Squirrel Comedy

By Lisa Clark

Alan Davies is most famous at the moment for his work as the regular dunce on the quiz panel series QI and also for the titular character in the recently revived drama mystery series Jonathan Creek. In 2011 Alan spent several weeks in Australia performing live QI with Stephen Fry and a lot of Australian comedians and then did his first solo standup tour in over ten years. He did warm up gigs for it around small venues in Melbourne and then took the show, Life is Pain back to tour the UK. He’ll be reviving it in the UK for a short tour in November 2013.

In March 2014 Alan will be premiering his new stand up show in Australia called Little Victories. Tickets are currently on sale and Alan was kind enough to spend more time than I expected chatting with me about stuff.

Alan begins by telling me that we have half an hour before he will be talking to the Adelaide Advertiser.

Lisa: Do you still have relatives in Adelaide?

Alan: I’ve got 2 cousins in Adelaide I try & see them when I go down there.

Lisa: Is that why you are so good at doing an Aussie accent or is that because of all the years watching Neighbours?

Alan: Definitely Neighbours, but probably even more Richie Benaud who was always on the telly when I was growing up. He was wildly popular in the UK, I know he was loved in Australia but he was loved here too.

Lisa: We were lucky in Australia to see Life Is Pain your first live standup in over 10 years and you seem to have enjoyed it so much you toured it around and are back to do a new show for us March next year. Was it an enjoyable return to standup?

Alan: Yeah Loved it

Lisa: Is it true that doing QI in Australia made you excited about performing in front of live audiences and was the reason you decided to go back into stand up?

Alan: Not realy, the tour was already booked. The QI shows were part of my going back to that though. It was Marnie Foulis, blame Marnie, I’ve known her for 20 years I think, she’s Colin Lane’s partner. When Lano & Woodley & I were nominated for the Perriers to win…

Lisa: Oh you were nominated that year?

Alan: Yeah I was supposed to win, I was the red hot favourite. Me and Harry Hill were the red hot favourites. Everyone on the panel put Lano & Woodley as their 2^nd favourite show. So when they added up the votes they won [sounds like our recent election]. I went to stay with Marnie and Colin at their house the following year and they put the Perrier Award on my bedside table, but despite that we’ve remained good friends. Marnie was saying “Come out to Australia, come out, come out, I’ll promote you” and she and Bec Sutherland promoted me. We started off in 2011, we booked five shows in five cities and we ended up doing sixteen shows in sixteen nights and the whole thing was off the back of the popularity of QI. I was a bit overwhelmed really and I loved doing the show. I’d worked on it at home then I came out and did warmups in Melbourne around some of the comedy clubs.

Lisa: I remember all the excitement in comedy circles when you were doing those warm up gigs around town. Are you planning to do that again while you were here?

Alan: Well it’s a different situation unfortunately, because at that time my wife came with me and we had two small children, we had a 4 month old baby and a two year old and the flight nearly killed em. It was pretty brutal that flight and everyone got sick. The kids got really ill, I don’t know how long the air has been in those planes, it’s just filthy and she said I’m not taking the kids on a flight like that again until they are older and they can cope. So last time I was out in Australia for eight weeks Now I’m going to be in Australia for fifteen days so all the warm ups and all my preparation unfortunately is going to be done in the UK & rather than go around all the little comedy clubs in Melbourne I’m going to Hamer Hall which is a whole different ball game, which is very exciting, I’m really looking forward to it.

Lisa: Your show last year had quite a bit of smut in it towards the end and I was wondering do you think you shocked some of your audience members who were expecting that nice bloke off the telly and you were using all these naughty words?

Alan: (laughs) Smut is such a funny word. Don’t even really know what smut is any more. But yes I know what you mean, there were quite a lot of sex toy jokes. I had a lot of fun doing that material and yes, maybe there were a few people in there going [puts on silly posh voice] ‘ooh my goodness I did not expect that’ and that’s the fun of doing the stand up. The stand up’s me and it’s my show it’s not me being the dunce on QI and it’s not me being the weirdo nerdy genius Jonathan Creek, it’s me being me talking about my life, my family & my view of the world and I think being away from standup for ten years gave me a chance to develop a view of the world rather than just jumping around and say anything I thought was funny which is what you do as a standup in your twenties. You’ve got bit of something to say and had a bit of a life and it’s interesting to go back to it and it means it works quite well for me now. Having a young family now, it means I can go away for short periods do some shows and get back home to them. If I’m touring the UK I can do about three shows a week and the rest of the week I’m at home. It’s about getting that balance right and seeing them while they’re small.

Lisa: Life is Pain had a lot of fantastic stories from your childhood and some about being a new dad can you give us any idea of what you are planning to talk about in this new one? Have you started writing it yet?

