Alan Davies

0:00Hello, I'm Giles Brandreth and I'm wearing a sweater that was once worn by Diana, Princess of Wales. Yes, I designed a sweater that Diana bought in Kensington in the 1980s. On the front it carries the words, I'm a luxury. And on the back it says, few can afford. Well, I like to think that rosebud is a luxury we can all afford. Welcome to it. Cue the music.

0:45Well, this week it's another special guest and another person that I've known quite well over a number of years. It's the actor, presenter, writer, stand-up comedian Alan Davies. I've always felt a fellow feeling for him because we were born within 48 hours of one another. we're both Pisceans though he was born a few years later than me I think I first got to know him was it doing QI it might have been because he is the one permanent feature of QI which if you haven't seen it is a very entertaining TV show which is popular in this country and other countries particularly Australia my wife got to love his work when he began appearing as a character as an actor in Jonathan Creek, which was a very entertaining mystery drama series that ran for, I don't know, almost 20 years.

1:37Anyway, I loved it. The point is, I've seen him in various different guises, find him very entertaining, very charming on television. But until I began to think about interviewing him today, having a conversation with him for Rosebud, I didn't know about the challenges of his childhood. And I think we're going to find this both an arresting and at times disturbing conversation. But ultimately, he comes out, well, you'll see, it is Alan Davis. I think he's in a good place now, but he's been in some pretty dark and difficult places. So this is, I think, a memorable episode of Rosebud. I hope you find it enjoyable as well as intriguing.

2:24Cue the music.

2:38alan my first question is always the same question and it's simply this what is your very first memory well um it's difficult to know because i there are one or two things i think have probably been told like i was told that i was in a pram and there was some netting over the pram um to stop cats getting in and sleeping on your face you know big fear in the 70s and my brother climbed up the side of the pram and pulled it over which could be construed as attempted murder yeah removed removed the netting i think he used the netting it helped him it was a kind of a plastic covered wire green netting rather like you'd used to border a flower bed in the garden you know you might probably did that kind of a thing it feels like it was makeshift other than that i remember being put in the bath by my mother my mother died when i was six so i think anything before anything with her in it is early yeah and probably the earliest but i remember being put in the bath and I still had my socks on which and I do slightly remember thinking I might be in trouble for this um but turned out to be the funniest thing that had ever happened to both of us and do you still think about that every time your socks get damp does it come back to you no it doesn't actually because my socks often get damp when I'm walking the dog and I never think of that but it's been a long time I do sometimes think of it when I put my own children in the bath or now there's only one of them i put in the bath the the last one is currently nine and he's very reluctant to get in unless the bath is lukewarm at the hottest and i remember being put in the bath weekly and the water was almost impossible to touch and it's so hot it's so hot and you'd be put in that till you you're gasping for breath i think there was a great you wash once a week but when you do you really boil them but how interesting only once a week yeah weekly weekly bath was this to do with finances the heating of the bath challenge didn't think anything just thought this is once a week is the weekly bath goes weekly bath okay tell us about who your mother was then when was this you were born in 1966 1966 on the 6th of march exactly that i know that because my birthday is the 8th of march so in the run-up to my birthday i think you are oh good you're the john the baptist to my anyway you are two days ahead of me two days ahead i was born in chinkford number one balgonie road what road balgonie balgonie and do we know have you worked out it was he somebody who was a trapeze artist a victorian trapeze artist who lived locally and they named the road i think it's scottish oh balgonie yeah but why why is it I don't know.

5:34I only lived there a couple of years. My mum was Shirley Margaret Price. Father was a postman, worked for the post office. Her father, your grandfather. Her father. And he was also in the Lee Bridge Valley Rowing Club. And I know this because one of the few things I own is a tankard that he won in 1931 for being part of an eight. Well done him. Don't remember, I know that he built my sister a doll's house with a working light and a chest of drawers, which my daughter now has. Oh, that's lovely. So he was quite a handyman. And a good man? Do you have any recollections of him? I think he was pretty quiet.

6:20My mother died from leukemia when I was six, at which point her parents were living in Blackpool. This was a bit of a disaster. so they'd moved to Blackpool to retire and as a lot of older folks did in those days perhaps they still do but unusually to go from the south of England to Blackpool especially when you've got a daughter with small children around the corner so we would go to Blackpool to visit them nice tended garden bungalow and then when my mum died they were brought back south. Bless them they came to help out. They came to help out. But your brother and sister they were both older than you?

6:57My brother's older, just under two years older, and my sister's two and a half years younger. And he was the murderer in the family. His plan was to take you and strangle you with the netting that was due to save your life. Tried to kill me. What's he called? He's called John. Is he okay now? Have you reconciled with him? I don't really see, I haven't seen him for years. Fine. And your sister? My sister I'm in contact with, and her two boys, who are grown up now, strapping lads. but my grandfather he also died a year after my mum died and then the following year my dad's mum died she died um my mum's mum granny price told me how granny davis died granny davis died doing the ironing and she said to me her aorta exploded dead before she hit the ground that's how I want to go that's what she said to me well actually but it's a very it's a good line and it's a good ambition isn't it I think that was because actually granny price lived to be 89 with arthritic hands taking eight paracetamol day and you know like the same things this was by now she'd moved to Australia where my mum's sister emigrated in the 60s I want to be in my box she used to say to me i want to be in my box and she lived on she would occasionally have difficult episodes which involved being put in a ward and sometimes given electric shock treatment and some pretty harrowing experiences so better to be at the ironing board as long as you're not holding the iron as you fall dead before you hit the floor dead before you hit the floor that's the line that stayed with me i think so it may be the title of my next volume of memoirs you will be given a credit i assure you so your mother dies when you're six before we get to her and uh her story what are your memories of her what's your sweetest memory of of her well all the memories are really of the kitchen so he's in the kitchen a lot a lot of pastry a lot of rolling pin action and making sweet and savoury pies and then the little trimming edges of the pastry could be made into jam tarts, whack them in the oven for 10 minutes and keep me supplied with those or banging saucepan lids together, some tolerance for me doing that.

9:28And I think when my older brother went to infant school, then I'd have been at home alone with her, very happy times. and I remember trying to amuse her. One of the things I do is I lie on my back and move my legs back together in a kind of V shape, which I said was windscreen wipers. And I remember her having me do that for visiting friends. And I remember she had friends who would visit. One of the things that happened after she died was these people stopped coming, you know. But I'm told by my cousins that she was quite formidable, a bit frightening. They remember her having a baby, whether it was me or my younger sister, I don't know.

10:13And asking if they could have a hold of the baby and being afraid to ask. But she gave them a hold of the baby and she was nice about it. She was an archaea in a cub pack. Oh, good. You need to be quite strong. That's the leader, isn't it? She'd go in there and shout pack at the top of her voice in the entire room and stop running around and immediately form their sixes. Well done her doing that, because that was voluntary work that she did that. She didn't have a professional job because she was a housewife and mother. Well, like a lot of women, I think at that time, education came to a halt at 16.

