Greg Davies

The teacher who hated the classroom

Greg Davies stands exactly 2 meters and 3 centimeters tall. That height shapes every film or television shot in which he appears. Before becoming the giant of British comedy, he spent thirteen years teaching English and Drama at secondary schools in Berkshire and Middlesex.

Teaching was his first prison.

In 2008, he played Mr. Gilbert in The Inbetweeners. That role as a misanthropic teacher was no distant caricature, since he knew well the boredom of the classroom. The character worked through contained verbal violence and that look of utter contempt for adolescence that followed him for a decade.

But his leap into personal writing came with Man Down in 2013. Davies wrote this series to channel his own frustrations about late-blooming adulthood. On screen, he lived with a father played by Rik Mayall who physically bullied him. The chemistry between the two actors set the tone for a comedy that steered clear of easy jokes about middle age.

Tyranny as a form of entertainment

The project that made him a central figure in television was Taskmaster in 2015. The format is built on a simple concept: Davies judges the absurd tasks set for other comedians from a velvet throne. His role as a relentless, capricious judge works because he controls the pace of humiliation with surgical precision.

And the gamble paid off.

The series moved from the smaller channel Dave to Channel 4 in 2020, aiming for a mass audience. The change of channel didn't soften his style, but it did increase the production budget. The average audience topped three million viewers during broadcasts of the seasons recorded between 2021 and 2023.

Outside the game show set, Davies has always sought projects with a grittier visual style. In 2021, he premiered The Cleaner. It is an adaptation of the German series Der Tatortreiniger, in which he plays Wicky, a worker tasked with cleaning biological remains at crime scenes. The focus is not the police mystery but surreal dialogue with the living.

Blood and cleaning products

Writing The Cleaner posed a technical challenge because of the limited spaces. Almost all the action takes place in enclosed rooms with only two actors on screen. So the weight of the narrative rests on his physical presence and on dialogue that blends existentialism with the most scatological humor.

In 2023, the production of the second season featured appearances by actors such as Harriet Walter and Simon Callow. Davies prefers working with classically trained performers to create a contrast with his rougher, more direct acting style. Because contrast is what has sustained his career since he traded the classroom for the spotlight.

Filming for the third season of The Cleaner was scheduled for the first quarter of 2024 on location in Bristol. The production company Studio Hamburg UK handled international distribution rights to secure the series' presence on European platforms. The renewal contract included a Christmas special lasting sixty minutes.