Returning to stand-up for the first time in a decade, Alan Davies – star of Jonathan Creek and long-serving QI panellist – ventures into edgier, darker territory than those familiar with his affable screen persona will expect.
Having lifted the lid on the childhood sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his late father in his acclaimed 2020 memoir Just Ignore Him, Davies is now finally, bravely, broaching the subject on stage. A barrel-load of laughs? At points: no. But he’s raising a sensitive, under-discussed issue that demands attention and makes you admire more fully his ongoing achievement in seeing the funny side of life after what was plainly a lasting trauma.
The evidence is there right in front of us. The night I attend, early in his short Edinburgh Fringe run ahead of an autumn tour, Davies becomes noticeably short of breath as he recounts the abiding fear he developed as a boy about when he might next be subject to bedroom molestations. “This is PTSD,” he explains, describing in real time the sensation of his tightening chest. “I can still do a comedy show,” he offers, as if to reassure his audience, but it is grimly eye-opening to see such a physical response triggered so long after the dark events he’s recalling.
Given the challenge of revisiting the pain of the past, it might sound insensitive to suggest that Davies’s show could benefit from a greater unpacking of his attempt, years later, to hold his father accountable for his actions. He tells us that when his father died, in his 80s, he hadn’t seen him for six years and didn’t attend his funeral. He had tried to have him prosecuted, but the details of that process (stymied by his father’s advanced years and Alzheimer’s) are left to readers of the book to glean.
Fair enough, but in the wake of abuse-centred hit shows such as Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, comedy audiences are more primed than ever to respond to material once only aired on the therapist’s couch. At the Gilded Balloon, during Davies’s most confessional moments, the mood of the room is rapt, and respectfully subdued.
Elsewhere in the show, he is on more familiar ground, reconfirming his rare ability to balance crispness with cosiness, serving up observational natter with a combination of splenetic (if exaggerated) mid-life exasperation and his signature snuffling delivery. “I’m an old white b—–d – that’s my role,” he says. “I’m leaning into it.”
He’s very funny about now being older – at 59 – than the actors famous for sitcom “old-git” roles, such as Clive Dunn and Warren Mitchell. He brilliantly mimes the exploding head of someone driven to despair by 20mph speed limits. Erectile dysfunction and prostate checks? He’s got entertaining material about those, too.
It’s early days for this show but already it feels as though something crucial has been liberated in Davies. It augurs well for the years to come.
Until Aug 10 at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, then touring from Sept 19-Nov 21. Details: alandavies.live. Alan Davies’s new memoir White Male Stand-Up (Monoray, £25) will be published on Sept 9