Alan: The shows quite well formed. I’ve been working on it this Summer over here in the UK. I do these work in progress gigs in a little studio theatre. I don’t do the clubs as much anymore. I can’t really justify leaving my wife at home with the little ones just to go and do five minutes somewhere. So I book a studio theatre and I go on stage with notes and I talk to an audience for an hour or so and at the end of it it evolves very slowly. I just did eleven shows in Edinburgh in a 150 seat theatre getting the material into shape. I’ve got a pretty good solid hour of stuff and it’s quite personal really. It’s about me and my dad and me and my son and me and my daughter and change you know with your parents when you become one and there’s a bit of illness in the family as there is in all families, you know So there’s a few things to talk about and it’s been a bit of fun exploring that. Now I’m putting that to one side and I go back and do last year’s show, [Life is Pain] I’m going around the UK doing that again in November. Then that goes out on DVD, and I can fully turn my attention to Austalia in March which is the new show and I’ll be doing warm ups in January, February. Dusting off the Edinburgh show, adding some bits, trying to evolve a new ninety minutes. That’s what I really need to put on a proper tour show, you need a good ninety minute set.

Lisa: I’d like to ask who in comedy inspired you? A lot of people you talk about in your book Teenage Revolution  are your heroes but not a lot of standup performers get the nod. You mention a few people in the last chapter that you encounter when you’re starting out in stand up like John Hegley and Eddie Izzard. So I was wondering who you looked up to when you were starting out?

Alan: A very big influence was Billy Connolly

Lisa: He was doing stand up when there was no standup

Alan: Yeah, well he was doing those big concerts in a way that other people weren’t. Standup was still in working mens clubs and strip clubs and end of the pier shows. The comedy circuit in London was quite fledgling and small.So Billy Connolly was a big influence, particularly he did a thing on ITV in the UK called An Audience With..

Lisa: Yep, I’ve seen that, it’s great [I think it was the best of all of them]

Alan: It’s a really funny hour, a very funny hour of comedy. Dave Allen was also very important.

Lisa: Yeah, Dave often gets forgotten as a great standup [or rather sit-down]

Alan: Then there are a lot of American comics, I really like Steve Martin, but I don’t know particularly what influences you. I think the thing is you have to find your own way and you have to find your own voice. That’s very important and you certainly won’t do that by copying. When I started in the circuit it was quite a political scene. There were quite a few comedians, mainly on the left and there was a lot of anti-Thatcher feeling generally in the UK and I was trying to do topical, news based material, but increasingly I found you’d go to a comedy club you’d have to say to the other comedians ‘What have you got on this, what are you saying about that’. But if you talked about your grandmother’s knitting, no one else is talking about that and if you talked about something several times over a number of gigs then it evolves into a routine rather than being two or three half developed jokes. So I found I could go in and be more autobiographical and then it was personal and it was just my stuff and it would grow and evolve over time and that was my development as a comedian really. I was never going to be a character comic and I was never going to be one of those surreal, off the wall type Harry Hill comedians. It was always going to be anecdotal nonsense. Half the time when I was starting as a comedian I didn’t know why they were laughing or why they weren’t. You know it takes a long time to get the hang of it.

Lisa: Did you keep diaries when you were growing up? I can’t remember my youth as clearly as you seem to.

Alan: When I was writing the book,… what’s interesting now is… much of what I was talking about is on Youtube. It’s really odd, there’s quite a lot of stuff, particularly if you’re talking about somebody like Debbie Harry or Paul Weller. When I was a kid, when Debbie Harry and Blondie were going to be on Top of the Pops, that week you had to be in at 7.25 and watch it. You didn’t have a VCR and it wasn’t repeated and that was your chance to see her for three minutes on television and now you can see, on line, all of anything that anybody’s ever done at any time of the day or night. It’s quite odd. That’s one of the major cultural differences I think that exists between my life now and my life as a young man. So I just did a lot of trawling through Youtube going back, remembering stuff. Apart from Youtube there are websites and they have loads of stuff about events in the 80s.It’s well documented. I remember specific important incidents from my teenage years, but it was a matter of looking at my own life on the internet. The book is about the changing nature of hero worship as you go through adolescence. It’s about who you revere when you are younger and how you find heroes and why you do and what they mean to you.

I had a bit of a big idea for the book and I don’t think I quite realised it. It sort of fell between two stores and the publishers didn’t help much. The idea was that it was going to be a quirky non-fiction cult thing and then in the end the marketing department got hold of it and said ‘Hang on, isn’t it about Jonathan Creek has written a book about his life? We’ll put his picture on the front and try and market it as a Christmas celebrity book.’ And in so doing they absolutely killed it because people are sick and tired of Christmas celebrity books, they assume that they’re going to be absolutely shit. It didn’t really get reviewed, the only mention it got in the newspaper was from some world weary reviewer who said I’ve been handed a bunch of celebrity Christmas books which I assume have all been ghost written and I found that really really heartbreaking cause it took me months and months to write it and he’s not even going to look at it. If he’d read it and said it’s a load of crap I could put up with that. It was one of those things that sent me back toward standup actually ’cause I thought, Well I tried writing a book, I do a podcast about football which we can’t get any money out of, they cancelled Whites which was my sitcom that I was really proud of and thought would last three or four years and they canned that and I ended up thinking, you know what? I’m just going to get up on stage and talk to the audience, it’s the thing I do best and maybe I’ll enjoy it and if I don’t then I won’t anymore and I did. Luckily.

