Dave Gorman: Modern Life Is Goodish

The PowerPoint Stage and the Found Poem

At its core, Modern Life Is Goodish reimagined the stand-up set by placing a slide projector at the centre of the performance. Rather than relying solely on spoken word, Gorman built each episode around a themed PowerPoint presentation, tackling subjects such as celebrity obsession and the mechanics of social media. The format gave his material a visual scaffolding that set the show apart from conventional comedy specials.

Equally distinctive was the recurring "Found Poem" segment. In this piece, Gorman would read aloud a curated collection of strange, often absurd comments that real users had left on news websites about a single story.

He delivered the material under a single spotlight while the Billroth String Quartet — rebranded as the Billroth Ensemble from the fourth series onward — played the Sarabande from Handel's Keyboard Suite in D minor. The contrast between the chaotic internet voices and the baroque string arrangement created a tone that was simultaneously tender and absurd. Each episode's title was drawn directly from a line within that Found Poem, tying the show's structure to its most human, unscripted moments.

The Grind Behind the Slides

The production of Modern Life Is Goodish was, by Gorman's own account, extraordinarily demanding. Each pair of episodes was recorded at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, but the real work happened well before the cameras rolled. Gorman would stage "dry run" performances of each episode's material in small theatres, using those sessions to identify what needed reworking. He frequently rewrote significant portions of his set after these test shows, meaning the final recorded version was often quite different from the first draft.

In the three weeks leading up to a taping session, Gorman reported working in excess of a hundred hours per week. That relentless pace was not merely a matter of artistic perfectionism; it was a genuine toll.

When he announced in December 2017 that the fifth series would be the last, the crushing workload was cited as one of the principal reasons. The other was his desire to step away from the studio and tour live in 2018. The show's creation was, in short, a marathon of rewriting, rehearsing, and re-recording that left little room for rest, and that reality ultimately shaped the show's original run.

Five Series, a Pause, and a Comeback

Modern Life Is Goodish premiered on 17 September 2013 on the Dave channel and ran through five series, concluding with the fifth series that began airing on 31 October 2017. On 18 December 2017, Gorman publicly confirmed that no further series would follow, effectively closing the book on what had become a defining part of British comedy television.

Nearly seven years later, in July 2024, UKTV announced that four brand-new hour-long specials had been commissioned for their rebranded U&Dave channel. The sixth series began broadcasting on 24 February 2025. However, the final output differed from what had been reported: rather than four episodes, the series comprised three.

The fourth recorded episode was pulled because a substantial portion of its material centred on the rise to fame of Gregg Wallace and his BBC programme Inside the Factory. That material had been written before allegations of historical misconduct against Wallace became public — allegations he denies. Two segments from the dropped episode that did not involve Wallace were subsequently released as standalone features on U's streaming platform, ensuring that some of the work still reached an audience.

"Good...ish" and the Blur Echo

The show's entire premise rested on a deliberately hedged verdict about contemporary existence. Gorman's argument was not that modern life was terrible, nor was it an unqualified celebration; it was, in his phrasing, "good...ish." That small suffix carried the weight of the entire series, acknowledging both the genuine pleasures and the persistent frustrations of living in the twenty-first century. Episodes explored themes like the machinery of celebrity culture and the strange dynamics of social media, always through the lens of that tempered, wry acceptance.

The title itself sits in the shadow of Blur's 1993 album Modern Life Is Rubbish. When pressed on whether the similarity was deliberate, Gorman offered a characteristically light response: he thought it was a Blur reference "if you want it to be," admitted that the "rubbish" version "comes to mind anyway," but ultimately said he "just like[d] that." The ambiguity was part of the charm. The show never demanded a single reading of its own name, just as it never demanded a single verdict on the world it was describing.