10:46She went to a secretarial college. But she was going to the old Vic to see Richard Burton in Shakespeare plays. And I feel, I think there was a little pressure to go out and get a wage at 16, bring some money in. So go to a secretarial college, get a job. and her younger sister my aunt hazel also in a typing pool but from what i understand i was told there's all this by my uncle michael who's my mum's cousin who sadly very recently passed away but he told me a lot about their life and he talked about them getting on the train at chinkford lots of young women all on the train and then going into the city of london and working in typing pools and secretarial positions lots of jobs available having quite a lot of fun together and then eventually all the time in your mind is got to get married got to get married got to get married and then once you're married and particularly if you've had a child they won't take you back to the type of you're replaced by the next lot of girls coming out of school you can't they won't hire you again so you're and you married from home so you live at home with your parents and then your wedding day you move to your new home with your husband and that was your mother's story as well was it well my mother's story was she waited and waited and waited for my father to propose took several years of waiting what was he doing at that time he was working as an accountant in the city and they met in london are they in the they met i think through the the scout pack she was a queen's guide this is the highest echelon of guiding there is and uh that's that was quite a um social hub the the brownies and the cubs and the scouts and the guides and all the work there's a big social thing and he was a scout he was a scout leader cub leader yeah so i think that's where they met and i've got one or two black and white pictures of dinners and on wooden tables um with people involved with the the pack or the cub scout having some sort of quasi-formal dinners in the early 50s.

12:57I remember, dib, dib, dib, dob, dob, dob, do your best, do our best. Bob a Job Week. Bob a Job Week. Oh, that was all great stuff. But they were good people then. They were part of the community. Can you remember them at all together? Can you picture your parents together? A little bit, yes. I remember my dad referred to her. I think they referred to one other as Darl, as in short for Darling. I do remember that. i remember her attaching a kind of girdle and stockings and watching her strap herself together for a day a day made her own dresses made our clothes a lot of sewing um i think they had perhaps my father preferred their early years together they went to honeymoon in the isle of and they like walking and the open air.

13:46I don't think he took too well to babies in the house. I've got a friend who works in a bank and he said quite a lot of the men that he worked with in the bank would delay going home so that they weren't there. Oh, for bedtime. For bedtime. And as a father of three myself, I can't quite fathom. I found all of that very involving and wanting to do it. and I had two children with Katie, my wife, quite close together. They were 18 months apart. And to sit between them with the two of them either side, reading Winnie the Pooh or whatever it was, was very pleasurable, you know, although often I would fall asleep and then I would get slapped on the chest.

14:29Daddy, wake up. But there wasn't much of that for you. Don't remember either of your parents reading stories to you. I don't remember having stories read to me, no. No. So your mother dies when you're only six years of age. when do you become aware that she's ill i remember going to visit her in hospital and i remember sitting on the edge of the bed and her drawing a little picture of a cat at some french windows i remember that picture quite well i don't remember the hospital very well i'm not very good with hospitals to this day if i have to go to hospital i sometimes through a slip of the tongue refer to it as a hotel um which is a one for the psychotherapists um then we were told we couldn't go and see her and then i was told she's gone to heaven so we weren't told that she was going to die and she wasn't told she was going to die it was a different era we're talking about the beginning of the 70s 1972 because i remember when i was brought up i never heard the word cancer when my aunt's was dying it was referred to as the big c and she wasn't told that she was going to die so that was the way things were mostly done was it my grandmother said my mom's mom said that there were two doctors who couldn't agree on the best way forward one was saying i mean oh is it the doctor's decision i think that's the way it works it's not very clear to me i think i think that my father's mother is the one who was dead before she hit the floor was quite frightening and quite uh dominant even though she was tiny she was quite dominant and i think she was of the view and one of the doctors said she's got young children it'd be so distressing for her you know to know that she's going to abandon them but then on the other hand she doesn't get to leave anything for them or make any plans or talk to them or any kind of little note or anything there's nothing you know she's just gone so it was extremely difficult very very difficult for all concerned you know but then she was we would send you a picture in your head your last meeting with her was that the one with the picture yes corner of the bed yes that's i think that's what i think of as my last encounter with her she drew this picture which i can really remember the picture and i wish i could draw i could recreate it you know um but and i feel like i had it for a while and then perhaps in the house move or something like that so you were six when she actually died yeah and who told you that she died or this phrase she's gone to heaven my dad came in and into my bedroom and sat on the end of the bed and uh said be brave um mum has gone to heaven so I burst into tears and he he kept saying to be brave you know and that was the last time I I mean I never cried about her again until I think the 20th anniversary when I just collapsed there was no grave you see this one of the odd things why wasn't there a funeral and I can understand you wouldn't be taken to the funeral but she was we weren't at the funeral she was cremated at Poundham Wood Crematorium which is near Harlow in Essex and her ashes were buried as are quite a lot of there's a kind of garden there little wood and there are lots of little plaques on the ground or photographs or places to put flowers but she didn't have one of those her ashes were buried and it wasn't marked um i remember as when i was later in life i remember thinking you know when you have a wife and children of your own you can start to think what would i do here you know what would what would katie do what would i do um and that we would definitely not i would definitely not do that i would make something there to go and sit by so i could go to pound and wood and i could sit in the wood and know she's here somewhere sort of thing um but that was what so you really just blanked it from then on for a while all the pictures were taken away my gosh your family photographs around the house were removed were they yeah there weren't there weren't any at all of her there was one picture which was of her and a black and white picture of her on her wedding day which was in my sister's bedroom

19:00my dad's mum said least said soon as men did and that was the thinking so she wasn't really spoken about by any of you how did your brother and sister take it? were you conscious of that? I think he took it pretty badly I mean he developed quite a bad stammer I reacted by acting up on any kind of attention really and which became increasingly difficult as I got into my teens so it was really traumatising all round I don't know how things nowadays you know there are lots of charities, lots of bereavement charities childhood bereavement people you can ring or court and help and someone who's volunteers, amazing people, take the call.

19:56I mean, the Cubs didn't rally around. Her friends from the, you know, the Scouts and the Cubs. Yes, that's an interesting thought. I'd never thought of that. Because had you joined the Cubs yourself by then? Yes, but not that pack. You weren't in her pack? No, because we'd moved from Chinkford to Loughton, which is about three miles away. It's all Epping Forest in between. and so joined a pack at St Mary's Church in Loughton. But my father, I remember, couldn't understand. He'd say, what did you do at Cubs? And we'd say, and he'd been looking quite disappointed. He'd say, what sort of Cub pack is this?

20:36He said, well, it wasn't what it was like in the 40s, you know, where he was. So I didn't last long in Cubs. And I do remember cycling to Cubs with my brother and turning to go across the road into the churchyard and being hit by a car.

