Gas station diaries

Published on Friday 1 February 2008 16:26

DAVE GORMAN HAS FORGED A career out of making his life as absurdly difficult and adventurous as possible. His award-winning one-man show Are You Dave Gorman? followed him on an essentially pointless transatlantic mission to meet 54 other Dave Gormans.

Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure was even odder, as he travelled the world in an attempt to find the authors of web pages featuring two-word phrases which, when typed into the Google search engine, only return a single result. He was having a mental breakdown at the time, which may have had some bearing on the intensity of his quest.

Similarly challenging was Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment, during which he read various horoscopes and diligently followed the advice given to his particular star sign. Which is why, among other things, he ended up openly browsing a porn mag in front of his mum, and spent the last of his money on a trip to Dubai to bet on Ian Woosnam in a golf tournament. Seldom has a man risked so much for the sake of a humorous stage show, subsequent TV adaptation, and best-selling book.

His latest project, the feature-length documentary Dave Gorman In America Unchained, follows him as he struggles to drive coast to coast across the US without giving a single cent to franchise corporations, aka "The Man". This meant that he and his director had to fill up only at independent gas stations, buy food from Mom and Pop stores, and stay only in independently owned motels. Dave Gorman simply loves unreasonable restrictions. Unlike his previous adventures, however, this film – which recently won the audience award for Best Documentary Feature at the Austin Film Festival – has a serious point to it, namely to find out whether the spirit of independent America still exists, and if so, whether it can endure in the unsmiling face of corporate monopoly.

"It's political with a small p," he admits. "I don't think the film lectures you or tells you that you should be doing the same, or makes any overt political point. It comes from a more personal angle. But between the lines, and specifically on the lines from some of the people that we meet, you hear some more political things."

Gorman was initially reluctant to make a film of his journey, as he had originally intended to embark upon the trip alone, purely for his own personal satisfaction. "I was worried about TV taking that away," he says. "You'd end up with a crew following me in another vehicle, and they'd be filling up at the Shell station, with a jerrycan in the back of their car for if I really got into trouble. To my mind, the thrill, the experience, is more important. I was persuaded on the strength that it would be just a person with a camera in the car with me. Then it's the same experience, isn't it?"

Well, not quite. When his director began to suffer from serious back pain, Gorman had no choice but to deviate from his journey. "When Steph's back started to go wrong, Steph's back started to dictate where we went. So I was basically driving her to chiropractors. Now, I'm big enough and old enough to realise that I can't be upset with Steph about that, because she's ill, and it needs to be dealt with. But there's still this resentment of me thinking, 'Well now the film is changing things, isn't it?' It felt like I was having this thing taken from me."

This minor irritant eventually ballooned into a full-blown disaster, when the director's ailing health forced her to return to the UK, leaving Gorman in the lurch and unable to continue for reasons beyond his control. "When Steph leaves, and I'm now by myself, I think that maybe it's mine again. But it's so not mine again, because the film company are now pointing out to me that they own that car – you can't go anywhere, stay where you are, we'll try and find a replacement, but we can't promise that we're going to do so. So now this is the thing that I really wanted to do, my dream journey, and I've let you c**** make a film about it, and now it might not happen because of your film. That just flipped me out."

And how. The film shows the usually placid Gorman railing at the camera and consumed with such self-loathing that he ends up devouring a Happy Meal, which not only contravenes his mission, but also causes the long-time vegetarian to spew his guts out. On camera. It's not pleasant. "There's the car sitting there, there's me by myself, there's the rest of America to go and drive into, and I'm basically forbidden from doing that. So I just hated everyone and everything as a result. It was a very strange thing filming myself doing that, and putting that on record."

Gorman's fear about compromising his integrity becomes most apparent during the scene in which he visits an old-fashioned and almost unbelievably perfect family-run diner in the perfectly named town of Independence, Oregon, on the perfectly serendipitous day of their closing after decades in business. "Taylor's in Independence was exactly the kind of place I was hoping to find. It was perfect on that level. And from a storytelling and film-making point of view it's even more fantastic because it's closing. You don't want it to be closing, that's not the point. It's only perfect for the story you're telling. I think you can see on my face the genuine conflict. Maybe it's like being a nature film documentary-maker, and you find some lions ravaging an antelope. You feel for the antelope, but you still film it dying as it makes your film more interesting."

One of the most heartening things about the film are the endless examples of human kindness Gorman encounters. As he points out, it may be easy to hate America, but it's more difficult to take issue with Americans themselves. "I feel really sorry for a lot of Americans, as there is a confusion among them. They sort of have an idea that the rest of the world doesn't like them, and they don't quite know why. It's the most powerful nation on earth, and middle-class Americans are having to work two jobs to put their kids through school. They have less holidays than we do, and work longer hours, and earn less money than we do. That's weird. What's the point of being the world's most powerful nation if you have less holidays than everybody else? If you're a guy living in Kansas working hard to put his kids through school – that's his priority in life – and somebody breaks down outside your house and you go out and help them fix the car, if you have that kind of community spirit, you don't understand why the world doesn't like you. And actually the world is wrong for not liking you, because it's not your fault. They feel put upon, and it's really not their doing."

