S10, Ep7: Alan Davies, comedian

0:00I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa each week I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors. Hello, friends. Now, you find me gazing at my bedroom wall. I'm just looking at my new purchase. I'm working on my gallery wall, since you ask. Now, the comedian Alan Davis is coming over in a minute to sit in my comfort eating hot seat.

0:54So I'm just gathering my wits. I'm going to admit something. When I hit middle age, I vowed to stop buying my art from Ikea. Oh no, not for me. The same old keep calm and carry on poster that everyone else has. I was going to be an individual. But then I realised that in order to be that person, I would have to spend my weekends scouring flea markets. I never do that type of thing. I actually just go on eBay at three o 'clock in the morning and bid on things. Last week, I bought this beautiful portrait of William the Conqueror for£6.15. Nothing gives me more pleasure than beating other tragic middle-aged women in those eBay auctions.

1:46You see, I've stopped drinking now, people. This is the only high I have left. Now, William the Conqueror has arrived and I actually can't work out where it's come from. This is either from a haunted house at Alton Towers or it's just a film prop. I love it. Gaudy, moi. If one person will recognise the provenance of my art, it'll be fellow intellectual genius Alan Davis. He's just about to ring my very dramatic doorbell. I really need to work out how to make that quieter. Wake the whole street up. Essex-born comedian Alan has spent four decades making us laugh, starting with his early stand-up days, then becoming a household name via the Abbey National Adverts in the 90s, then abracadabra, transforming into the brilliantly dishevelled amateur sleuth Jonathan Creek in one of TV's most beloved shows.

2:45But Alan's real magic is staying power. He spent two decades holding court as a panellist on QI, sparring with the finest minds in comedy. He's also graced our cinematic screens in 2008's hit Angus Thongs and Perfect Snoggin. His third memoir is out soon. In the first, he talked about his childhood. In the second, he talked about his childhood with more candour, detailing the sexual abuse meted out by his father with unflinching honesty. His third is about the highs and lows of his comedy career. I've heard that, like me, he's got a penchant for anything, Mr Kipling. But what else sustains this busy, funny man as he writes, tells jokes and films TV dramas?

3:35time to find out oh that's him better go

3:46alan davis welcome to comfort eating hello thank you for having me now loughton in essex was your stomping ground as a teenager as a child historically this is the east enders weekend end playground. It is just a stone's throw from Epping Forest, which I think has probably seen more than its fair share of secrets, snogs, stolen glances than most of London's nightclubs. My question is, what is the maximum amount of fun that you have ever had in Epping Forest? There's a lot of fun to be had at Epping Forest, but I associate it with illicit cycling. Illicit cycling? What without your shorts on? You're not supposed to cycle in there.

4:36There are some paths where it's allowed, but you can see tyre tracks here, there and everywhere and you know people have been cycling illicitly. I love the fact that when you get two middle-aged people together, we're talking about illicit cycling, like it's literally a sex party. But when I was a teenager, I used to take my motorbike, which is called a fizzy. Did you have fizzies when you were growing up? No. And then you put a very loud exhaust pipe on it and you can do 38 miles an hour at a push downhill. And taking your fizzy into Epiphrase was fun. Did you say you changed the exhaust on your fizzy so it made more noise?

5:11It made more noise. The more noise you can make, the better. I mean, it would instantly attract women, actually, because as a teenager, that would be the sound to me, that that is actually a man I want to get involved in. Now, somebody who's causing some sort of ASBO level of upset. I would be like, that's it. Me and my friend Ernie used to go around together very loudly. And we had two friends who were both called Anna. And we used to go and see them at their stables in Epic Forest because they had ponies. I seem to remember having to turn off the engine and roll in for the last 50 yards because it would scare the living crap out of all of the horses.

5:51Can you get up to absolute mischief in that forest? Is that when you think of that forest, do you think? Well, when it is, it's an escape from your home. and you can be in there by yourself quite happily you can get time and solitude in there which is nice and if you feel like you know your way around that's quite good there's a pond in the land called the lost pond and i could find the lost pond that's not easy and find my way back that's some talking shit but if you wanted to snog someone you'd have to get someone who'd like being in the forest at night in the dark and not many people do the comfort food my guests bring gives me a tiny glimpse into what made them am i about to unwrap something very essex maybe it's got maybe it's got some eyelashes on it or is it going to be a quiet piece of english heritage i don't know what's underneath this tea towel what i would like you to do is reveal your snack tell me what it is and we'll eat it together okay it's a dessert oh i've got the sweetest twos in the world thank you right let's cancel all recordings it's got custard people it's custard oh let's see tell me what it is it's a pie in there this was a thing that my mum made when i was a kid because in our back garden in loughton we had apples and blackberries and I had a lot of blackberry and apple Is that the taste of it?

