Review by Jay Richardson

Joe Davies has quite the comedy pedigree, being the son of Perrier-nominated Hank Wangford, cited for the award in 1984 as frontman for his lighthearted country and western band.

Trouble is, Davies never knew this. Growing up believing his father was a Spanish sailor, it belatedly transpired that he was the product of a casual hippy fling, only discovering who his real father was when he was 27. An inversion of the dead dad trope of comedy, this is a show about the dad that never was.

Having lately become a casual friend of his progenitor, Davies sets the stage for a nature versus nurture enquiry, seeking to explore the traits that they both share - not least as he'd wanted to perform comedy long before he met Hank. Unfortunately, the affably goonish Davies doesn't yet have the storytelling chops to capitalise on this pullback and reveal of his DNA.

Rather than build up to a big disclosure, he introduces Wangford (or Samuel Hutt to give his real name) almost immediately, sporting one of his leather jackets and playing his gospel-inflected spoof 'Jogging for Jesus'. And what emerges in the snapshots that Davies has cobbled together makes him seem like a fascinating character.

A gynaecologist and doctor in a drug-addiction centre, for a time he was London rockers' physician of choice, a photo of him smoking spliffs with Roger Waters and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd perhaps an indication of how attentive he was in his work.

Wangford was a Cambridge graduate who performed in Beyond the Fringe the year after Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and there's footage of him playing the nose flute on the Little and Large Show. Davies shares a photo of him with Arthur Scargill and Ken Livingstone. Turns out he also performed benefits for the striking miners, touring with Billy Bragg and those other notorious Perrier nominees, Frank Chickens, under the banner Hank, Frank and Billy. And according to his website, he's still gigging at 75 and part of the medical profession.

To top all that off, he's currently the Nude Mountaineering Society's president and is reputed to have slept with thousands of women, meaning there's every chance he might have aspiring funny bastards the length and breadth of the country.

With that substantial resume, his son can't really hope to compete, his own showbusiness career consisting of being part of the Weirdos collective and a brief reality show contest appearance on an obscure cable channel, memorable only for its teary-eyed pathos. His quirks don't extend far beyond never blinking and carpentry, even if he can claim a sexual precociousness that ought to make his dad proud.

Actually, we know that Wangford's proud, because just ten days after a heart attack, he attended Davies' wedding. And although Davies retained some residual anger towards his parents for a while, the arrival of the he 33-year-old's own son finds him philosophical in weighing up the appeal of a nuclear family unit against the allure of showbusinness.

Delivered in a straightforwardly chronological, show-and-tell manner, Davies doesn't make the most of his story's potential. Still, he's cheery company and you can't help but wish him well with his family life.

Review date: 24 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Dragonfly