Serious intentions aside, Gorman's thwarted road-trip through the suffocating soul of America ultimately succeeds as an encapsulation of a man seemingly obsessed with contriving unpredictable situations for himself. "What you see in this film is not what anyone planned," he says. "This goes beyond what I thought it was going to be. When this was first conceived, no-one thought we were going to get very far on independent gas. We thought that we'd have to use chain gas stations when we had to, and acknowledge that in the film, but showing that we were trying to do everything we could. But actually because we managed to find independent gas on day one, then day two and so on, every time you do that you think, 'Bloody hell, I'm not going to let go of this now, it might actually be possible.'

"And that became more important. Essentially it does become a film about finding gas stations, because that's the most difficult part of it. But what that does is add this horrible layer of stress. When you spend the entire day scanning the road in the hope of seeing an independent gas station, and constantly checking the fuel gauge to see how necessary that station is going to be, there's this little cold sweat on you the whole time. I wouldn't wish this on anyone, and I'd hate to travel like this again."

Maybe so. But it surely won't be long before this inveterate adventurer embarks upon another voyage into self-imposed madness.

• Dave Gorman in America Unchained is on More4 on 5 February.

How to become a comic adventurer

A few months ago, I wrote a feature in this magazine about a Scottish woman called Eilidh MacAskill, who was spending 2007 performing a ukulele ceilidh every single day. The project's name: Eilidh's Daily Ukulele Ceilidh, of course.

I couldn't help observing that the project was proceeding in an endearingly haphazard fashion compared to the likes of Dave Gorman, Danny Wallace and Tony Hawks, who have forged lucrative publishing, stage and TV careers documenting similarly oddball adventures – a year on, most people I talk to have still never heard of MacAskill.

Possibly she was offended by the word "haphazard", possibly flattered by the word "endearingly". Either way, by the time the ceilidh became a show at the Traverse in Edinburgh in November, she had adopted "endearingly haphazard" as a catchphrase and backdrop. All publicity is good publicity etc.

MacAskill might not have got a book or TV deal out of 2007's ukulele adventure, but she did get a lot of work and publicity – for a performance artist at least – and the comments on her MySpace page suggest she inspired a lot of people. Her example proved, yet again, that there's a living of sorts – if not necessarily a fortune – to be made from throwing yourself into an arguably pointless venture.

Dave Gorman is something of a pioneer in this. Then again, you could say his escapades have an endearingly haphazard quality to them too. His stage show/book/TV series Are You Dave Gorman?, famously began in 2000 with 1. a tequila-fuelled pub argument with his flatmate Danny Wallace, 2. Wallace's refusal to believe that the assistant manager of East Fife Football Club was also called Dave Gorman, and 3. Gorman's pigheaded (and drunken) decision to take the first train to East Fife in order to prove it.

Gorman still maintains that the duo took that train purely for a bet, and only started thinking about a show months later, having already maxed out Gorman's credit card while searching for other Dave Gormans in France, Italy, New York and Norway, out of pure, obsessive self-indulgence. Either way, he got a Perrier nomination.

Gorman claims a similarly haphazard history for his even more successful Googlewhack Adventure. He was intending to write a serious novel, had a publishing deal, but got distracted by Googlewhacking (it means looking for combinations of two words that, when typed into the famous search engine, give you only one result rather than the usual thousands).

Gorman then rashly spent his entire advance travelling the world finding other people with Googlewhacks in their lives. When the publisher demanded the novel, Gorman admitted he hadn't written anything and offered a book about Googlewhacking instead. The publisher, to his surprise, said no. So Gorman made a stage show in order to repay the advance.

This, probably, is what is so appealing about Gorman. He risks everything on mad, pointless but touchingly sincere quests, and somehow gets away with it. By comparison, Wallace's similar efforts – a book, Yes Man, about saying yes to every question he was asked for six months; another, Join Me, about starting his own cult – have a faintly contrived quality. So does Tony Hawks's book Round Ireland With a Fridge (about hitchhiking with a fridge for a 100 bet).

But then perhaps that's a matter of taste. The appeal of all these people is that they do things many of us talk idly about to friends but would never have the time or the obsessive streak actually to carry out.

They are also, arguably, the adventurers who define the times we live in. When every part of the earth has already been conquered, even serious quests sound faintly pointless (third person to climb Everest without oxygen etc). Knowingly silly adventures have a peculiar integrity to them – they're an act of rebellion against conventional notions of heroism, and perhaps the ultimate example of making one's own, enriching entertainment in a consumer culture that spoonfeeds us trash.

If you can get a bestselling book out of it, all the better. More fun than having a real job, surely.