As someone only really familiar with Greg Davies through Taskmaster can you say more about his other comedy and work vs his Taskmaster persona re: queerness? Your last post made me curious!
I cannot overstate the degree to which Greg’s non-TM comedy is lately laser-focused on communicating the following:
he is old
he is huge
he is romantically and sexually attracted to well-kept men over 40
in his earlier comedy, his queerness is more about him constructing himself as both non-threatening to women and sexually pathetic, as a comedic juxtaposition with the way his height confers a kind of unearned masculine virtue
but as he gets older imo he’s just being himself in a less self-conscious way, and who he is is a theatre nerd whose genuine teenage hero was Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and he flirts with other men because it’s funny but at the same time it’s not really a joke
his character in The Cleaner only dates women, but he straighforwardly expresses sexual attraction to multiple men, and when a kid asks him if he’s gay, he says no but doesn’t say he’s straight
he flirts with a particular category of male guest so consistently on Never Mind the Buzzcocks that Noel Fielding and Jamali Maddix make targeted jokes about men who are his type (in a supportive way, not a homophobic way)
on Taskmaster he does plenty of flirting with male contestants (and Alex), but he’s noticeably less effusive and camp, especially in the earlier series, and unlike on NMTB he doesn’t often make jokes that reference queer club culture
genuinely if all I had to go on was NMTB, I would assume Greg had been out for decades, I seriously can’t get past how queer he is on that show and how straight the Taskmaster seems by contrast
