Dave Gorman's PowerPoint Presentation, Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
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No matter that he has changed direction a few times, a Dave Gorman audience will always be an expectant one, preparing to be, well, googlewhacked – bowled over by some nifty questing and bamboozled by layers of seemingly inconsequential knowledge that build up to a rewarding climax.
Tonight's audience have all the more reason to be expectant, as this is Gorman's first Fringe show in eight years and the start of his latest tour. The show also harks back to the docu-comedy that made him a household name in the early Noughties.
For quite some time, however, it is not exactly clear where the show is going. Gorman has a giant screen and every time he uses it we can hear the amplified clicking of his PowerPoint control pad. What isn't happening is him completely clicking with us.
Fortunately the real clicking becomes less annoying and the metaphorical clicking prevails – but not before a long, erratic introductory section that covers meeting Jordan's ex, Alex Reid, his wife's cooking of a "mean lasagne" ("mean as in average"), how Gorman has been mistaken for a Jewish celebrity and how he has endless dubious lookalikes.
The latter two sections teeter on the verge of being jumping off points, and perhaps in a full tour they will be, but tonight the breakneck speed suggests that Gorman has got his 90-minute tour show planned and is anxious to concertina it into the 60-minute Fringe format. Consequently, the parade of lookalikes and his ranking as 12th out of 25 great literary Jews in a Jewish magazine look more ego-driven than they need to.
The show sprouts wings in a playful section about technology companies and their depiction of social media. From this Gorman extracts a gem of trivia about clock faces and moves on to give life to the fictional identities that are used to populate adverts featuring pictures of Facebook or Twitter pages.
From this he makes his next neat leap, into the fertile area of comments left after articles on newspaper websites, in particular on a piece about a French firm making union flags for the London Olympics. "I for one will never salute a Union Jack made by French hands" runs one example, which amuses and bemuses in equal measure, much like Gorman's show.
To 28 August (0131 623 3030); then touring
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