20:55And I remember my bicycle was spinning up the road and I was lying on the tarmac. Nothing broken. And the driver of the car got out and put me in the back and there was an old man in the back who I assumed, because I suppose this is how he works, I said, oh, this must be his father. And he said, well, that was stupid, wasn't it? and I thought it meant me not looking when I turned the wheel now I look back and think did he mean his son and quite a wide road with not much traffic managing to drive into an 8 year old on a bicycle who yes of course is likely to go any which way but I don't really remember going to the pub as much after that who were your friends outside of your family at that stage when you were at the time of your mother's death when you were five or six who were your first friends um i think i liked primary school staples row primary school um i think one of the things that happened to me was when my mum died which would have been in this in the summer so now you'd call it between year one and year two yes so in year one i had a mum and in year two i didn't have a mum and then i do I sort of remember being told off by quite a stern teacher at the school called Mrs Baker who said we were all on the stairs waiting to go into a classroom and something was going on and she said to me just because your mother's died there's no need to be spiteful and I didn't I thought that that was the first that everyone had heard of my mother dying whether someone had gone into the class and told them because it happened in the summer time it didn't happen in term time so there wasn't a case of me missing school for a week or two just came back in September and you didn't mention it to anyone in the class I don't really remember discussing it by the sound of it you didn't talk about it it wasn't talked about at home she died on August the 22nd so it would have been a couple of weeks before term starts at the beginning of September and I do remember I really remember that thinking now they all know but no one spoke about it you know and you brooded about it did you were you thinking about it a lot even though you weren't talking about it do you think I don't think there was any thought for me until my late 20s early 30s really that her die might have impacted on anything although I did say some I do remember at school I had a friend at school whose father died when we were at school I remember going with him I wrote about this I've just written another volume of memoir following on I wrote one called Just Ignore I mean this is following on from that called White Male Stand-Up and it's about becoming a comedian but at the beginning of the book i talk about this story because it just came back to me someone came into the classroom and said when you come to the headmaster's office to him and i went with him and i waited outside the headmaster's office for him and when he came out the office he said my dad's died and i i just thought he must be in trouble we were always going out sneaking around the streets of Woodford smoking cigarettes at 15 I thought he must have done something and he came out and said that and I do remember saying to him there was some reference made to single parents and they're kind of looking at him and eye rolling and he wasn't really playing along so it didn't really it just seemed to be not a thing that you considered to be an issue this has just happened you've just taken your stride and on you go on you go um i realize much later in life that you're carrying quite a lot quite unresolved grief and and how do you resolve in the long term wants to go back to your chart in a moment in the long term how does one resolve that i mean how do you resolve clearly we're talking about it now so you have resolved it you've processed in your head but how does one do that well i started seeing a therapist prompted by my friend joe brand who spent many years working as a psychiatric nurse and knew somebody who had trained as a therapist who she trusted and sent me to see him when I was about 29 with the phrase, have you ever thought about seeing anyone?

25:44And I said no, because I hadn't.

25:52And that was really where, and I went to see him on and off for eight years and became quite the advocate for therapy. And it's essentially talking therapy. You just talk yourself out, do you? Yeah. and I found it fascinating I kind of got better at it the more I did it initially I thought well you go there and you unburden yourself that's what I yes burst into tears the first time and then gradually tell your story yeah is that not what happens and what also happens what happened to me is you learn that one thought connects to another thought and you may not know how if this incident prompts this memory why is that and why does that memory link to that memory and you can investigating those connections that your brain is making your unconscious subconscious is the fascinating part why do i feel like this in this situation why does this person make me feel in this way why are these emotions being triggered in this environment let's have a chat about that what does it make you think about and some very interesting connections can emerge and i found that very helpful and it also it helps the practically when you do start to feel emotions rising or feelings rising you can you can apply some of that thinking in your life so you can identify and name a feeling before it starts to impact on your behavior and those around you was there a particularly helpful moment in the sessions can you think oh yes that was a day that i think i began to find a sort of reconciliation and peace with my uh well a couple of things happened um one was i said to him the thing is i've been coming in now for a few years and i do really value it and i found it extremely helpful um but i'm not feeling really any better as in cured I still feel upset about this and down from time to time and he said to me would it be any other way Alan given what's happened to you and I said oh that's the conclusion we've come to after six years six years but it's kind of an accepting accepting that you age six lost your mother and then an extremely difficult relationship with my father which was very buried in secret for a very long time.

28:37At first, when your mother died, did you try to rally around your father and support him? Did you realise, the three of you, Dad's alone now, we must help him? Or did you just all bottle it and just carry him? Well, my mother started that process. I do remember her saying, you've got to help Daddy with, for example, the laundry. You know, sifting through, whose T-shirt is this? She knew she was in work for a while, did she? She would be in and out of hospital. And then the hospitals, I don't remember how many times, I got a vague idea that it was two or three times the hospital stays and then the last time she never came home.

29:14So I do remember her saying that. and then that once you give a child a job to do you know help daddy in sainsbury's on a saturday morning with the weekly shot she wrote i remember she wrote out a shopping list for him and he had that shopping list for years the same shopping list in her handwriting you know and we would have to go to the laundrette you'd have to go to the laundrette so then it's a matter of helping sought whose clothes are whose so he had those little jobs to do he managed to find somebody would come and clean the house and change the beds and a woman called mrs o 'leary and the grandparents had come down from blackpool the grandparents came down a few months later they lived nearby they lived in they got a flat and loud but then the grandfather died i do remember my gran saying oh he was a bugger because she said he wouldn't argue with you he would just go quiet and she wouldn't let him smoke in the house but he'd just go in the garden and smoke and it was the smoking that killed him killed him i think he was in his early 70s so but yes but they came and she came and helped but then she came and helped and then had a nervous breakdown and was in Claybury Hospital near to where we lived.

30:38And soon after that she emigrated to Australia to be with her daughter, her younger daughter. And she told me that my father had stood over the bed and said to her, complete breakdown, mental and physical. Rather as if it was a failing on her part. Not very empathetic. no well he was confronting her in his mind he was confronting her with the harsh reality that's got to face it now look what you've done you've had to be broken down you're useless did you find another wife in due course uh he did because he would have been quite young still if your when your mother was young wasn't she my mother was 38 and um so yes he she died a week before his 39th birthday and there were some pictures that were taken of the three of us and him in a local photographic studio and like a high street photographer you could pay to have family portraits done and he had those pictures on his chest of drawers in his bedroom all through my childhood in little frames and i learned later that that that photographic shoot was bought was arranged by my mother for him as a birthday present and he went ahead and did this thing with the three of us and when you know that the pictures have have a very different feeling you can really see we all really do look like none of us have slept for a week and we probably he had the family trauma photographed trauma yeah yes we've seen a picture here we are a week after oh my goodness but he did the right thing i think to go ahead with that it is a moment it was her present i think he probably did i imagine this exhausted and kind of sleepwalking through and at least it's somewhere to go to for that day you have a photograph two photographs of your mother now you say uh i don't have i've got i've got a few that have actually come to me more recently but i didn't have any growing up so you can you picture her though in your mind's eye what she looked like only really from these pictures a little yeah so your dad didn't answer the question which was did he find a second wife he he remarried when i was 16 he remarried to a lady who lived across the street from us who had divorced her husband and she had two children um who were a little bit older than me and her son who was the younger of the two i remember from primary school we went to the same primary school and uh we moved the two families kind of merged and moved into the house next door to us opposite her so she lived on the other side of the street we moved next door and she came and moved in and then we this was in 1982 when I was 16 um and it was it wasn't like the Brady Bunch but she did her best to be a good stepmother but by then you were 16 so you really were leaving home in your head yeah I think I was the least of her worries did you call her what did you call her do you have to call her Joan you didn't have to call her stepmother or something awkward like that.

34:01No. So, and yes, just when she arrived, I dropped out of school, in my school, which my father had gone to, and went to FE College, Further Education College. So, your father, there he is, aged 39, literally the week after his wife has died, who he was fond of. He loved your mother. There was a good marriage. Do you think as far as I could see? Yeah, it's different. to understand other people's marriages anyway. And what is he doing by that stage in his life? He's working as an accountant in a city firm. And is he like a picture of an accountant? Is he quite a conservative sort of type of person, quite reticent?