 Lisa: When did you realise that comedy could be a career for you?

Alan: I was pretty fixated on that. When I left university I didn’t want to get a job, I wanted to get on the circuit. I knew it was there. It took me six months before I started getting paid gigs.

Lisa: Did you think that this was a way of becoming an actor or was comedy the end goal?

Alan: Well I always wanted to.., I did a lot of both at university and I have some aptitude for acting. I’ve done a lot of plays. I never really considered standup til the late 80s.Though of course it was there. Most of the people at uni who I thought I might write comedy with in the French and Saunders style never quite worked out. So stand up presented itself and I had a really great five years on the circuit. That’s all I did, you know? Hundreds and hundreds of gigs, but after a while I though, I don’t want to be on the circuit for the rest of my life, I want to do other things. I want to do a sitcom, I want to do some radio and I want to do other sorts of comedy and so I started pointing myself in other directions and it was through trying to get a sitcom off the ground that I ended up getting the opportunity to audition for Jonathan Creek and things changed quite dramatically really. Then it became, once I was doing a lot of drama filming, it was harder and harder to keep my standup mojo. Cause you’re not in the clubs every week and you couldn’t get your material together and I fell out of love with the touring side of things a little bit and it was hard for me to go on the late spot at the Comedy Store cause I was so familiar to the audience from television that they would just get a bit too excited because they’d had so much to drink. I got a bit downhearted about it really and I never thought I’d be away from it for ten years. I really didn’t. I always thought I’d get back into it. It just took me a while.

Lisa: About QI Do you see it as a 26 year project? Do you think it will make it through to the full 26 years?

Alan: O yeah, we’re in it for the long haul, we’re totally in it for the long haul. We might end up on some obscure little website by the time we reach the end of the alphabet. I know the BBC will still be giving us airtime. Were up to series K that’s just started going out in the UK last week and hopefully you’ll get that in Australia sometime between now and March when I come. It’s a good series, we’ve got some good guests and it’s in rude health at the moment, QI, and there’s no sign of anyone – the producers, researchers or me and Stephen – we’re not flagging. We’re bang up for another lot.

Lisa: Have you learned a lot about the world from QI or has it just made things more difficult to get your head around?

Alan: Yeah, I’ve learned that I don’t know anything. That’s quite humbling and quite healthy.

Lisa: You’ve done radio, theatre, TV drama/documentary/comedy/panel shows, books, theatre, standup bit of film. Apart from your upcoming tour here, have you got anything else new on the go?

Alan: Well really I’m back doing what I always did. Today was the first day of shooting on the new series of Jonathan Creek. Which is three brand new episodes. I’ve been working with Sarah Alexander all day. I’m doing that for the next eight weeks. The new episodes will air in the UK around about the time I’m out in Australia or just before. So hopefully you’ll get those soon. Then I’m touring the old standup show [Life is pain] in November and then the new show warm up dates in February and a nice juicy tour of Australia in March and then I’m doing some dates in April and in May and June we do another series of QI. I’m quite busy the next six or eight months. It’s quite a busy period.

Lisa: Have you ever thought that you’d like to make a movie?

Alan: Oh yeah I think about it. It’s not one of those things you can control. One of the nice things about standup is that at least if you think “Do you know what? I’m gonna do a show”, you can actually just do a show. It becomes quite difficult when you’re dependent on being cast in other people’s things. There’s always something, you know. Whites was a big disappointment but Oliver Lansley was one of the co-writers and we became good friends and we’re noodling away at a show at the moment that we’re hoping channel 4 will take. There’s always something going on. But the things you actually end up doing are, as the saying goes, the things that come up between your plans.

Lisa: That’s really the end of my questions but I wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading your book because I grew up the same time as you and it resonated with me.

Alan: Well that’s nice of you to read it ‘cause it was so much effort to write it. I don’t know if you saw it, if you got in in Australia, but there is a three part TV series based on it about life in the 80s in the UK called Teenage Revolution

Lisa: I don’t think it did get shown here in Australia, but I got to see it on the Youtube.

Alan: Well the response I got about that, people our age were just bowled over by it. The rush of memories and the soundtrack that played for it.

Lisa: I enjoyed that your perspective on the 80s was different to how it’s usually portrayed in the media as a boom time of shallow excess. That’s not how I remember it.

Alan: Yeah. It feels so weird though. I started doing standup in that decade, yet it feels like a lifetime ago….No Mobiles

Lisa: Well we survived

Alan: Yeah… but…

[His voice sounds like he’s glad mobile phones came along.]

Lisa: Thank you, I’ll let you go now

Alan: Thank you and it’s very nice to talk to you.

Lisa: Nice to talk to you too and I look forward to seeing your show when you come out.

Tickets for Little Victories are selling out fast at Ticketmaster http://www.ticketmaster.com.au/Alan-Davies-tickets/artist/1621116?tm_link=tm_homeA_b_10001_1