At Chortle's Fast Fringe

With Charlie Talbot. July 2011

More Dave Gibson videos

Finalist in the 2010 Laughing Horse new act of the year competition.

Ray Time In The Daytime: An Audience With Ray Green
Live Review

There’s nothing factually incorrect in the title which is a good start. It’s definitely daytime. The audience is spending time with Ray Green, and he even has ‘friends’ in the form of long-forgotten children’s TV presenter Josie D’Arby and some bloke who had five minutes of fame as a have-a-go hero. So all the elements are in place – but this turned out to be a long, painfully dragged-out hour.

Dave Gibson as Ray Green, the desperate out-of-work former TV presenter, is a massively likeable character. He makes it clear even while the audience queue how grateful he is for your presence, support and money. At this particular performance tickets were going two for one and he made clear from the outset how the eight audience members (out of about 25) that had paid full price deserved special appreciation. It would take someone with a heart of cold granite to not warm to this approach.

However, the level of desperation that is so critical to the fictional character of Ray Green, appears worryingly close to Dave Gibson himself. The line between reality and the conceit becomes uncomfortably blurred.

This is meant to be a DIY chat show, being streamed live on the web, but even this essential structure gets lost in between clips and prank phone calls. The whole concept is a waste of everyone’s time. The clips in the main are funny enough, but they do smack of a media student’s final-year project at some woeful former polytechnic.

The final ten minutes are bizarre and nonsensical, with most of the audience waiting checking their watches and hoping something would occur that would bring all the misshapen bits together. Most left the unstructured mess of a show scratching their heads either metaphorically or actually.

I caught his act and thought his style was strong - plenty of belly laughs from me!

Dave King, August 2009