Greg Davies

Wem, Brunel, and thirteen years of other people's children

Gregory Daniel Davies was born on 14 May 1968 in St Asaph, a Welsh birthplace his parents arranged deliberately despite living over the border. He grew up in Wem, Shropshire, went to Thomas Adams School there, and read drama and English at Brunel University, graduating in 1990. Wem made him an honorary townsman in October 2025; Brunel gave him an honorary Doctorate of Humanities in December 2022.

What followed the degree was not comedy but teaching: thirteen years of secondary-school drama, at Langley Academy, Orleans Park School and Sandhurst School. That stretch is the raw material for a large part of his act and later for his writing — Man Down was at points filmed in his actual former classroom at Sandhurst. He is 6ft 8in, which gets mentioned in roughly every review ever written about him, usually by the second paragraph, and which he has spent twenty years turning into material rather than ignoring.

Klang, cheeseballs and the slow build

Davies came up through the sketch trio We Are Klang with Marek Larwood and Steve Hall, who played the Edinburgh Fringe from 2003 to 2007 and got a BBC Three series in 2009. The solo stand-up started on the independent circuit in the mid-2000s and the industry noticed quickly: three Chortle Award nominations in 2007, including best breakthrough act, and a best compere nomination in 2008.

His first solo show, Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog, took him to the 2010 Fringe and an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination, and came out on DVD in 2011. The Back of My Mum's Head followed in 2013. The jump in scale came with You Magnificent Beast in 2017, filmed at the Hammersmith Apollo and released by Netflix in 2018; it won the Chortle Award for best tour that year. Then he stopped touring for seven years.

Mr Gilbert, Wicky, and the man with the chair

The television break was Mr Gilbert, the sixth-form head who despises his students, in E4's The Inbetweeners from 2008 to 2010, reprised in the 2011 and 2014 films and the 2019 reunion special. Cuckoo on BBC Three brought a BAFTA Television Award nomination for best male comedy performance in 2013. Man Down, which he created and wrote as well as starred in, ran on Channel 4 from 2013 to 2017.

Since 2015 he has sat in the chair on Taskmaster, opposite Alex Horne, first on Dave and latterly on Channel 4 — the role that turned a well-regarded circuit comic into a household fixture. He took over Never Mind the Buzzcocks in 2021. The same year brought The Cleaner on BBC One, which he writes and leads as crime-scene cleaner Paul "Wicky" Wickstead, adapted from a German format; its third series ran from 4 October to 8 November 2024.

Autumn 2026: three jobs at once

Taskmaster's twenty-second series began at 9pm on Thursday 3 September 2026 on Channel 4 and runs to 5 November, with Chloe Petts, Isy Suttie, Matt Lucas, Nina Conti and Richard Ayoade in the line-up. The format's future was settled on 2 April 2026, when Channel 4 ordered a further six series across three years plus New Year and Champion of Champions specials — Horne's response was that the prospect of "three more years in Greg's deep embrace" was soothing his little head. The series announced around that recommission put Amy Gledhill, Armando Iannucci, Joanna Page, Joel Dommett and Kumail Nanjiani through the tasks.

BAFTA named Davies host of its 2026 Television Awards on 23 March, and he fronted the ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on 10 May, opening with a sketch about television's worst moments and a line noting that he was not personally nominated while Romesh Ranganathan was up twice in a category he could have entered.

On 20 July 2026 the BBC confirmed the first new Cleaner since 2024: a one-hour festive special, working title The Cleaner In Italy, written by and starring Davies, in which Wicky joins girlfriend Ruth on a hiking holiday in the Dolomites, has an accident and is marooned in a remote mountain hotel. Robert Webb, Peter Serafinowicz, Zita Sattar, Tori Allen-Martin, Kevin Eldon, Veronica Ferres, Milanka Brooks and Dylan Blore are in the cast; it goes out on BBC One and iPlayer over Christmas.

The tour that kept growing

Full Fat Legend, the first tour since You Magnificent Beast, went out in 2025 and immediately outgrew its own plans. Davies sold out the Royal Albert Hall and the OVO Arena Wembley, where Chortle's Steve Bennett reviewed it on 13 June 2025, and played to 12,500 at BP Pulse Live in Birmingham on 18 June 2025 — the largest audience of his career to that point. Bruce Dessau caught the Albert Hall show for the Evening Standard that same month.

On 8 December 2025, with more than 250,000 tickets gone, the tour was extended into 2027: six consecutive nights at Hammersmith's Eventim Apollo in March 2026, and a final London date at the O2, with second nights added in Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, Leicester, Birmingham, Bristol, Swansea, Cardiff, Manchester, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, York, Belfast, Norwich, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Pre-sale opened on 10 December 2025 and general sale on 12 December.

Then came the first trip south. Announced on 25 February 2026, Davies's debut Australian and New Zealand stand-up tour opens at the Aotea Centre's Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre in Auckland on 18 October 2026, then Wellington on 20 October and Christchurch on 21 October, before Adelaide's Thebarton Theatre on 24 October, Perth's Riverside Theatre from 26 October, Brisbane on 29 October, Canberra's Royal Theatre on 31 October, Hamer Hall in Melbourne from 2 November and Sydney from 7 November. The UK and Ireland leg resumes in December 2026 and runs to March 2027. The Royal Albert Hall performance was filmed for a second Netflix special.