by Allan Sko
Brit stand-up comic, actor, author, panellist, and excoriator of personal truth, Alan Davies, has been a mainstay for so long now, it’s hard to recall a time when he wasn’t here.
Whether sleuthing his way through seemingly impossible crimes in Jonathan Creek, challenging Kelsey Grammar’s Fraiser Krane as the longest-running TV character as anchor panellist on QI, or hosting his own sit-down chat show, As Yet Untitled, Davies’ ubiquity and longevity is matched only by charm and humour.
But then, during the pandemic, Davies dropped a bombshell in the form of a new book, Just Ignore Him.
To those expecting a gaggle of hilarious anecdotes and wry observations, be prepared: it is a fiercely honest and commendable examination of a secret he has held onto for decades: that of the abuse he suffered from his father.
Undergoing the early stages of my own fraught journey to sobriety and its associated hardships, it was an honour and a joy to tell Davies himself how much his book helped, and how brilliant it is both in terms of writing, and vulnerability.
“Thank you, that’s very kind. That means a lot,” Davies responds. “The next book picks up from there, somewhat, and it’s about a life and career in comedy and television.”
Indeed, we find Davies in the midst of double-promo duties, extolling the virtues of both his new book, White Male Stand-Up, and his new stand-up show, Think Ahead, which is coming to Canberra Theatre on 8 December.
“There are bits of anecdotes here and there, but it’s mainly about examining how you carry the past with you. It’s not behind you. It’s not a closed chapter or any of those things which I regard as nonsensical. It’s with you, and present.
“In my case, it was very secret,” Davies continues. “Building this public face whilst carrying this private secret; those two things are quite far apart.
“And it was hard, at times, to manage that. I realised I had to bring those two things closer together. And that’s what that book did.”
Davies was to discover that personal growth and self-reconciliation weren’t the only benefits from undergoing such a weighty undertaking. “I can be more open in my stand-up now,” Davies reveals. “Which, for a long time, never felt like the forum to do that.
“Stand-up can be skin deep and trivial at times,” he continues. “So now, later in my life, I’ve been more able to bring everything to the table at once, and hopefully it’s the better for it.”
Davies’ comments bring to mind a recent YouTube I watched: a compilation of Jim Carrey clips in which he is imparting various slices of wisdom gained from navigating his own identity crisis of some years back.
A line that resonated was his assessment of what depression was: your body shutting down because it can no longer reconcile the façade you present to the world with the truth you feel inside.
I bring this up with Davies, adding that it wouldn’t have been an easy thing to undergo his own self-assessment, and enquiring about catalyst for action he experienced.
“I think that’s true to a degree,” he says of Carrey’s assessment. “I think [unearthing the past] started when I met my wife and we had children.
“Once I had a family, it became unsustainable to be erratic and moody and difficult. There needed to be more stability, understanding and cooperation.
“I had lived on my own for 15 years, y’know, and I drank a fair bit and smoked a fair bit. I had a way of shutting things off. And then you go out to the comedy clubs, and you’re a funny guy, right? And you do QI on television and you’re larking around playing the fool…”
Creating a feedback loop of validation and mirth, while wonderful, I venture, can create a bubble within which your protected from any meaningful growth.
“Yeah, right!” Davies enthuses. “You’re building this edifice, this public persona, whilst carrying around this other stuff.
And it was the risk that it posed to my family, to my kids and their happiness [that spurred me to action]. I didn’t want the stuff that had impacted me and my childhood to be carried forward.
“I wanted, needed, to deal with it better. To manage it.”
“And so, that’s what my new book is about. How do you have this life that you want to have? I want to do comedy and acting and but how do you manage it with some of the pressures and downsides of it?
“It’s not always a boon to be recognised in public places, for example. How do you reconcile the two, and how do you keep your kids sane?
“So, yeah, it’s been a hard thing to write,” Davies concludes on the subject. “But I’m quite pleased with the outcome, and I hope people enjoy it. It’s got more light and shade, and there’s more to it than the previous book, which was going in search of a mistreated boy.”
Oh no, wait… That doesn’t conclude topic. Fuck me… he did the audiobook, didn’t he? Good grief, that must have rough.