7:24Yeah, that's delicious You like custard? It's not the same custard as I used to have because it was always powdered birds custard obviously I think powdered birds could be the best though I think it's a very nostalgic taste and a colour I think it is the best People are a bit snobby now about things that are reduced to a powder and then turn back into food but I'm not. Funny that. I know, no, but I'm not joking aside. I think that often when it comes to Christmas, you can go and get that like pint of Madagascan custard made with fresh vanilla ponds. But the taste that people like is that taste of bird's trifle made with bird's custard.

8:02Yeah. The apples would be stewed by my mother and we had a lot of stewed blackberry and apple. we would keep the apples in the shed and you'd have to wrap each apple individually in a usually a shiny page of a magazine which was quite often the Sunday Times magazine and each apple because you know one bad apple wrecked the lot so you have to have all the apples and then they're in the shed and then you can get apples out and stew them all winter not always with blackberries but quite often with blackberries because we had a lot of brambles up the back of the garden there were a lot of blackberries See, I'm actually wondering whether that is even the getting the apples and putting them all into paper.

8:44Is that a real thing? Or is that just something that they told us on like Blue Peter and we thought of it forever? Is there any actual science in that? And does it have to be the Sunday Times? I think so. As you say, you grew up in Loughton. You had two siblings, a younger sister and an older brother. Now, the middle child is usually the adaptable one and the independent one, it is said. to what extent is that true with you? Well, the middle child's quite interesting in our house because our mum passed away when we were little, so my older brother was inflicted with extra responsibility in the sense that you've got to step up now because there's only one parent.

9:24And the fact that you're eight is not relevant. Yeah. Yeah, raise your game, grow up quick. Come on, mate. Partly because your younger brother is an idiot and a pain in the arse. And what are we going to do with him? And then my sister was only three, and so my father had a bit of an old-fashioned attitude to girls, which was they can't do anything. Yeah. So she really became a redundant specimen. Yeah, just kind of floating in the house. She would always be given, you know, the biggest strawberry and the punnet or whatever, and that used to drive me mad. Yeah. I didn't think it was fair at either end.

10:09It does sound as if your childhood was quite tough from the world go. As you're saying, your mum died when you were little of leukaemia. You were just six. Do you have a memory that you just bring to mind immediately of her? Well, it's in the kitchen, usually. And it is rolling out pastry. And if she's making a pie of some sort, sweet or savoury, and once she's gone around the edge of the dish those off cuts of pastry get rolled up and cut out and then you get jam tarts because they can just go in so a lot of jam she made her own jam from time to time usually with blackberries she sounds capable a capable woman she was capable I think but I think you were kind of obliged to be capable and she was born in the 30s so grew up through the second world war Her mother, my grandmother, who lived to be 89, lived into the 90s.

11:10She embraced rationing and lived by it for the rest of her life. She was keen to repurpose things. So if you got a birthday card from her, it would be an old birthday card, torn in half, so you'd only get the picture half. And with happy birthday written on the other side, and that's really spidery, really grandparent. I don't know when grandparents' writing becomes spidery, but it does at some point. I can't believe she wrote like that as a child. Yeah. So this is your grandmother. My grandmother. I love the fact that your grandmother just seemed to refuse to accept that the war was over. Yeah, that's exactly right.

11:45She grew her own beetroot. You know, she dug for Britain. I can remember her plunging her hand into the flowerbed and coming out with a beetroot. And that was impressive. When you lose a parent so young, do your memories as you age, Do they erode or do they kind of come into different focus as you're looking at it from different angles? Well, it's interesting what you hang on to. You hang on to memories that you return to, you know. So memory is a strange thing in that respect. And so the most significant memories are the ones that you keep returning to. And so I think that's why difficult and painful memories stay with you longer.

12:28Yeah. I've written three memoirs, kind of, but two more significantly, one I published five years ago and one that's coming out soon. And revisiting and going back and trying to recall, it's a very difficult process. You can't really rely on your memory. And you begin to question, why is that coming back to me? Why am I thinking of that? In my book, Just Ignore Him, which was the one I published five years ago, I tried to write down every single thing I could remember about my mum. I think it was about eight pages, you know. But it's very little because I was very young. I'm fascinated by your dad suddenly being alone with three children, because this is a point in the 70s where there isn't really this huge thing of fathers taking control of single parenting, which is what is supposed to happen now.

