The Power of Dave

You may think that my name is Plastic – it isn’t. I’m not sure that I could go through life with the name Plastic Mancunian – people would think that I am as weird as my name.

What do you mean "You are!"?

My real name is Dave.

I love being called Dave. It is a great name, a wonderful name – a bloke’s name.

My mum and sisters, and indeed my aunts and cousins, all insist on calling me David, despite my insistence that Dave is the name I prefer to be known by. I guess in my mum’s case, she would argue that David was the name she chose, the name she fought over with my dad, and the name that is on my birth certificate.

My dad was called George, as was his dad and his dad’s dad. He wanted to prolong the family name by making me George IV; thankfully my mum won that particular argument. She didn’t get it all her own way, sadly, because I am stuck with George as a middle name, something I only rarely admit.

I can therefore understand why my mum insists that my name is David, and has drummed it into my sisters, my aunts and any other family members that, despite my protestations, I am David.

I’m not David – I am Dave.

Whenever I introduce myself to new people I say

“Hi, I’m Dave.”

That says it all for me.

Such is the power of Dave that there is a feeling amongst non-Daves that we are taking over the planet. And maybe we are.

For starters, in the UK, all Daves have our own TV channel named after us. I am not making this up.

Dave TV was named such because “Everybody knows somebody called Dave”.

And from my experience that is true. The channel also sells itself as “The Home of Witty Banter” and shows a constant stream of old favourite comedy shows. Such is the power of Dave TV that they have produced, exclusively, two new series of Red Dwarf, one of my favourite all time comedy shows.

Here is the trailer for the brand new series, Red Dwarf X, which started on Dave last Thursday:

And, of course, the hero of Red Dwarf is another Dave – Dave Lister.

This is the power of Dave. Of course, Dave TV was first mentioned by another Dave (David Lee Roth) in his video for Just a Gigolo:







Conspiracy theorists, who consider the Power of Dave to be an evil cult bent of taking over the world, may actually have a point.

Here is the evidence:




As well as having a logo on the moon, here in the UK, our Prime Minister is a Dave – David Cameron. That is just the beginning. It won’t be long before we have a Dave in the White House, the Parliament of Australia and the Government of Canada.

Getting a Dave into the Kremlin or the Government of the People’s Republic of China might be tricky though. I’m sure that there are Daves in Russia (Dave in Russian is Дэйв) and China (Dave in Chinese is 戴夫). There must be somebody with those names in those countries.

Here are one or two interesting facts about the name David:

David is a really old name, originating from ancient Mesapotamia.

St David is the patron saint of Wales.

Variants of David are Dave, Davey, Davie, Davy, Dafydd, Dewi, Dai, Daf, Dovi and Dof.

The female equivalent is Davina.

David means “Beloved”

As much as I love my name, I wouldn’t want every other bloke in the world to be called Dave – imagine the confusion and chaos that would ensue.

Dave is such a popular name at the moment that I know quite a few other Dave’s. On one project I worked on a few years ago, there were no fewer than four Dave’s all sitting on the same table. People would come into the office and say “Where’s Dave?”

Four people would look around and say “Here I am – are you blind?”

It was a tough project but a fun one, and while we were all working really hard, things went wrong, so much so that we created an “Excuses Register”. There were some classic in-house excuses that we all used but my particular favourites, given that there were four Dave’s, were:

“Dave asked me to do that.”

“Dave wrote that.”

“I thought Dave was meant to do that.”

Also, can you imagine being called Dave and married to a Davina?

“Dave and Davina” doesn’t really have a ring to it, does it? Or is that just me?

It just sounds – well – SILLY.

Thankfully Mrs PM is not called Davina, although if she were, I would still love her (though I may try to persuade her to change her name).

In conclusion, I would like to thank my mum for fighting to have me called Dave. I have my own TV channel and I share the name of a boy who slew a giant called Goliath armed only with a sling. If only I could do something similar.

I’ll leave you with a few quotes from a fellow Dave from America, a very funny guy called Dave Barry, a man who surely, like me, embraces the Power of Dave.

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You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.

Never assume that the guy understands that you and he have a relationship. 

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it. 

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'. 

If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.