34:44Yeah. Yeah. He's conservative. And in the evenings when he comes home, you're playing Scrabble or watching the telly? Watching the telly. The telly would come on when we got in from school and it would stay on until he went to bed. The three of us, various different ladies were hired from, usually from ads in the lady magazine. I remember it. And the lady magazine was where you found ladies. And ladies would come to your house and be there when you came in from school and cook your tea, your fish fingers, or your beans on toast or whatever you were having. And my brother and sister and I would sit around the table and the television was on a trolley so it could be wheeled up to the table.

35:27And on the fourth side of our rectangular table was the TV. And so Rent-A-Ghost, Blue Peter, Paddington, all the shows. Great. We absolutely loved. And the TV stayed on. And then the weekend, the TV was on all day and all night. Yeah. It was never off. And what was he like, your dad, when he came home with you? He'd just watch the TV with you and then say goodnight, everybody? We would normally, we'd be on our way to bed. Yeah. so he'd sit and watch um with his supper as he called it he'd usually sit and watch the nine o 'clock news as it was then and uh so i signal to go to bed get out get out the way he would still he would commute in from chinkford to liverpool street walk around to the office he worked for the same firm i think from leaving school till he retired um he was very much that sort of a person and someone who just, the same way to work every day, the same routine, the same, everything the same.

36:31And at that stage, did you have any particular feelings about him? Did you like him, not like him, or just took him for granted? He's dead, and that's that. Well, I mean, everything changed for me and him when he started coming into my bedroom at night and relieving me of my pyjamas and molesting me. So this... And how old were you then? The first time that happened, I think I was maybe aged eight or nine, and he was in his underpants and I was completely naked. And I've not been able to talk about this until five years ago I published my memoir, Just Ignore Him, in which I wrote all about this.

37:15But prior to that, I hadn't spoken publicly about it. Writing that book and unburdening myself in that way and it was very helpful for me and very helpful for Katie in my marriage and my family. So it was definitely a positive thing to do, but difficult for people to hear. Difficult to understand as well. Very difficult to understand. I mean, having talked about it, do you know why people like him did that sort of thing or do that sort of thing? No, in short. Power, I think. Control. role um i think i was a bit unruly uh my i remember my grandmother saying often it was said to me what are we going to do with you what are we going to do with you you know your mum's died and now you're you know being an eight-year-old i think my brother was loaded with responsibility you're the eldest you've got to step up very unfair on him and especially given the way your younger brother behaves and i think that decision to kind of define us in that way quite early on impacted seriously on our relationship as siblings which is now non-existent really so he said to me you must never tell anyone about this cuddle this is our special cuddle that's the line that stayed in my head can you remember the first time you came in did you think this is because by the time you're eight you sort of know what's going on you know this isn't quite right it felt very peculiar and it was done in complete silence oh my gosh you just came into the room in his underpants i think i was getting changed it feels like it was in the daytime

39:01um it's funny because talking to you about this now in this kind of interview setting the time It's very reminiscent of it. Years later, I went to the police about it, and the police interviewed me about it, and I had to try and recall it. And the reason I did that was we discovered, my stepmother revealed, years later, that he had been downloading and printing off pornography of teenage boys, all teenage boys. So at that moment, because the abuse stopped, it was one incident that didn't happen and then it began to happen again when i was 11 12 and at that moment i realized oh he was just really obsessed with boys and it i was just a boy the nearest boy who he could manipulate and had power over and could make do things and uh and the really you know the scales fell from my eyes because for many years i kind of justified it in some way well not justified it but rationalized it or something by thinking whether he was some sort of confused parental affection it was something to do perhaps he was sexually inactive yeah frustrated he lost your mother perhaps compensating by cuddling you and sort of creating some sort of quasi justification or something to get process it yeah and then i realized oh no he just it's like boys he was no longer a scout master he had been a scout he had been a scout master which had given him access to young boys over the years but he was no longer doing that no longer doing that at that point he did that into his well into his 20s though um camps every weekend and boys everywhere and the funny thing is that what had happened was two men had come to the house his house and said to my stepmother we knew your husband when we were in the cubs and she thought oh my god the chickens are coming home to roost something terrible is going to happen and that was when she revealed all because she by then had discovered the she discovered the she found a picture stuck in the printer um i mean there were dozens and dozens of colour photographs.

41:27So, anyway, it turned out these chaps weren't after anything. They just remembered him. They just were in the Cubs. And you went to the police, understandably, because, in fact, here was somebody you felt something's got to be done about this. I really felt like, oh, these were crimes. And it, you know, it took me a long time. At the time, Katie and I were struggling a bit in our marriage. And we had young children, and she had wanted us to go and see a couples therapist and try and work through. And I was reluctant about that. But while we were doing that, the therapist said, tell me a bit about your childhood.

42:21And I said, oh, this happened. and the therapists are amazingly good at not flinching but there was the definite flicker across her face at that moment your father did what oh and what's and so then while we were there and also at that time I was at Goldsmiths College doing a creative writing masters which was very obviously prompted by wanting to tell this story why are you doing a creative writing course I I think I might, something might be prompting me to say something. I'm trying to, every time I sat down to write anything at all, all through my career, I could only think about this story.

42:57I couldn't write any scripts, I couldn't write any fiction. All of my stand-up has been concocted on stage in comedy clubs. It's all skin-deep, frivolous stuff. Because I couldn't sit down with a blank bit of paper without wanting to tell this single story. And have you told it to anyone when you were a young boy or in your teens? I did tell it to one or two girlfriends and one or two people, and I did mention it to my grandmother in Australia, but she couldn't compute it at all. And so it felt like no one was going to... And I think he... And then when I did go to the police... Did you confront him ever with it?

43:29I did, because two things happened. One was we were on holiday. We had this amazing holiday to the United States, family holiday to America, and we were all, like many English people in the 70s, obsessed with Americana, you know, Starsky and Hutch or Charlie's Angels, and for my father it was John Wayne and Steve McQueen, you know, and we just loved Hollywood and television and sitcoms too, like MASH and all those shows. Couldn't wait to go and see the Statue of Liberty and everything else. But my brother and I were at loggerheads and my sister and I were arguing a lot. We had an explosive argument in an airport and I screamed at him, you come into my room at night.

44:10God. And I remember my brother saying, shut up, shut up. saying he comes into my room at night he comes into my room at night you know so confronted them and then ran off and hid i write about this in in just ignore him i wrote about imagining a whole different life when you go to some uh american policeman and say my father's a child molester don't make me go back to them and then end up living in virginia with an adopted family go to the baseball but instead of that we all got on the plane do you think your brother said shut up because he'd had a similar experience i don't think so no i don't think so i think he was obviously uh embarrassed about the scene just shut up shut up you're making a noise you're making a scene and yet again you're you again and then years later i remember uh i'd been away to university i'd come back from university i was living at home and i was going in and out of London going to comedy clubs doing open spots and my father said to me you need to contribute around the house you need to contribute be part of the family and I wrote him a letter I said I tried to be part of the family and I was rewarded with sexual abuse and I put it on his chest of drawers with some cash as a contribution and And he didn't respond.