13:13And what was your dad's attitude to that? Who looked after you? Who cooked? Well, he would hire people from the lady magazine. Loughton at that time was really very sleepy suburbia. It was quite a slightly strange place in that the other end of Loughton High Road was the Debden Estate. There was nowhere really, nowhere to go out as a teenager. There was a wimpy. As a teenager, we'd sit in the wimpy and smoke, you know. I'm going to go to the wimpy in a moment. I'm going to say, so hang on, there's these ladies come out of the lady magazine. The lady magazine. So these are quite, are these ladies?

13:53I don't know who they were or how they got there. We had four of them at different times going to live with us in a kind of housekeeper role. But my dad didn't really like any of them enough for them to stay around longer than a few weeks or months. So they were just gone? So they were, yeah. One of them I became really quite attached to, but yeah, she was just gone. No goodbye? Was there a goodbye? No, I don't remember there being a goodbye with that one. Someone would come and clean, and somebody else would come in and be in the house when we got in from school. It feels like with something like that, that, you know, going back to food, there can't have been a regularity then of, like, what was going to be served for you, what was going to, if it was a different woman cooking.

14:33Was there any things that you loved or you remember from that time? The only thing I really remember was we'd go for Sunday lunch to my Uncle Pat's house. Uncle Pat's my dad's brother, and he was really good fun and his wife Carol made some big lunches and kind of uncomplainingly incorporated all of us. Yeah. So, yeah, I got to pull a few wishbones and she was a good one as well for a pie. That's the second part in your story where pies brought happiness. Yeah. Great. I do like a pie. do you remember the sunday lunches as like a high point was that happy because suddenly you're going somewhere where you're welcomed and you're you're loved yeah i do we were on the end on the kids table but my uncle pat was funny and i do remember i really remember him there was a cake maybe there was someone's birthday i don't know and he was cutting the cake and how much cake do you want you know so some people want a big slice someone said just cut me off a finger you know like a very thin slice and you can guess the rest and cut his finger and then held it up said I've cut my finger and I don't think there was so much laughter it just went on for ages and he had to get a plaster and it was still funny you know ages later it was still funny when you were eating back at your house was there kind of any foods that you were eating with like spice and flavour or anything, or was it all quite bland?

16:16No, none at all. He put a lot of salt on everything. I thought growing up that when you've got a hot plate of food, you put salt on it to cool it down, because that's why I saw people just throwing salt from the salt shank all over their food. And I thought, well, that must help cool it down. and we had no foreign food which meant no pasta no rice no recipes my dad would boil a ham on a saturday oh boil vegetables he thought potatoes had to be boiled for 20 minutes and then you've got to put what's left you've got to put through a calendar and then mash that and they can't taste of anything then and then you've got to put Oxo on top.

17:01Starchy slop like a brown smear.

17:12You've referred to your memoir from 2020, Just Ignore Him which is wonderful. I mean it is wonderful. I read it back then. I think it's beautifully structured. I think it's beautifully written and it's an incredible book. You wrote a memoir 15 years ago, all about your childhood, and didn't tell entirely the full story. You told a story, but you then went back and you included something really important that you wanted to say. It was about your father's sexual abuse between the ages of eight and 13. And you've called yourself something that really stuck out to me. You said you called yourself the enemy of the twin evils of silence and secrecy.

17:58The question I've always wanted to ask you is, from the moment that book dropped, how did things change? Well, the change for me in my life was really at home. And Katie and I, my wife, we've been together for 20 years now. We have three children. And in the period around the time I began to write that book, things were quite tricky for us. There were three kids and I was finding it hard. and we'd been kind of divided really by coping, you know, and you've got to somehow try and reconnect, you know. Yeah. And it really helped us to go through the process of writing that book, to get all that stuff out in the open and work through it properly and actually properly assess the impact that all of that had instead of thinking of something that was in the past.

18:55Is there any sense of catharsis from that or are you still in the same position that you were? I'm always quite reluctant to say catharsis, but I feel as though you are a bit unburdened, you know. It's like something's been lanced or something. Like a boil. Yeah. I did have actually this isn't a very pleasant subject matter but I did have a sebaceous cyst that had to be cut out it was on my back I mean obviously because one of my favourite shows is Dr Pimple Pepper I'm going to drill right down on that it was on your back? yeah were you awake when they did it? yeah did you feel like a relief once they'd done it?