“I had to do it,” Davies says of the task. “It’s very, very personal, obviously. And they wanted me to do it.
“The thing I remember about it is,” Davies says, a wry smile of recollection slowly spreading. “There were a couple of moments in the text where I thought, ‘Oh, no… I don’t like THAT line!’
“Or I encountered a bit of repetition that I thought I’d got in the editing. Because I wrote it in pieces and assembled it with the help of an editor, there was a lot of repetition which we edited. Seemed a couple slipped through.”
I assure Davies that, from the prospective as both a career Editor and a listener of his audiobook, his perceived worries were trivial at worst, and unnoticeable at best. This feedback sparks a thought in Davies regarding the nature of books versus stand-up.
“It’s an interesting thing,” he ponders. “When I do stand-up, with a live audience, I know if the gig’s gone well or not. It’s right in front of you. And I know if I’ve performed well, if I was tense and anxious or relaxed, whether I felt committed or if I felt I was holding back…
“With a book, it’s in a vacuum. You have to wait months before hearing feedback.
“But it has been very gratifying eventually hearing feedback, whether via social media or the old-fashioned letter writing, which I’ve discovered still exists.”
Having received precisely THREE pieces of handwritten fan mail myself, I pose that there’s a certain richness with someone taking the time to sit down and write out their thoughts by hand.
“I think that’s true,” Davies says. “It’s nice to know that someone’s taken the time, and enjoyed what you’ve done.
“And it’s good to put things on record,” Davies continues. “I look back on my first book, which I wrote 15 years ago, and I find stories and anecdotes that would have otherwise been lost, even to me.
“And it’s nice to have something my three kids can dip into later in life.”
Becoming painfully aware that the clock was ticking and there was a stand-up show still to celebrate, I ask whether Davies’ recent reconciliation had led to a renewed verve on-stage?
“I don’t know about that so much,” he considers. “I still think of the content of the books as separate from my stand-up.
“But what IS the case is I’m no longer going on stage or trying to prepare material burdened with the knowledge I’ve got some other stories and secrets that had never been told.
“The funny thing I found was,” Davies continues, “when I started to talk a little bit on stage about the contents of Just Ignore Him, most of the audience didn’t know I’d written it!
“It was released during the pandemic, so I didn’t go around doing book festivals because there weren’t any. And it wasn’t talked about a lot in the press. Because it’s about my father, and he was still alive at the time, I feel the newspapers were a bit nervous about that.
“Also, books sales are different. Even if it’s a book that sells 100,000 copies, and most authors would be happy with that, it’s still a country of 67 million people.
“But you can have a bit of fun with that… I can ask who’s read it, and two people will put their hand up,” Davies chuckles. “So, that presents a funny way into talking about how I used to do comedy when I was younger, and how I feel different about it now.
“In the end, when you put together a stand-up show… my way of doing it is jotting things down all the time, over months—things you think are funny, things you thought of or were said or heard—and then you try and blend them together and order them.”
This tired-and-true of creating stand-up has the same revelatory benefits as journaling.
“My preoccupations are revealed to me when the show’s completed,” he reveals. “And I think, ‘Oh, I see what I’ve been obsessed with for the last 12 months’.
“I’ve never set out to do a show about “X”, you know,” he continues. “It’s always been a bit random. I don’t want a show that’s heavily researched and structured; I want something light and free-spirited, and I want to engage with the people in the room.
“Material generated from notes shared with an audience, talking to and hearing from the audience and engaging with them on that… that’s what stand-up is, for me.
“I think most stand-ups, and I’m one of them, will say, ‘That’s the thing that you really love’. It feels like that’s your profession, your skill. Other stuff, people can do as well. Other people can write, can act.
“But no one can do your show. It’s YOU. And it’s a time where there’s NOTHING between you and the audience; you’re looking them in the eyes.
“It’s the thing I started doing when I was 22 and can’t imagine not doing it. I’m sure that when it comes to my last gig, I won’t think it’s my last gig; it will just turn out to have been.
Alan Davies and his new show, Think Ahead, will be at Canberra Theatre on Monday, 8 December. Tickets are $81.90 + bf and are on sale now via Canberra Ticketing.
Extra show added by popular demand! Tuesday, 9 December
