Comedian Alan Davies’ career changed once he admitted, ‘I’m one of those’

It’s second thing Monday in London. “I had to call the vet because the dog’s got a bad paw,” Alan Davies explains. “All her behaviour is normal, then I go to touch her paw and she goes –” he makes an alarmed dog noise. “There’s no talking to her about it. So we’re off down the vet. That’ll be a bargain.”

We’re either 30 seconds into a Zoom meeting or I’m accidentally streaming Alan Davies on YouTube. Like one of his tangential anecdotes on QI, the story is unremarkable but oddly compelling. There might even be a pay-off. “I’m taking her at 3.30. I could call you back for an update?”

After more than 35 years on stage and TV, Davies knows this space between life and funny like the back of his paw. He knew he wanted to be a comedian at 16. But it took writing three memoirs – White Male Stand-Up is out in September – to understand why.

“Eddie Izzard and I started out together in stand-up,” he recalls. “Like me, he also lost his mother when he was six years old, and he told me early on he thinks that [seeking] the love of the audience was an attempt to replace the unconditional love of his mother.

Davies on a 2017 episode of the panel show QI.Credit:

“I wasn’t having it at the time. But as I’ve got older I think he’s probably right. It’s still the case. The audience laughing and applauding makes you feel good in a way, perhaps, that I need.”

Just Ignore Him is the title of Davies’ 2020 book. It’s something his dad used to say to undermine his credibility. This was because his dad began molesting him when he was eight or nine – two or three years after his mother died, of cancer, under especially cruel circumstances. Telling that story, after a lifetime pretending to ignore it, “changed a lot of things”, he says. “Prose was the only way. As a comedian I’d not been able to tell it.”

Nor would there be any value in his audience wondering, “Why’s he saying all this sad shit?” when he brings his new stand-up show, Think Ahead, to Australia in November. “But I’ve tried to access it a bit,” he says, “and I do that by talking about being an older comedian.

Davies knew he wanted to be a comedian at 16. But it took writing three memoirs to understand why.Credit: Tony Briggs

“I’m turning 60 next year. How do I approach comedy? How do I approach who I am when I’m speaking to the audience? And how was I approaching it when I was younger? Why was I behaving like I did on stage in my 20s? Why is it different?

“I can tell you why it was different: because these facts were unknown to you. I was concealing them, and I was creating a persona to navigate my life with, and I thought I’d cracked it. And then you find later in life you haven’t cracked it, you’ve just got a facade, and the facade starts to annoy you, as much as it perhaps does those audience members who don’t like your show who have spotted it.

Davies with Sarah Alexander in the long-running series Jonathan Creek.Credit: BBC/Mark Mainz

“So it’s a bit of a reappraisal. Some of that is prompted from being able to mine the material in the book.”

Think Ahead, you’d assume, will be progressive by definition. “I can’t remember why I called it Think Ahead. That’s probably all you need to know,” he says with a laugh. But he does know it’s a relatively new headspace.

“When I started doing stand-up I was 22. I did a drama degree at university, then I started doing open spots on the London comedy circuit, which was quite a nice thing in the late ’80s. It was all these little comedy clubs that were run by individuals who you’d ring on their landline, they’d put you in for a spot a few months away, then if you went down well they’d book you three months further on.

“So your diary was never more than three months ahead. After that it was literally blank for the rest of your life, and that suited me at that time. I liked that feeling of ‘I’m not tied into anything’.”

Those blank days are long gone. Booming comedy career aside, Davies’ kids with his wife Katie Maskell – a fellow writer of books, TV and radio – are 15, 14 and nine, so school has the future block-booked for the medium term at least.

TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO ALAN DAVIES

1. Worst habit? Overeating. My nine-year-old had a taste of something the other day, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s disgusting. Give it to Dad.’ And, sure enough, I ate it.
2. Greatest fear? Dying. I was asked by my publishers to write a list of how many of the people in my new book are now dead, and I think there are 35. So, yeah, it bothers me.
3. The line that has stayed with you? ”Why is it important?” [via actress Fiona Shaw]. That’s a good question to ask of anything you’re doing. Or watching. Especially online.
4. Biggest regret? Not dealing with the stuff with my father earlier.
5. Favourite book? Recently it’s Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
6. The artwork/song you wish was yours? A New England. I really revere Billy Bragg. He grew up not far from me, in Essex.
7. If you could time-travel, where would you choose to go? I imagined being at my own funeral and seeing what people were saying. Then I suddenly had a terrible fear: what if Katie and the kids are not there? But I did a podcast with [astronomer] Brian Cox and he reassured me that time travel is impossible. So don’t worry about it.

“On top of that, your own mortality comes into play,” he says. “This is one of the hardest things to manage in life, is the length of it. I mean, we’re obsessed with the length of things. How long will it take to walk to the cinema? You go on your maps app and it says nine minutes, and you’re thinking, ‘I could shave a minute off that’.

“How long is the film? How long will it take to cook the potatoes? We demand to know those things. But how long are you going to live for?” He makes a grunty “dunno” noise. “It’s really troubling when you get to an age where, let’s face it, people start disappearing all around you.”

The suggestion that he log onto death-clock.org and type in his particulars makes him splutter. “What if it says next Tuesday? Then what do you do?”

In his case, probably a stand-up gig. He’s described it as the love of his life, despite giving it away for 10 years when a show at the Comedy Store in London went wrong in the early 2000s. Thrown by a heckling audience, he felt his burgeoning profile as a wisecracking sleuth in Jonathan Creek and his many other TV gigs had dulled his impact.

It was an Australian promoter friend, Marnie Foulis, who convinced him to get back on stage in Melbourne in 2011. He’s only since stopped to write his books. But these days his “why?” radar is ever more acute.

“Once you’ve established that you have that skill to make people laugh, what choices you’re making in the subject matter becomes more important to you. If you’re 23 and you’re just learning, ‘Well, I need to get a laugh. Shopping trolleys! They never go straight. And then your kid goes in it, and …’ Yeah, I could do five on that.

“When you get older you think, ‘Who gives a shit about shopping trolleys? No one. Shut up about shopping trolleys. You’re a 59-year-old man talking about shopping trolleys. What do you really want to talk about?’”

One of the things that fuelled Just Ignore Him was a website called 1in6.org, “which is the number of men and boys who have been abused in some form or another”, he says. “It made me think about all the audiences that I play to, all the people sitting in silence with their secret troubles, and I thought, OK, I’ll be the one who stands up and says, ‘I’m one of those’.

“I’m not going to dwell on it. It’s just a fact. It’s affected me in this way and that way. And here I am with my comedy show in which it’s a small part because that’s how I prefer to think of it. There comes a time when you just think, ‘I need to work out what it is that I’ve been trying to say for 35 years’. And it could take that long to get there.”

Think Ahead is at Bunjil Place, Narre Warren, on November 28, Palais Melbourne on November 29, and State Theatre, Sydney, on December 12 and 13.

White Male Stand-Up (Hachette) is out on September 9.