10 things we learned from Greg Davies’s Desert Island Discs

Greg Davies is one of the country’s best loved comedians. His ability to spin laugh-aloud stories from his own foibles, frustrations and embarrassing mishaps have seen him forge a hugely successful stand-up career.

On screen, he’s known for his role as the entertainingly stern host of the global hit show Taskmaster, as writer and star of popular sitcoms Man Down and The Cleaner, and as Mr Gilbert in blockbuster teen comedy The Inbetweeners.

But after spending over a decade as a teacher before getting into comedy, Greg felt for a long time that he had a lot of catching up to do.

Here’s what we learned from his Desert Island Discs…

“I feel like I've spent my career doing a bad impression of him,” Greg says of his dad. “He was a sensationally silly man, and we had such a laugh as a family.”

Greg recalls a family game of hide and seek with a twist: his dad insisted that they played in complete darkness.

“I remember once being so freaked out that I drew an end to the game… I barricaded myself in my bedroom and I remember shouting, ‘This is ridiculous!’... And I got into bed and I leant over to turn the bedside light off, and my dad was lying in the gap between the bed and the wall with this awful expression on his face like a ghoul. And I screamed, I don't think I've ever screamed that much. And then everyone came in and laughed.”

He reflects later, “No doubt that it was the start of my comedy career, when I realised if I made him laugh, I kept his attention.”

Greg thinks his dad had mixed feelings about his success as a comic. “I think he felt two things. He told me very clearly how proud he was of me. And I think he was hugely jealous. I think he would've loved to have done it.”

“My dad had the preposterous notion that I was going to be a Welsh international rugby player,” Greg explains. “He was a very proud Welshman and a rugby obsessive.”

So, when his mum went into labour, Greg’s dad took extreme measures. “They were living in Shropshire and there was a hospital seven miles down the road, but he drove her 45 miles… in a hugely unreliable 1960s car, across the border into St Asaph – just to make sure I was Welsh.”

But although Greg is qualified to play for Wales, he reveals that he never even made it onto a rugby pitch:

“When I was about 12, my dad begged me to go to a rugby club just for a Sunday practice, just to see if I liked it. And it was already established that I was a painfully thin, asthmatic weed who couldn't catch a ball. But I went because he was so desperate for me to try.”

“We pulled into the car park of the rugby club, I started crying, he drove me home, and that's the end of my international career… I remember him shaking his head in quite a sweet way and going, ‘We'll go home, love.’”

“The thing that I love about the art form, really, is it's so selective,” Greg says, “and you can offer exactly what you want to offer of yourself. Sure, you know, there are vulnerabilities displayed, but it's very selective… I don't think I've dealt with any real existential crisis on stage, but I do feel it's really important that it all comes from a place of honesty. So, I never lie.”

Greg says it’s also vital that he’s the butt of any joke, and no one else. “I would be horrified if I said anything to upset anyone I know. In the very British tradition of stand-up, I want the target to be me… I hope that largely you see the gun being turned on me – because I can take it.”

4. His mum also shaped his sense of humour

“She is a naturally funny woman and she's remarkably thoughtful about the universe and life… And I love hanging out with her and I'm glad I've said it on Desert Island Discs,” Greg says.

“She was a practice manager for her working life, but she's always been creative. Sian [Greg’s sister] and I always won the fancy dress competitions at primary school and beyond… other kids would be turning up dressed as cowboys and my sister and I would be a walking scale model of the Coliseum.”

Greg says he thinks anxiety is “a Davies trait” and they all have a tendency to catastrophise.
“I think Mum wouldn't mind me saying that her approach to life – and it's certainly mine and my sister's approach to life – is to imagine everything that can go wrong in every given situation and then be pleasantly surprised when it doesn't.”

This had implications for Greg’s career too. “That's why the early years of comedy were so stressful, and it's probably why it took me so long to do comedy in the first place. Because the risk of putting your head above the parapet is so great when you’re an anxious personality type or a catastrophiser.”

“I hated primary school and I certainly hated secondary school,” Greg says. “I was always an awkward kid and a painfully thin beanpole.”

“I don't think my sister enjoyed school either… we didn't find out where we fitted in for a long time. I think that the bond between us as a family was so strong, and we had such fun, that outside of that it just took me a while to connect with the people who I would feel the same connection and safety with.”

But later on, things improved. “I suddenly found that there were a group of similarly minded silly boys who liked to, rather than kick a football around, stand in the corner of the playground and make up stupid sketches and silly characters.”

The Leeds band Yard Act released their debut album The Overload in 2022: it reached number two in the UK album charts and was nominated for the Mercury Prize for album of the year.

Greg has chosen the final track on the album, 100% Endurance, for his desert island: “It's such an eloquent little song pondering the nature and the mysteries of existence. I just love it, and I'll often pop it on if I just need to switch off for a bit… and going back to my mum, I just knew straight away when I heard it that she would love it. And we went on a drive and I played it to her, and sure enough, she did love it. And we had a real moment to this little song, Mum and I – she probably doesn't remember it, but I do.”

“And the line that really gets to me in this song – I think it's so beautiful – is: ‘It's all so pointless. Ah, but it's not though, is it?’”

Greg spent 13 years in the classroom before deciding on a complete career change: “I did for a long time look back on it as wasted time. But… I've got a bit of perspective now and I think I needed time to thicken up my skin and it helped me with presentation and confidence.”

“The stand-up version is: ‘I hated teachers. I hated children. It was a black time in my life.’ And the truth is, it was a fascinating, insane time in my life.”

One pupil even nominated Greg for Teacher of the Year. “My headteacher was laughing his head off because she'd written out the form for Teacher of the Year, which is quite a prestigious award, and she'd only put one sentence on the form. She'd put: ‘He's a dead good laugh and he don't make us do no work.’”

Greg realised he had to change tack after his then-girlfriend bought him a floating relaxation session. “The next morning I woke up and I couldn't stop crying… the day after that I couldn't stop crying. And day three, I thought, ‘Okay, I've gone mad.’”

By coincidence, in the midst of this crisis Greg went to a barbecue and met a woman who owned a floatation tank centre. She explained that the deep relaxation induced by the experience could have released buried emotions. “It was a real turning point where… I knew exactly what I'd been suppressing.”

Greg joined a stand-up comedy course and the rest is history. “I met all these like-minded people who wanted to try this mad thing in life. I mean, absolute game-changing event for me.”

Food and drink have long been favourites among the castaways when it comes to choosing a luxury item, with wine and champagne particularly popular over the decades. Some tastes are more down to earth: the actor Matt Smith requested English breakfast tea, and the chef and writer Nadiya Hussain is one of many who have asked for Marmite. Greg’s choice is also relatively simple: sausages. No other castaway has plumped for them in eight decades.

“In many ways I'd like to be a vegetarian, but to me… there's never a situation that isn't improved by a sausage,” Greg enthuses. “Just bog standard – I don't want my sausages cut with anything, OK? I don't want them to put fenugreek in it. I want some cheap straight sausages. That's all I want. I'm a very simple man in my ways. I like the occasional sausage!”