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It\u2019s second thing Monday in London. \u201cI had to call the vet because the dog\u2019s got a bad paw,\u201d Alan Davies explains. \u201cAll her behaviour is normal, then I go to touch her paw and she goes \u2013\u201d he makes an alarmed dog noise. \u201cThere\u2019s no talking to her about it. So we\u2019re off down the vet. That\u2019ll be a bargain.\u201d<\/p>\n
We\u2019re either 30 seconds into a Zoom meeting or I\u2019m 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. \u201cI\u2019m taking her at 3.30. I could call you back for an update?\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 White Male Stand-Up is out in September \u2013 to understand why.<\/p>\n
\u201cEddie Izzard and I started out together in stand-up,\u201d he recalls. \u201cLike 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.<\/p>\n
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Davies on a 2017 episode of the panel show QI.Credit: <\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t having it at the time. But as I\u2019ve got older I think he\u2019s probably right. It\u2019s still the case. The audience laughing and applauding makes you feel good in a way, perhaps, that I need.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just Ignore Him is the title of Davies\u2019 2020 book. It\u2019s something his dad used to say to undermine his credibility. This was because his dad began molesting him when he was eight or nine \u2013 two or three years after his mother died, of cancer, under especially cruel circumstances. Telling that story, after a lifetime pretending to ignore it, \u201cchanged a lot of things\u201d, he says. \u201cProse was the only way. As a comedian I\u2019d not been able to tell it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nor would there be any value in his audience wondering, \u201cWhy\u2019s he saying all this sad shit?\u201d when he brings his new stand-up show, Think Ahead, to Australia in November. \u201cBut I\u2019ve tried to access it a bit,\u201d he says, \u201cand I do that by talking about being an older comedian.<\/p>\n
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Davies knew he wanted to be a comedian at 16. But it took writing three memoirs to understand why.Credit: Tony Briggs<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m turning 60 next year. How do I approach comedy? How do I approach who I am when I\u2019m 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?<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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\u2019d cracked it. And then you find later in life you haven\u2019t cracked it, you\u2019ve just got a facade, and the facade starts to annoy you, as much as it perhaps does those audience members who don\u2019t like your show who have spotted it.<\/p>\n
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Davies with Sarah Alexander in the long-running series Jonathan Creek.Credit: BBC\/Mark Mainz<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it\u2019s a bit of a reappraisal. Some of that is prompted from being able to mine the material in the book.\u201d<\/p>\n
Think Ahead, you\u2019d assume, will be progressive by definition. \u201cI can\u2019t remember why I called it Think Ahead. That\u2019s probably all you need to know,\u201d he says with a laugh. But he does know it\u2019s a relatively new headspace.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen 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 \u201980s. It was all these little comedy clubs that were run by individuals who you\u2019d ring on their landline, they\u2019d put you in for a spot a few months away, then if you went down well they\u2019d book you three months further on.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo 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 \u2018I\u2019m not tied into anything\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those blank days are long gone. Booming comedy career aside, Davies\u2019 kids with his wife Katie Maskell \u2013 a fellow writer of books, TV and radio \u2013 are 15, 14 and nine, so school has the future block-booked for the medium term at least.<\/p>\n
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO ALAN DAVIESWorst habit? Overeating. My nine-year-old had a taste of something the other day, and he said, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s disgusting. Give it to Dad.\u2019 And, sure enough, I ate it.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.The line that has stayed with you? \u201dWhy is it important?\u201d [via actress Fiona Shaw]. That\u2019s a good question to ask of anything you\u2019re doing. Or watching. Especially online.Biggest regret? Not dealing with the stuff with my father earlier.Favourite book? Recently it\u2019s Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.The artwork\/song you wish was yours? A New England. I really revere Billy Bragg. He grew up not far from me, in Essex.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\u2019t worry about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn top of that, your own mortality comes into play,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is one of the hardest things to manage in life, is the length of it. I mean, we\u2019re 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\u2019re thinking, \u2018I could shave a minute off that\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow 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?\u201d He makes a grunty \u201cdunno\u201d noise. \u201cIt\u2019s really troubling when you get to an age where, let\u2019s face it, people start disappearing all around you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The suggestion that he log onto death-clock.org and type in his particulars makes him splutter. \u201cWhat if it says next Tuesday? Then what do you do?\u201d<\/p>\n
In his case, probably a stand-up gig. He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It was an Australian promoter friend, Marnie Foulis, who convinced him to get back on stage in Melbourne in 2011. He\u2019s only since stopped to write his books. But these days his \u201cwhy?\u201d radar is ever more acute.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOnce you\u2019ve established that you have that skill to make people laugh, what choices you\u2019re making in the subject matter becomes more important to you. If you\u2019re 23 and you\u2019re just learning, \u2018Well, I need to get a laugh. Shopping trolleys! They never go straight. And then your kid goes in it, and \u2026\u2019 Yeah, I could do five on that.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you get older you think, \u2018Who gives a shit about shopping trolleys? No one. Shut up about shopping trolleys. You\u2019re a 59-year-old man talking about shopping trolleys. What do you really want to talk about?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the things that fuelled Just Ignore Him was a website called 1in6.org, \u201cwhich is the number of men and boys who have been abused in some form or another\u201d, he says. \u201cIt 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\u2019ll be the one who stands up and says, \u2018I\u2019m one of those\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to dwell on it. It\u2019s just a fact. It\u2019s affected me in this way and that way. And here I am with my comedy show in which it\u2019s a small part because that\u2019s how I prefer to think of it. There comes a time when you just think, \u2018I need to work out what it is that I\u2019ve been trying to say for 35 years\u2019. And it could take that long to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
White Male Stand-Up (Hachette) is out on September 9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size It\u2019s second thing Monday in London. \u201cI had to call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-31108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}