45:38And then soon after that, I moved out. I rented a room in a house in Stoke Newington. Years later, when I went to the police, they went through his belongings and they found this letter. And he had kept it for decades. So it obviously, he knew it was significant, but he didn't respond to it. Did your stepmother stay with him? she did and this is one of the great mysteries of my life she did stay with him and uh pretty much to the end his final years were in her in her home she by the time she told us about the pornography collection or the pornography obsession he had an alzheimer's diagnosis and so the police went to the cps i hired a lawyer to make the case for me and the cps said we believe you we would prosecute but there's no point he won't be able to follow the proceedings of a trial so there wouldn't have been a proper trial they wouldn't there would be no point probably on day one they said the judge would have said i'm sorry we can't proceed yeah yeah so but having them say we believe you was sufficient was sufficient vindication for me it was very important to me initially they didn't they said there's not enough here to make a case and i said you can't be serious that means you don't believe me and that's when i hired a barrister to go back to them a very impressive woman and she wrote it up for me and i was very grateful to her and then they came back and said actually yes we do believe you and your stepmother and you by that stage were united on this she was ready to did she support you in your idea of going to the police by then well i couldn't really tell how she was feeling she appeared to support me and certainly when she passed over the materials because she disposed of a huge amount they had had a bonfire in the garden initially and burned hundreds of pictures you know a4 paper printer paper in the garden scorch mark on the grass which i remember seeing what's gone on here you had a bonfire and it was years later when she said this i he told me he wasn't going to do it anymore he told me he'd got rid of it all i have found another folder and she gave me this folder and then i got to the house and i went in and i saw katie and she said don't you can't bring that into the house and i left it in the car and actually under the floor mat in the footwell i was so worried about somebody finding this took it to a lawyer and they said we will keep this here and we will write an accompanying note with it saying it's your possession but not your but your father's you know yeah so and that's still with them and he's died since you know he He died in 2023.

48:40Oh, not long ago. Not long ago. My gosh. He lived on for another six years, largely in a care home. Gosh. And how did you find out he died? My sister rang me. I found out I was with my family and we were flying down to Australia to visit relatives. And I like to keep in touch with my Australian cousins and for my kids to meet them all. And we've been down a couple of times and they come and stay with us if they're in London and it's very important to me all that so we're off we go and we were going via the united states so we're flying from los angeles to melbourne and we were flying on the 2nd of august and i said to the kids we're going to land on the 4th of august and we're not going to have the 3rd of august and they said what and i said it's to do with the international date line oh this is like around the world in 80 days we're flying over the international date yes exactly we're leaving we're right at the end of this day and we're going to the very beginning of this day and we're not having this day in the middle and they asked me a few more questions and i said i can't explain i don't think anyone could explain this it's almost impossible to understand but we're not having august the third so i we land in melbourne i turn on my phone as we're taxiing to the terminal and there's a message from my sister saying can you ring me and i immediately knew what it meant what it meant was a father had died and he died on august the third he died on the day that didn't exist there is a god he died while we were in the air oh my goodness which really was very freaky very freaky and uh that was four weeks before his 90th birthday oh my when when did you last see him i last saw him the day i went to collect the pictures the pornography i remember he was on the patio with he didn't know you're getting up he didn't know my stepmother was smuggling it to me in the living room and what was your relationship with him by that time well for many years i had tried to shift my relationship with him and i imagined that i had he came to me and asked me for a loan and his pension collapsed with equitable life he asked me for an enormous sum of money which i later realized of course he's just manipulating me turned out he didn't need that money and when my stepmother took power of attorney over his affairs some years later i said before i agree to this because i was asked if i would agree to that i would like that money back i don't want that going into the estate at some point if that can be arranged and they came up with the money within two days so and also what the other thing that happened was he became quite unwell because he had a leg infection on holiday in greece and he was airlifted to athens and his leg had expanded to it was a shocking sight and they were talking about cutting it off and uh i flew out to see him two or three times and my brother and sister wouldn't go and katie said to me and said to me several times since their reaction makes much more sense than your reaction i mean why would anyone go and see this man and but you went and you're the one who was with least reason to go but you're still trying to please him you know so that's really yes you're right I realise even as I was getting older and older and he was getting older and older I was still sort of locked in somewhere he was always, he still is he was your dad, he was your father whatever he was like have you ever thought about given the time you've spent in therapy yourself what there was in his childhood or background that drove him to behave like this?

52:19Well I have and you've come to a conclusion? I can't come to any conclusion as I understand it he had a very close relationship with his mother she used to lay out the clothes he was going to wear well into his 20s before he went to work in the morning I know that his older brother my uncle Pat who was a lovely man I was very fond of didn't want my dad to join the golf club all you have to are these tiny little clues little snatches of insights but you wearing your jonathan creek hat could find a magic trick that would explain it all there's a clue there yes if we rub carefully on this note with a pencil we'll see all the mystery will be revealed yeah god some handwriting will emerge have you before we get back to your story uh have you as a result of this and sharing this uh which i imagine has been very helpful for other people who have had similar slightly different experiences um do you have what do you say to other imagine when you publish your book lots of people got in touch to say thank you for sharing this i had something similar happen to me etc i mean is are there help groups now what would people do today who are in that sort of situation well i say to people tell someone and find someone to tell and you'll be surprised you'll find a friend and someone will listen and it might be quite tearful but it will make your friendship stronger and it won't break anything and they won't run away you know you can tell them the fear of it the fear of what might happen is what keeps people locking things inside i've done so much reading there's a very good website i recommend called one in six dot org um which is a good place to start if you're carrying something that maybe our conversation might be triggering in some way there are places you can go and one in six dot org is a very good resource for for boys and men who've been abused and this is because one in six people have been one in six men have been yeah one in four women and these aren't just numbers plucked out of thin air as you will see if you read the website um so there are places you can go and there are professionals you can talk to and there are friends around you you'd be amazed and i've sat with friends and sat down i'm gonna i want to take you for lunch and i'm gonna tell you something and one of my friends a good friend of mine oliver said you know that was the worst day of my life and uh i said i'm sorry and he said no i'd go through it again you know and it and it and our friendship is stronger for it and so what i said in my book just ignoring was i hope you find someone to tell because the long the longer you carry it it affects everything that you do and it's it's the hardest thing is telling the first person but you don't feel like you need to take it to the grave you know just find someone who believe you being believed being heard being affirmed is is all that really matters because some people wrote to me and they're the person who abused him is still in their life and it's very problematic you know and i was much older my father was elderly had alzheimer's he wasn't in my life he wasn't a person who was there disappeared by then in a sense into the i think this is one of the reasons why people leave it so long because I was going back at Christmas all through my 20s and my 30s and trying to act as if nothing had happened nothing had happened because at that stage nobody knew anything had happened and when my sister had would have Christmas with her two boys and she would invite my brother and his two sons and my father and they would go to my sister's house for Christmas and I would speak to her on the phone on Christmas day Katie and I would either either be with Katie's family or by ourselves.

56:23I remember my father saying we had a lovely family Christmas, a lovely family Christmas. And I'm looking at him and saying, you know you're talking to your son who was absent, but my absence was fine. So absence is quite an important word. I do remember you asked me earlier about is there anything at a particular moment in therapy? And my therapist referred to the presence of absence, which I thought was a lovely phrase really talking about my mum her absence being present all the time and I when I was writing about her when I was writing just ignore him and I do really remember I was writing in a room in which there was a window big bay window on my right with a sofa in the window and I could picture her sitting on the sofa and that had never happened to me before and I didn't dare look around because I knew she wasn't there so better to have that picture of her sitting there it felt like she was giving her approval or something you know this is all invented in my mind but I do remember that but she at least was spared the horror of all this in a sense because she wasn't there to see it happening yeah and of course I think for a while my father would hire housekeepers and we had four of these ladies from the lady magazine and they'd come and live in the box room and he had hoped there would be maternal for us but none of them could live up to what he wanted them to be and he sent them all packing one of them was a lady called emma who was only 33 and i became very attached to her but she was gone quite soon but my therapist wondered if he was perhaps not conscious of this but that he was doing that so that he wouldn't be tempted into my room.

