

Number one, massive tits.

LAUGHTER

Number two, a glass-is-half-empty approach to life.

Whatever I'm doing, I think it's going to go wrong.

Whatever I'm looking forward to,

I think it's going to get cancelled and someone is going to die, right?

It is the worst way to live your life

because you are never truly present.

You are never just doing something, you're thinking outside it,

worrying about what's happened or what's about to happen.

For once, when I was firing crisps at a dog,

I was just doing something, right?

I thought, this is how I want to remember my life.

I want to look back on my life and remember only the times

where I was lost in time, just doing something.

I thought, I wonder if I can sustain a whole life story

using that system. You'd think no. Yes!

Let's crack on with the main narrative.

Years one to ten. I will cover years one to ten in one incident.

I will summarise that incident with the word AWKWARD.

LAUGHTER

Because I want to remember the first time ever

that I was lost in space just doing something.

I've remembered it, it's my first memory.

I was three years of age, I was sitting in a pram

outside a supermarket, waiting for my mum to do her shopping.

She'd left me outside on my own at three years of age.

It would appear, in the early 1970s, there weren't any paedophiles.

LAUGHTER

I'll do a little diagram of this for you.

I was sitting in a pram. Here's the pram.

Yes, there it is.

Here's the little wheels. Look, there they are.

Yes? Here's little Greg.

Little three-year-old Greg, smiling away.

There he is. Nice.

Here's his legs.

LAUGHTER

Here's his fucking arms, look.

It looked like someone had tried to Sellotape