19:41well the dermatologist couldn't believe how much local anaesthetic she had to put in and I was saying No, it's hurting now. She's got a scalpel. Can I ask you about football? Yeah. You're a famous Arsenal fan. I think that it's one thing that people associate with you. This was a fundamental part of your childhood, your journey, because I don't think home sounds like it was too safe and great. Is this somewhere that you go and find happiness? Oh, completely. Yeah. I wasn't really able to express properly what was happening to me with my father, you know, the kind of nighttime visits. And the way it's, and again, I'll write about this a bit in the book, the way it manifests itself now is if I'm in a room by myself with the door closed and I hear somebody outside the door, I get a little tightening.

20:37I get this mild PTSD because obviously what he did when he did it was unpleasant. uncomfortable but it was just the thought that it might happen at any time and that's kind of what you're living with so I was never relaxed in the house you know my brother and I didn't really get on and he was very much on my dad's side and loyal to my dad but so on a Saturday if I could go on the get the number 20 bus from Loughton to Walthamstow Central and then get the tube in and you come out of the tube at Frensbury Park and there are thousands of people and they're all going to the same kind of cathedral you know the same place of work Arsenal didn't have a particularly good team but didn't care and then with one year we did win the FA Cup and that was quite exciting but most of the time there weren't that many people going in those days nowadays laser arsenal at 60 ,000 every week but it wasn't then because hooliganism was a thing and also it wasn't a very pleasant place to take kids it was nearly all men as you got older how did you not end up in hooliganism well I kind of trailed around following it a little bit it was present yeah because that's also a thing that you know my experience of knowing people who've been in hooliganism is that is another sense of belonging when they kind of get in their team and they work out their anger through violence so yeah you wouldn't surprise me if you said that you'd been involved but I didn't have anyone to go with and I didn't really know anyone when I got there but for me it was really was about being out of the house for several hours I like being on the bus and the tube and you know I quite like the fact that you go to the bus stop and you didn't know when the bus was going to arrive and you just waited you didn't have a phone obviously you know And when you got on the bus, you looked out the window at things.

22:33You listened to people. You got on the tube. You were just in the world. What did you eat at this point? Did you set off with money in your pocket and get some food at the football? Occasionally, I think I would get one of these terrible burgers or hot dogs. I was still eating meat at that time. I stopped eating meat when I was a student. So I had a few of those. One of my friends I go to Astor with now is a big burger fan, and then he calls them dog burgers, which I think is not fair. I doubt they are dogs. Yeah. But we don't know for sure. I don't think it's anything as nice as dog.

23:09You tried to escape from home, it feels, but it didn't work out as planned. No, not really. I did a bit of a runaway once when I went and I stayed in a squat for a night, which was memorable for me because the house itself was amazing. there was this huge old house that was going to be demolished vast place and my friend i was a lownd college by now i was doing media studies and that's where i started doing drama and performing i had a big round my dad and my friend said i know someone you can stay and he took me to this place and there's two lads in there big skinhead called mark and a big punk rocker called straub and straub and mark had a fire going and straub had a big mohican and when he leant forward the shadow of him was up on the wall and he looked like a bird of prey and then in the middle of the night there was a lot of banging and a man came in with a hatchet and what this guy was doing was he was going through the house trying to steal all the fireplaces so when i saw the man with the hatchet i thought we're doomed this is like a horror film and he said to us don't worry i'll come back later and you can have your fireplace.

24:18Sorry to disturb. I love that. It's like just a shift of gear. Sorry. Sorry. So then I went back to sleep. Then about seven in the morning, there was more scraping and banging, and a man appeared in a suit with a clipboard, and he said, name, and I looked at him, and then Mark rose from his sleeping bag and said, Mark. And he was a bailiff, and he had been sent. To clear everybody out of this house, as it was, there was only the four of us. That was the end of it as a squat. I love the fact that you managed one night as a homeless person, one solitary night. I love the fact that you lived 10 lives in that night.