58:25There's an adult in the box room at the end of the hall and the other end of the landing. So that's just obviously... He might have been aware and trying to stop himself. He might have been trying to stop himself by putting someone in the house. Well, also, maybe by marrying a second time also to try and create a kind of normality around him. Yes. I mean, her children, were either of them boys? Your stepmother's children? Yes, one boy, but he was 19 or 20 or something. so yeah that was the uh i always ask people and it's difficult question to ask you because there may be no answer what people think they've got from their parents that is in them now.

59:12So what do you think from your mother you may have from what you know of her? Do you look at all like her? A little bit, I think. I think she was the one with a sense of humour and making her laugh. I wrote a bit about early stand-up routines I did, two or three of which would finish with me lying on the floor. one of them was about cycling and falling over one was about the grand national and imagining being a horse lying having after a fall and another one was about smoking on a plane desperately trying to keep stay smoking whilst being dragged on board for you know anyway i'm always on the floor some of these uh pubs i played in the floor wasn't a very nice place to be if there'd been a band on the night before but um and of course i was it was on the floor that i sat trying to make my mother laugh and I just dawned on me years later and I look back at my days on the comedy circuit and I was very lucky to work with some completely brilliant comedians you know Eddie Izzard and Lee Evans fantastic comedians they were never on the floor Bill Bailey's never lying on the floor neither's Harry Hill so it was just me so I do feel like making her laugh and years later I talked to Eddie Izzard I did a television series called Stand Up with Alan Davis.

1:00:37It was about stand-up comedy. And I interviewed comedians, some older comedians, some of the real greats like Ken Dodd and Dave Allen, Victoria Wood as well, and then some of my peers and contemporaries like Joe Brand and Eddie Izzard. And Eddie Izzard lost his mother when he was six. And he was very adamant, really, at that time that performing for an audience was about replacing the lost, the unconditional love of a mother we're getting that love back that affection back from the audience is the only thing that gave you a feeling of being loved and i do remember him saying this to me and i didn't really believe it i hadn't thought of it myself and i wasn't convinced but i became convinced that he was right actually that it was the thing when i was 16 years old and I was at college and drama was just part of the course I was on well hadn't planned to take drama that actually standing up on stage and everyone looking at you and laughing and applauding felt great and was perhaps linking back to how great I felt when she laughed and had encouraged me to make her friends laugh of course it's connected it was only a few years later when I was in college you know and Eddie picked that up early on.

1:02:05They say a childhood lasts a lifetime and I suspect in most cases it does last a lifetime. How do you ensure that you don't see yourself and all that you do now through the prism of the difficulties of your childhood? Well, I think what happened to me, it feels like it happened to me, was Katie happened to me. She appeared on the scene and wanted to have a family. And how old were you when you got together? We got together. I was 39 and she was 26. It was 12 and a half years between us. And was the reason you hadn't formed a relationship because of a permanent relationship until you were 39? Was that, what would you attribute that to?

1:02:47Because you obviously must have had a series. of relationships leading to the one that changed your life. Yes, I did. And I think all of them were impacted by everything that happened to me. Impacted also by how focused I was on being ambitious in my career. Impacted by drinking. Impacted by liking to live on my own. Impacted by lots of things that can be... You know, I'm a psychotherapist field day, really. but Katie came along and I immediately just liked being with her and we were married within 18 months and she wanted to have children and then when we had our first child I didn't really know that you could feel love or be loved in the way that children love you or you love children and again it's another moment where it took me a while to process and I thought oh this must be what I felt for my mum this must be what my mum felt for me I have had this experience before it's just buried in the past and I don't remember it but how your child looks at you and how you look at them that can only be reminiscent of your own mother looking at you that unconditional and the other thing that happened was when my children reached the age of six which was how old i was when my mum died and when katie was 38 with children that was very impactful i felt very very strongly emotional about that seeing them at that age and then imagining them and imagining me and so my life my life's focus shifted from the old family to the new family it's from the negative to the positive and it's all you know different you You shared with Katie before you got married all your, the baggage you were carrying, did you?

1:04:46I did, but I don't think either of us really, we talked about it, and then we got on with our day. And I think it wasn't until after we'd had children, and then we had some arguments, and we were finding it very difficult, and she was wanting to go and see someone and talk about it, and we need to resolve this, and we're going to have to split up. And I said, what are you talking about? Don't be ridiculous. and then we addressed it ourselves with professional help um well done making it work and uh and and you know we survived and uh actually the last year or two it's been perhaps the best it's been i'm touching wood yeah i think you should do that because i can tell you after 57 years even without the baggage that you've got it's a roller coaster yes don't don't get complacent i'm sure they do think though that writing the book just ignore him is really beneficial and helpful i do really get organizing why did you call it just ignore him because that's what my father used to say to my brother and sister about you about me if i was acting up at the tea table he would say to them just ignore him and that was why i called it that yeah and And then after I had him arrested, my brother stopped sending my...

1:06:04In a sense, you had him arrested. He was actually... They got as far as arresting him to make inquiries, did they? And did they interview him? So he wasn't then suffering from Alzheimer's. Well, it was the early stages, so they felt they could interview him. Yeah. By the time he would have come to trial, he would have been too far gone. They thought he wouldn't be able to follow the trial. So he was made aware that he'd been sussed. Yeah, denied everything. They said to him, did you go on holiday to America? Was there an incident in an airport? They said it was, I talked to the police afterwards.

1:06:38I said, what did he say? They said, he said that was a wonderful holiday. So he blanked it, really, total denial. Total denial. Total denial. So, here we are with you and Katie now in a very good place. I'm really pleased for you. But you've got three children. three children so yes it's the five of us oh that's good strong family but also the cousins are important and the cousins in australia they're the children of who they're the children of my mum's younger sister good so that's all good so let's take you back to the age of you're at school uh you're playing up a bit at school are you concentrating on your work not much No.

1:07:20Are you good at sport? Are you good at anything? No, not good at anything. And also, I was taken, when I was at primary school, in what would now be called Year 5, I was very clever. I was called Brain Box. I was best friends with a girl called Debbie Porter. And Debbie Porter did classics at Cambridge, I think. Oh. Can I say that's the real thing? That is my definition of being clever. That's clever, isn't it? Classics at Cambridge, and you're called Debbie Porter. well done Debbie so but she and I were neck and neck for top of the class oh my god so I think there was another life for me in the classics department I think there was and you're cultivating the look still with that lovely long grey hair of yours you could play a dom I could so Debbie Porter was she your best friend?

1:08:10she was her friend yeah I enjoyed that class our teacher was called Mrs Thorogood oh and that's really Dickensian she really was Thorogood yes you couldn't make it up could you oh we loved her but because i was doing well um my father hit upon the idea of taking me out of there and putting me into secondary school a year early which was his old school this it's called bancrofts in woodford green it's a public school and i remember the head teacher coming into year five as we would have been called and saying mrs thoroughgood is going to be your teacher next year and I turned to the wall and just cried my eyes out but no one could see me because I nothing I wanted more than to be with them for another year the final year I'd have been in the football team because there were only 15 boys so four of them had big glasses you know and I had to pretend that I wanted to go to Bancrofts but I was the youngest boy in the school at Bancrofts and it was too difficult an environment for me.

