Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, George Square Theatre, Edinburgh
Entertaining voyage around googlewhacking
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For those unaware of the expression, "googlewhack" is derived from Google, the world's favourite internet search engine, where all human life, or at least the "wired" percentage, can be found, spread over some three billion web pages. A successful "googlewhack" is composed of a juxtaposition of two unlikely words which produces only a single link when offered to the gods of the world wide web.
Dave Gorman, of Are You Dave Gorman? fame, the 2001 hit show where he pursued his namesakes (and which later became a successful six-part series for BBC2 - quite an achievement for a one-hour Fringe slot), discovered this phenomenon when he received an e-mail from Australia pointing out that his website was the only one in the virtual universe featuring two particular words on the same page (To preserve their "googlewhackness", they can't be revealed here).
Intrigued, he pursued the idea, using the answers to the Observer's cryptic crossword as a "googlewhack engine", soon contacting the man behind the rather, er, specialist site www.womenanddogsuk.co.uk (which does exactly what you might expect, if you expect to see photographs of respectable women with respectable dogs, and nothing more.) Asked to produce another GW, its owner found a link which, amazingly, mentioned one David Gorman, the Canadian living in France who featured in Dave One's previous show, and a regular correspondent of the comic. Confused yet?
Dave half-reluctantly accepted the challenge of amiably stalking a trail of 10 whackers before reaching his 32nd birthday. Cue a series of long-distance journeys and a revival of the pie charts and graphs familiar from his previous show, much to the delight of the sold-out house.
Though entertaining, it's thin stuff next to the living breathing entity which was Are You Dave Gorman?. While that show evolved each night of its run, as every new, previously undiscovered Gorman was thrown into the equation, this is merely a documentary account of his travails, sometimes hurriedly glossing over travel schedules which might frazzle a transatlantic CEO. Which is presumably why he pleads with the audience not to give the details away.
Venue 37, 7.45pm (1hr 30mins) to 24 August (not 11 & 12 August) 0131-662 8740
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