25:03Anyway, that's it. You go to Kent Uni and study drama. Finally, you are away from home. You've got a first taste of proper independence. so given everything that you've been through to that point are you able to enjoy it i don't know i think i was so sort of combative i think i was kind of inherently dissatisfied like i couldn't think oh this is the way this course runs that's the nature of that lecturer's personality i would think this course is crap that lecturer is an idiot yeah and i'm to say that yeah and they would say who the hell are you it feels like comedy happened a little bit by mistake at uni a friend kind of forced you into an open mic slot how did this happen if you shut your eyes can you almost get into that feeling again is it is it there locked in your memory this idea of standing at the side of the stage going I've got my three lines I can remember it really well I've been funny in a couple of plays and I've been a bit funny in the pub people knew that I like going to see stand-ups when they came to campus or when we were in Edinburgh some friends of mine were in a band and they were doing a benefit for Amnesty this is very typical of the time a benefit for Amnesty International at the local Labour Club

26:381988. And they put my name on the poster as MC. And they said, you can do some stuff if you want. If you don't want to, you can just get up and say, welcome to the show. We've got these bands coming on. This one's on first. And I thought, I'm going to do some stuff. And I asked two friends of mine, Steph and Mandy, if they would help me in a sketch about the Capri's Flake Abort. Okay. In which I put a condom over a flake. And then when I unwrapped the flake, had a condom on it. You had to put a condom on everything in the 80s. It was very important. And the flake was very phallic in those adverts.

27:10And then what I hadn't rehearsed was actually biting into a condom full of chocolate. It was a really awful experience. And then I had to try and do my under-rehearsed monologue afterwards with that lingering. You came on. It's like, nah, nah, nah. And in the 80s, they would say something like, yeah, but it's a curry-flavoured condom. I do remember that curry-flavoured condom. Don't worry, it's curry flavoured for her pleasure. When you're standing at the side of the stage, you could have got away with going, thank you for coming, give a big hand for blah, blah, blah. But instead, what's your observational comedy in this bit?

27:50What's it about? We used to shoplift a lot from the bookshop on campus, which was a Dillon's bookshop. Everyone stole books from Dillon's. It's gone under now. It's weird, that, isn't it? Yes, disappeared. Disappeared from the high street. What happened? What happened? God, guys, business and order. Well, my theory was they watched the students shoplifting and then they themselves would go to the wholesalers and steal all the books that they were putting on their shelves. So that got a laugh. Yeah. So it did a bit about that. But you must have, right, you know, when you felt that laughter, was it cleansing?

28:24you know up until this moment you've been in your house with your family and you say you're just kind of treated a bit like the annoying one and then suddenly you're on stage and there's that well there's a lot of adrenaline i realized later and there was a lot of fear my hands were shaking terrifically that carried on actually from in about the first year i did stand up i couldn't take the microphone out this day because my hands were shaking so much from nerves but the first time i got laughs and so then you have that memory in your head you can do that yeah you're not really in control of it so you might do the same set and get no laughs you can't work out what's happening in the gig you're just saying your thing as fast as possible and people might be thinking this is quite always finished another incredible thing happened to you at this point you had your first curry That's true, the curry garden in Canterbury.

29:21And some friends took me and they said, try this and try this and try this. I was still eating meat at the time. I remember chicken tikka being the nicest thing I'd ever eaten in my life. I mean, that is not an exaggeration. That is a literal truth. And then they gave me a bit of a chicken madras and that really stopped me for 10 minutes. I couldn't breathe. I was sweating. But they thought that was very funny. But then I think I had a korma and a couple of other side dishes and then never looked back. There's nothing better than Indian food. The Jeff Poppadoms. Oh, yeah. Incredible moment. Yeah.

29:50I might even have had a lime pickle, but that might have been a bit chancy. Back in the 90s, when there were only four TV channels, your face became a household fixture. You landed a job that's the face of Abbey National. I love talking to people about adverts because, like, I have no qualms about doing adverts, none whatsoever. But I'm guessing at this point, finding this type of fame through an advert was not on your bucket list. It was not a thing that you were planning to do. How did that change your life? This is 18 television adverts filmed between the mid-90s and 2002. Well, there weren't many positive sides to it.

30:40Really? I found it. I didn't want to do adverts, right? Mm-hmm. And I told my agent I didn't want to do that first. Yeah. And I said, you'd have to pay me a million quid, which was an unthinkable sum of money. And he came back with a three-year deal for 975 grand.

31:00And I just took the shilling. How long was the gap between them offering just short of a million and you kind of putting your shoes on and walking with a sense of purpose towards the studio?

31:16because I tend to leave it upwards of six minutes. I'm like, what? Okay. Look, I'm speaking to a comedian and I know that there was, and there still is today, I've spoken to people for the biggest comedy agencies that will remain nameless. They still feel sniffy about this now, you know, it's like not wanting their acts to be involved with brands and things like that. So, you know, it's interesting. My agent was very different. It was a very mainstream agency, old school. They turned their nose up at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Montreal Comedy Festival. You don't need all that. Yeah. We can get you into the summer seasons and pantos and we'll get you on Des O 'Connor and we'll make you a load of money.