1:09:14It was quite strict and severe and a bit old-fashioned in its approach to teaching and nothing like Mrs. Thurrogate and it was a bit of a disaster. But had I not done that, perhaps I wouldn't have gone to Loughton College at 16, wouldn't have done drama, wouldn't have... You know, you just can't... When you trace your life back, you know... It's what happened. It's what happened. So you go to Loughton College... Yes. Which is a college of... Further education. Further education. to do what media studies which had just begun the year before and i wanted to be i had an idea that i might be a football reporter having given up on being an actual footballer and uh i did an a level called communication studies which i actually found very interesting about mass communication interpersonal communication very interesting and i did theater studies because i tried it i was invited to try it for a week it was that or sociology but i only did two a levels because i didn't think i was gonna do the work to do three which subsequently when i then decided i want to go to university slightly narrowed the field for universities but i got into the university of kent to do drama and that's what i did ukc university of kent yeah and all of this you now now see in retrospect you were wanting to do this performing because it is looking for this recognition and acceptance from an audience who loves you yeah it turns out yeah i can i can believe that um and you blossom at university of kent do you well i wouldn't say blossom but i didn't really engage well with the actual course but i did a lot of extracurricular i did a lot of plays and i really wanted to do comedy from the get-go do you remember the first time you went on to an paying audience and they laughed yeah I do when they I suppose the first time there was a very talented director called Pete Natale who subsequently went to Australia where he's a professional theatre director and he put a company together to go to the Edinburgh Fringe and he wanted to do Lysistrata the Aristophanes play where the women deny men sex so that they will end the war but he did it with an exclamation mark like Oklahoma and put songs in and we did it as a musical four boys and four girls and up we went and in one scene the the four boys sit on the edge of a stage and the four girls come behind them and try and tempt them draping their hair over their faces rubbing them unbuttoning their shirts tempted simply by the description they were tempting they were tempting young women and we were all about 20 21 or something and the the girl who was draping her hair over me was the most voluptuous with the best hair and she was really going for it and i didn't allow her to one button my shirt and i sat and looked terrified the other three boys of course were being tempted and becoming but the fact that i was on the end with this voluptuous beauty molesting me looking terrified and buttoned up the audience found that hysterically funny and to the point where the other actors were complaining to pete the director said what's he doing at the end of the line and he's saying i promise you he's not doing anything he's just sitting there and laura is all over him and it looks very very funny well he can't do it i'm not going to tell him not to do it it's really funny he's not upstaging it's just funny to have one of them not getting turned on just frightened and that was the first time that i got really big laughs from being on stage which was something we just sort of found in a performance one night and you thought i liked this i loved it and then some comedians came to the campus that year and i watched them and thought that's what you can do you don't need i was hoping that i i would be adrian ebbinson and i'd meet my rick mayle you know i'd something like that but That didn't happen, though I met some very funny people.

1:13:22They didn't want to get on stage with me. And I saw these comedians and I thought, you don't, you just do it yourself. You can get a microphone and you can do it yourself. And so I did a bit of stand-up towards the end of my time at Kent and then once I'd left, that was all I thought about. Yeah. And you won some award at Edinburgh, didn't you? A few years later, I won the Critics Award. That's to get the Critics' Award. Critics Award. But it does take some going. And I received that award in my 20s, a little bit flippantly. imagining this is the first of many. And to this day, it's the only award that my comedy has brought me.

1:13:58Oh, well, we'll hope to get you the podcast award next year. And I've still got it. And it did, it was a base with a pen nib on it. It's quite a nice-looking thing. But after a few years, the nib fell off. Well, that puts things in perspective, doesn't it? Do you remember your first kiss? Yes, I do. It was at my friend Matt's house, Matt Giles, with a girl called Susan. Great. Was it satisfying, good? It was very exciting. For you, anyway. Yeah, I don't know. There were some girls there. Girls had been admitted to the school. This is one of the worst things about being put up a year, was the year below, the year I should have been in, was the first year that they allowed girls in.

1:14:42So the first year the school became co-educational. And then after that, every year until the boys' years were gone. so there were girls at the school and some of these girls came round to Matt's house and then Matt, I remember they put the light out and the next thing I knew it's a signal for some, isn't it? so how many, you and Matt in the room with two girls and the lights out? there may have been three boys and three girls and the lights out, hey! and then the lights came on again and everyone had to adjust themselves that's fine, we've done that and so Susan and I then saw one another for several months which was very nice.

1:15:21So was it difficult forming, I mean what is interesting about your story is that it's so overwhelming that did it overwhelm you, did it overwhelm every, given you weren't at that stage sharing it. In retrospect I'm sure you think yeah of course that's why that relationship didn't work but at the time were you just busy with your career, I'm growing this, I'm proving successful, I've got the odd girlfriend.

1:15:47I don't know Charles honestly I don't I had a girl from when I was 17 at Lowne College called Justine and I think in another life before people went away to university yeah you know before people even went to the next town which was the way of English life for thousands of years um that Justine and I feel sure would have you settled down together probably done quite well 17, 18 year olds and you know I went off to university she came and visit me a few times but we didn't survive that and then I had a couple of girlfriends at university a couple of girlfriends when I was on the comedy circuit but things kept collapsing things kept breaking up either I was meeting somebody and then putting all my eggs in that basket too soon going in too fast and not picking up any of the signals getting feeling very very strong and then the other issue is once i was with somebody um and i think this is perhaps true of people who've lost their mother the fear of separation is very difficult so i certainly had a couple of times i've definitely stayed with somebody too long because i was frightened of loss of loss of the of that of those feelings being triggered.

1:17:07So I think there's a bit of that sometimes. It took me quite a long time. What's your proudest career achievement? Or happiest, maybe? Well, I think being a good stand-up comedian is my thing. That's the thing. I know I do that well. That's interesting, because I think you're a wonderful actor. Well, you're very kind. I'm very lucky. I remember seeing you on a stage place. You were so good. I went to see it twice. I saw you in Edinburgh. and then I said to my wife, actually this is really good. Was it Wyndham's or somewhere? Somewhere in the West End? Wyndham's, yeah. Yeah, so I came to see you twice.

1:17:42I said, I think you're a really good actor. Oh, that's very kind. I just haven't had many opportunities. You haven't made the opportunities. You could do it. It's quite a commitment. It is. It's nearly all television. Of course, Jonathan Crete was a game-changing, life-changing thing because I went from, I cashed in my anonymity overnight. Didn't give that a second thought. nobody said before you go through that door we want you to look at this you know you just say go through this door into the life you dreamed of you know but of course it's a great privilege to have david remwick writing scripts and all these amazing guest stars and the success of it and but that was a big a big deal and then subsequently one or two other shows i did like i did a show bob and rose for itv i was very proud of with leslie sharp and jessica hines and i'm very proud of the just ignoring the book i wrote and and um looking forward to the sequel overcoming that yes it picks up from that and go well it's about white male stand-up i call it is what we used to be called in those days white male stand-up white male stand-up and i do remember somebody saying there are too many white male stand-ups this was in about 1988 and i just started i thought oh shit well i'm already in trouble and that's really about having a career in comedy and radio and then television and then fame and and how the you know the secret life i was carrying with me impacted on that and how i coped or didn't um so it's been quite a hard thing to write actually no way um but i'm quite i think i think this has come out okay yeah it's come out very okay you come out very okay at all of this um Do you still have nightmares?

