Dan Davies, a forty-something drama teacher still living with his parents, staggers through Hertfordshire like an overgrown schoolboy dodging responsibility. Greg Davies, drawing on his own pre-comedy teaching years, scripts a man whose girlfriend Naomi dumps him in episode one and never truly returns, leaving him to fumble through dates, school inspections and the savage pranks of his unhinged father, played with gleeful cruelty by Rik Mayall in the first run and Christmas specials until Mayall’s death in 2014.
Around Bob’s Café table he meets Roisin Conaty’s permanently lost Jo and Mike Wozniak’s fretful Brian, friends six years his junior who match him for stunted adulthood; together they weaponise nostalgia while avoiding anything resembling progress. The classroom scenes, shot in Watford and South Oxhey, turn standard lesson plans into chaotic sketches where only one pupil dares dislike him and deputy head Emma (Jeany Spark) becomes first his unattainable crush, then by series four the mother of his baby, though romance remains off the curriculum.
Channel 4 ordered a Christmas special before the first episode even aired, then kept renewing as Davies toured his stand-up, turning the show into a loose seasonal ritual. Each six-episode run escalates the humiliation: parents versus parents quiz nights, a school camping trip that ends in police intervention, a nativity musical hacked into a punk protest, and a final series that strands Dan with a newborn and no survival plan. The humour is broad, physical and cheerfully cruel, landing somewhere between farce and sitcom punishment, with every escape route blocked by Dan’s own vanity. Tony Robinson arrives in later runs as the mysteriously competent “Daddy,” a calm counterweight to the inherited chaos, proving the family tree was twisted long before this generation.
Production Details
Channel 4 / 4 Seasons / 24 Episodes / 2013
Created by: Greg Davies
Writer(s): Greg DaviesStephen MorrisonSian HarriesAndrew CollinsRichard Herring
Producer(s): Spencer Millman
Main Cast
Greg Davies as Dan Davies
Roisin Conaty as Jo
Mike Wozniak as Brian
Jeany Spark as Emma
Gwyneth Powell as Mum
Ashley McGuire as Shakira
Stephanie Cole as Nesta
Rik Mayall as Dad
Tony Robinson as Daddy
Ramon Tikaram as Dominic
Annette Badland as Mrs. Wigmore
Elliot Levey as
