#oneaday Day 1002: Man Down

I've been watching a Channel 4 show recently that I'd meant to check out for a while, but never gotten around to: Man Down, by Greg Davies.

The basic premise is that Davies plays a drama teacher who hates his job and life, and things systematically start falling apart for him when his longstanding girlfriend leaves him. With his friends Jo and Brian (played by Roisin Conaty and Mike Wozniak respectively), he gets involved in all manner of ridiculous scrapes, and never quite manages to completely recover from that initial instance of being knocked down.

In the early series, there's a lot of thoroughly silly, exaggerated comedy, much of which will be familiar to anyone who has seen Davies' stand-up shows. But as we move into the later series, we start getting into some serious pathos, and it's hard not to feel bad for the poor bugger as he increasingly feels like life has completely left him behind.

In many ways, it's a similar sort of idea to Bojack Horseman, which was similarly comedic and pathetic by turns, only here there's a distinctly low-key British bent to it all. There's no overdramatic drug overdoses or anything here; just an overweight middle-aged man breaking down and crying in a bank when he discovers his mother and aunt have used his inheritance to set up a trust fund for his as-yet unborn son, born out of a night of passion with the woman he truly loves, but who knows exactly what a hopeless case he is.

That might not sound very funny — I've been through a lot of very similar feelings to what Davies' character expresses in the third and fourth series in particular, especially about 10 years ago when my first wife departed. But there are times when you can't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all — and how much of a bastard other people can be at times, especially to someone who is already down on their luck.

There's an incredible cast in it; Rik Mayall played the father of Davies' character in the first series before he was tragically taken from us, Mike Wozniak is absolutely incredible as the strait-laced Brian, Tony Robinson does an amazing stint as a horrible old man "romancing" Davies' character's mother, and even Mark Hamill has a wonderful guest appearance in one episode.

It's doubtless not a show everyone will enjoy because a lot of the comedy is very much on the "cringe" side of things — Andie can't watch it, as she really can't deal with that kind of humour — but if you're up for that sort of thing I can highly recommend giving it a watch.

Curious to see how it ends, and if there's a conclusive finale at all. It ran for four series before being cancelled, but shows like this have a habit of just sort of fizzling out when that happens. We'll have to wait and see, I guess — I'm only a few episodes away from the end now!