‘There were bad times and bad behaviour’: Alan Davies on alcohol, self-love, comedy and cancer | Alan Davies

Met seems like Alan Davies they are in the wrong place. Not if he’s in the wrong place: he’s here at the Pleasance Theater in Islington, a funky venue in north London, where we’ve arranged a meeting. But he’s in the wrong part of it. Although there is a stage with a single microphone on the stand, Davies – who has performed here many times – joins me in the hall, sitting down at a table. Someone in the shadows is trying to turn it on, and suddenly there is a light on the stage where the mic is. Is it an attempt to jump in there and do his thing, even for an audience of one? “It’s a little bit, yeah,” he admits.

When I started asking questions, I found that the notebook I brought with me had my 14-year-old son’s notes. “Do you have the wrong notebook, or has he been writing in your notebook?” Davies asks. I think B. “Sounds like he wants to be found.”

Davies also has a 14-year-old son, a 16-year-old daughter, and a 10-year-old son. He is thinking a lot about family right now; that’s what his latest memoir is about, even if he didn’t realize it when he started it. In its previous history, Just ignore Himpublished in 2020, she wrote about being molested by her father as a child. In 2017, she discovered that her father had many pornographic images with boys. Davies wanted to be prosecuted but by this time his father was in his 80s and had Alzheimer’s disease. He is dead.

I ask him how he did with the book. “People have talked to me, texted me, talked about similar experiences, not about things happening in their childhood, but about not telling anyone, not even the people close to them.” Some have come to say that they can do something because they read the book, so if it helps, that’s fun, it’s beneficial.”

It has been useful for Davies too, to express it out there, “to reveal this hidden side of my childhood. It was an important work for me, because these stories still affected my behavior, my happiness – a kind of hidden anxiety or whatever you want to call it. The process of turning around, looking back and looking … there was a lot of time to filter, reflect, think and analyze it has been beneficial.”

His next biography, White Male Stand-Uppublished in 2025, it begins the stage of happiness: the sports community in the 1990s and the laughter, love, success and transcendence that went with it. He called it White Male Stand-up because, he says, with few exceptions, “that’s who we all were”. It was brilliant and Davies loved it: the bandmates, the famous friends, the job itself – just getting up on stage with a mic. “If you have the talent for this, you can laugh at them, you hear the laughter, it’s good, the adrenaline and the joy of it.”

But it came with dangers. He dodged some bullets; others found him. He didn’t get into the mountains of cocaine that were apparently everywhere as happily as some of his contemporaries (he did the drug, but he says he didn’t get to the point where he needed to take it). Beer was very difficult. “It can be very destructive, so there were some bad and bad moments that you regret.” Sometimes he downed two bottles of wine every night.

The job also came with a risk. “You can be arrogant, if you’re young, in your 20s, to get on stage like that. There are rooms full of people laughing, comedy clubs are booking you left, right and centre. How selfish do you have to be to think: well, I’m in a room of 500 people – maybe it’s better if I’m the only one talking?”

When he took on the role in Jonathan Creek, David Renwick’s BBC crime drama, which first aired in 1997 and garnered 12 million viewers on a Saturday night, Davies became a household name. QI, a comedy-drama he co-starred with Stephen Fry (and continues to co-star with Sandi Toksvig) came later, in 2003. “If you’re starting to think you’re important, there’s a lot of opportunity to take it, you know: I’m not the only one who thinks I’m weird.”

But most of it was about thinking that “I’m going somewhere and leaving something behind.” It took me years to realize that this was impossible. He was still the “angry boy” he described in his books. It was her friend, fellow comedian (and former psychiatric nurse) Jo Brand who realized it wasn’t weird in the 90s. They offered help, which Davies has found helpful. Some of the White Male Stand-up features interviews, such as sessions with therapists.

Yet there were takeaways, dark places, lines pouring alcohol, blackouts, violence. Anger. In 2007, he was impeached biting off a homeless person’s ear outside the Groucho Club in London. He denies this, but admits that he injured his hand after hitting his friend; and reset his nose after being punched by a fellow Arsenal supporter in a pub; and hiding from the police in a soft play area after an argument with a man; and locking his wife, writer Katie Maskell, out of the house after a drunken row, and hiding in the bathroom when the police arrived; and – earlier – in a hotel room he hears his then-girlfriend and Jonathan Creek co-star Julia Sawalha tell someone on the phone: “I’m on vacation with a cunt.”

I find it difficult to associate that person with the calm, thoughtful person sitting at the table. Now in his 60s, with silver curls, he’s not very famous and he’s fine with that – even if he mistakes James May. Or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. “I want to be famous because of my childhood experiences and I can’t tolerate being famous because of my childhood experiences,” he recalls to his assistant in a new memoir. And then he concludes: “The interesting thing is that all my fathers are guilty.”

He says about one in six men and boys have been raped or otherwise abused. And violence does not end with the act itself: it goes around, it affects everything and everyone. “The consequences – culturally, socially – to have a large number of survivors, in terms of the possible consequences for many of those people.” Things like high contact with medical professionals, high contact with psychiatrists, increased risk, drug use, alcoholism, broken relationships, family problems.

“The consequences of having a broken and dysfunctional family means you look at that for the rest of your life,” he says. “And maybe when you find something like a family, you can start doing things the wrong way, which creates stress and cracks, because that’s what you’re used to.”

He says he found Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score to be a helpful reading material. Writing about it has been helpful, and supportive, one on one and with Katie. “We talked a lot about living for a long time without fully realizing how devastating childhood trauma can be.”

Davies’ mother died of leukemia when she was six. He calls it “the presence of absence”, because that’s what his assistant calls it. It has been especially since she had her own children. “When I saw them when they were six, that’s when my mother died, and when Katie was 38, the same age that my mother was when she died, seeing them together and realizing what happened suddenly.”

While working on his new book, Davies had his own cancer scare: blood in his urine, tests, bladder cancer, surgery. He said: “It was a bad week, waiting for the results to see if it had gone anywhere else. It made him realize that he still wanted to be there to see his little family grow. Luckily, only one tumor was found and it was removed.”

The disease gives this memoir an additional context. He didn’t want his second book to be a memoir, or what he calls “another show book”. He wanted it to be authentic, and funny, and it is. I enjoyed his description of the bladder examination, using a rigid machine called a cystoscope, which the ururoolos doctor loosens from his pocket and ties together, and Davies compares it to Eddie Redmayne’s sniper rifle in The Day of the Jackal.

It is also important for its standing. “I feel like my current journey is a perfect reflection of who I am, what I’ve been through, talking about childhood abuse for the first time and trying to find a way to make a comedy.”

But is it funny? “Oh, God, I think it’s the funniest show I’ve ever made.”

Getting these things out, he says, shows that anything bad can happen to you, “It’s not what defines you and it’s not what makes you enjoy your life or have quality time with your family.”

I wonder how much her children know about her childhood. So far, he says, he’s shown as much interest in reading his books as he does in QI. “In other words, nothing at all.” It said, “They can visit you on Google, they’ve seen things, they’ve had their own thoughts and conversations, they’ve had conversations with their mothers.” As he told me earlier, when he puts it in a book, it sounds like he wants it to be found.

White Male Stand-Up by Alan Davies it comes out next week in paperback (Octopus, £10.99). The Alan Davies: Think Ahead Tour kicks off on September 21 in Truro; alandavies.live