Greg Davies: 'Rik Mayall was still a force of nature.'

The Man Down star and comedian has had a hard year, with both the death of his father and onscreen dad Rik Mayall and a breakup with Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall.

Radio Times review

For a while it looked as if Man Down might not return. Greg Davies' splendidly daft sitcom about a blundering oaf who is the victim of bizarre attacks from his father, looked in doubt when Rik Mayall - who played said father brilliantly - died in June 2014.

Without Mayall's injections of crazed comic energy the show won't be quite the same, but this Christmas one-off should give us an idea of how much he'll be missed. It was still being made as RT went to press but the plot involves Dan and his two friends - off-with-the-fairies Jo and brilliantly square Brian - visiting the farm of Dan's aunt Nesta (Stephanie Cole). There they meet a peculiarly mean turkey.

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A Christmas instalment of Greg Davies's sitcom ahead of a full new series next year, though one that will be sadly missing the late Rik Mayall among its cast. Dan (Davies) has had a tough 12 months, but he's trying to turn things around. A festive thorn in the side, however, threatens to derail his efforts with the unwelcome arrival of his Aunt Nesta (Stephanie Cole). Meanwhile, Jo and Brian have realised rather sooner than expected that a farm is really not their natural habitat.

Man Down Series 2 will explore Dan's dad relationship

Man Down fans - good news: the second series of the Channel 4 comedy will see a lot more of the popular madcap dad played by Rik Mayall, who spends his whole time devising cruel and unpleasant practical jokes to play on his son Dan.

Another debut sitcom that was awarded a Christmas Special is Channel 4's Man Down. Having not been a fan of the series I approached Man Down with trepidation and mainly watched it as I couldn't find the remote control after Alan Carr had finished.

Man Down can best be described as a surreal sitcom which gets laughs from the absurd situations its characters find themselves in. Greg Davies is perfectly cast as the hapless hero while Rik Mayall provides incredibly absurd support as he revels in dressing up in a number of costumes to surprise his son. Best of all though is Mike Wozniak as Dan's only sensible friend Brian and gets to deliver a brilliant speech about this year's must-have toys for kids.

I have to say Man Down was the biggest surprise of the Christmas season as I was expecting not to laugh at all while watching. It may well have been I'd had too much to eat and drink at this point, but I still found Man Down to be a comically surreal slice of festive fun.

The more it went on, the more we came to love Greg Davies's beautifully tasteless sitcom. His character Dan may be a towering oaf of a teacher who swears at pupils, insults his own parents and exploits his friends, but we still want things to go right for him. And as it's a sitcom, they never do. Tonight, Dan tries to impress head teacher Amy by putting on a Christmas play. But his practical joker of a dad (Rik Mayall) has inaugurated the "12 Scares of Christmas", one of which is properly nasty: Hitchcock would be proud.

A certain Christmas spirit was in abundance on Man Down here thanks to Rik Mayall's demented turn as a father whose festive regimen focused solely on terrorising his son, including shoving Greg Davies's Dan headfirst into a Christmas tree and rigging his car with a rowdy seagull. That's my kind of Christmas spirit, right there. And any show which can come up with a kids' school nativity called Scrooge 3000 (sample lyric: "Look at the tasty futuristic geese/ you can't afford a goose to eat") is all right in my book.

Channel 4's sitcom Man Down has settled into a pleasingly puerile groove, and joined BBC One's hit Mrs Brown's Boys in representing slapstick comedy. Here, teacher Greg Davies gave the nativity play a contemporary twist with the nightmare robotic future of Scrooge 3,000, but it was Rik Mayall as his dad, working his way through the increasingly unpleasant "12 scares of Christmas", who stole the show - and, potentially, planted ideas for potentially fatal practical jokes in the minds of cooped-up families everywhere.