1:19:26No. I wake up in the night needing a wee. Well, that, I'm afraid, is due to having children. I found that when I had three children, you have to do it in the middle of the night. When you have grandchildren, as I have, you have to get up twice in the night. I'm afraid it's directly, you can blame the children. I don't need a physiotherapist to tell you that. I'm telling you it for free. It's going to get worse. And, of course, the answer to your question, what are you most proud of? is of course having a functioning family who we look forward to christmas lunch together you know it's a great achievement it's a wonderful achievement well done three more questions then we're done when i say to you joy a moment of joy in your life what immediately comes into your mind well um declan rice's free kick against real madrid a couple of months ago i had my nine year old next to me in the stadium Declan Rice was lining up this free kick he's never scored a free kick in his life but he's our star man big powerful athlete committed and he lined up this free kick and he launched it into the net like a missile and the place went up and you instant euphoria and I do remember my boy's face Francis is called he's just his mouth was agape what what just happened so yeah i mean that was is it is euphoria past joy it's all the same yes it combines joy is a synonym it was having him there and seeing his face and knowing that he would never forget that that's shared joy which is even better yes uh sadness you could pick so many but what actually comes into your head as i say that well i think i just i think the thing that makes me most sad is not being in Mrs Thurgood's class in 1976 it was the year of the heat wave it was my last summer before I joined Bancroft and I I really remember the sadness of hearing that they were all going to be with and not being able to go home and say to my dad I don't want to go I want to be with Mrs Thurgood not daring to say that not being able to well you say at the moment you said that I to turn to the wall like you did and start crying it is very sad he's just a boy and i see my own boys now i've got my bobby my my little son he's 14 in a few days and he's going through you know the change and you know let's watch them you can't sort of get to them somehow they're growing up and they're going to go they want to do things it's you want to get hold of It's very interesting.

1:22:05What age do they leave? What age do they grow up? There's a line in Peter Pan where the first paragraph of the novel of Peter Pan, where Wendy declares that it's the age of two you begin to grow up. Really? But most people seem to think it's either 12. A. A. Milne came to the conclusion it was 12 when you begin to say goodbye. But definitely by 16 or 18, you're beginning to say goodbye. It's a strange thing, isn't it? when these children that you love so much you have to eventually let go and get that balance right yeah and then you have to which we're a bit in the process of my daughter's 15 and of course they part of them would like as many hugs and cuddles as they ever had but part of them doesn't so they're in a confusing place too but I think probably A.A.

1:22:58Milne's right I think 12 is a turning point. You get your own, very much as strongly your own interior life is taking over. And the conversations you have with your friends, the idea of having those in front of your parents is impossible to imagine. OK, we're at the end. You've led a most interesting life, and you've shared it with us very beautifully. What do you think you've learned? What's the lesson? You've got these three children. You've got to share a lesson with them. What is the lesson? I think you know when you're doing right and you know when you're doing wrong. And try and do the first one.

1:23:39And if you do the second one, I know it's a modern phrase I don't like to use, but you do have to own it a bit. You have to say, and I was very big on this, because my father would never say sorry. If I chatted at the kids or I'd lost my temper or something had happened, I'd go and say sorry to them. go to the room, tap on the door, I'm sorry. And I do remember my daughter saying to me, oh, Dad, you always say that.

1:24:09So I think that's the lesson I've learned. Remember to say sorry. Well, thank you. I won't need to say sorry because after this, we will do a great big plug for your tour for Australia, for any books you want sold. We have to say thank you in any way we can. but I do before I burst into tears and my producer Harriet burst into tears and Lou who is helping us today we'll all burst into tears and have a big hug but meanwhile Alan Davis thank you so much thank you wow

1:24:43completely fascinating my thanks to Alan Davis for actually throwing so much light onto the darkness of his life really revealing and I think to many people I hope helpful. If actually you want to share any of your experiences, particularly, you know, memories, because this is about memories, but also how you cope with the memories now, do please get in touch with us. It's a very simple address. It's simply hello at rosebudpodcast.com. Do get in touch. In fact, somebody has been in touch once this week's email. This is from Moya McCarthy, and she says, Dear Giles and Harriet, I was a slightly late discoverer of Rosebud, and I'm gradually working my way chronologically through all the episodes.

1:25:31This morning, I was listening to Giles read from his 1960 diaries, and it raised so many connections that I felt compelled to write in. I was born in 1950, so although a little younger than you, Giles, your memories of growing up in London in the 1950s and 60s are very evocative for me. Unlike you, I was not sent to boarding school, but I was brought up in South London, in Streatham Hill. Like you, theatre was always a huge part of my growing up. So, my first sizzle moment was when you mentioned seeing Treasure Island at the Mermaid Theatre. I too saw that production and remember being so amazed at this theatre created from an old warehouse with its bare brick walls.

1:26:17It was the first of many productions I saw there. Next you mentioned Dick Whittington at Streatham Hill Theatre.

1:26:50situated off the top flight just before you went into the auditorium. The entrance to the balcony was at the very top so you could almost touch the ceiling and I can still see what seemed like an endless flight of steep steps leading down to the front rows. The seats were unreserved and it was rare for there to be more than the front two or three rows occupied. The pantomimes were a special treat and we would sit in the royal circle for those. I remember seeing so many amazing shows including the original West Side Story Salad Days, The Folder Rolls, Peter Pan The Desert Song and The Miracle Worker That one had a profound effect on me We would wait outside the stage door to get autographs afterwards Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson particularly spring to mind Sadly, the theatre closed in 1962 to become a bingo hall It subsequently closed completely, I think, in the 90s, but it's still there, with most of its faded glory still intact.

1:27:54There's currently a very active campaign group working to reopen it as a cultural resource for the whole community. Fingers crossed. Then, to top it all, your ma and pa's visit to the new Royalty Theatre. That would have been to see The Visit, starring Alfred Lund and Lynn Fontaine, with a cast including my father, Henry McCarthy. Sadly, I never saw it. As age nine, it was deemed to be unsuitable for someone of my age. So, that's it. Thank you for that almost overwhelming deluge of memories. I'm still slightly reeling. And as a final nod to the discussion at the start of the episode of when people listen to Rosebud, I always listen just after I've woken up.

1:28:42if I know I can still safely stay in bed for another hour. I have to make sure I'm properly awake so I don't snooze off and miss some. Keep up the good work and thank you. Moya, Moya McCarthy. She actually gave me how to pronounce the name. It's written M-A-I-R-E, but she put in brackets, pronounced Moya. In the unlikely event, you might read this out. I was delighted to read it out. We find the letters from listeners really heartwarming and often revelatory and, well, I find them also very touching, a letter like this, where we've shared so many memories, Moya and I. Okay, that's it. If you want to be in touch with us, you know where we are.

1:29:22You simply write to, well, send your email, please, to hello at rosebudpodcast.com. That's it for this week, but there'll be plenty more where we come from. We hope you'll be there. Whatever time you listen, I love the idea of Moya waking up and thinking, yes, I'm alive. Not only am I alive, but here's a new episode of Rosebud. Cue the music.

1:30:29Rosebud is a Plain Jane production produced by Harriet Jane hosted by me, Giles Brandreth with music by Phil Leppard and recorded this week at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London's Park Lane. Room service.