Alan Davies reflects on childhood abuse, dealing with anger and being diagnosed with cancer
Abuse, cancer and other traumas have been part of Alan Davies's life – but he’s learning to look forward positively.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Flying west across the International Date Line erases a day from the calendar. For most, it’s a curious geographical twist. For Alan Davies, travelling from Los Angeles to Melbourne in the summer of 2023 became something symbolic when 3 August vanished – it was the day his father, who had sexually abused him from the age of eight to 13, took his final breath. “It was weird because, technically, I wasn’t on the planet,” says Davies, who had not seen his father for six years by the the time he died.
In his courageous and acclaimed 2020 memoir Just Ignore Him, Davies exposed a harrowing childhood in Essex: the heartbreak of losing his mother suddenly from leukaemia when he was only six – then, two years later, how his accountant father began visiting his bedroom after dark. He later reported the offences to the police but because of his father’s Alzheimer’s no charges were ever brought.
Two years on, Davies’s emotions toward his father remain complex. “I read a lot about forgiveness and how it can set you free and you’re a better person and it’s what Jesus would have done. But it’s a long journey because of what he did, the way he treated me,” he says.
“He did a lot of damage and I really try not to pass any of that damage on to my own kids. It’s less about forgiveness and more about trying to forget. There won’t be any more memoirs.”
His first, My Favourite People and Me 1978–1988, featured the 44 people who most influenced Davies growing up, and inspired his 2010 Channel 4 three-parter Teenage Revolution. His latest, White Male Stand-Up, continues Davies’s life story, charting his journey from 90s comedy circuit novice to landing his big acting break in Jonathan Creek in 1997, before becoming the only permanent panellist on QI.
An ongoing thread of the memoir is Davies’s inner “angry boy”: a product, he writes, “when baked-in rage is unmanaged” and trauma is “suppressed”. Angry Boy often surfaces in the face of authority or confrontation, exacerbated by alcohol and drug abuse. Examples: walloping his late comedian pal Jim Miller during a row; becoming “unforgivably abusive and aggressive” towards his wife on a trip to Athens; then, 11 years ago, assaulting a stranger in front of his kids at a local leisure centre before hiding from police in the soft play area.
It’s hard to marry the softly spoken, gentle and funny chap who dials in over a video call from his home in Hampstead, north London, with this short-fused man-child. “You just have to manage yourself and acknowledge who you are, what your flaws are,” explains Davies, who first entered therapy 30 years ago on the recommendation of his close friend Jo Brand.
“I said to my therapist, after several years, ‘I don’t feel any better’, and he said, ‘Yeah, but would it be any other way, Alan, given what’s happened to you?’ It took me a long time to realise that the work we were doing together was about accepting who I am.”
Another big secret laid bare in the book is cancer. Exactly a year ago, after he spotted blood in his pee, tests detected a small tumour in his bladder. Last October, he underwent surgery to remove the growth – and diagnosis, fortunately, was early enough to avoid it spreading. “Recurrence,” Davies reports, however, “is quite possible.” He will be under close observation for five years.
“I just feel lucky because that was close,” he says. “I only spotted a bit of blood and if I hadn’t spotted it and gone to the doctor, I’d still have this tumour and it would have gone through the bladder wall and it would be everywhere by now.
“I’ve lost friends like Sean Lock [the comedian died of lung cancer, aged 58, in 2021], while other friends, like Mark Steel, have been saved. Life is such a minefield, isn’t it?”
Davies laughs when asked what a good next 10 years looks like. “Being alive at the end of it, mainly, and that all the kids are still good. Work-wise, I really enjoy acting.”
What about a reality show like Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, which famously offers participants a raw, emotional space for processing and healing, albeit under interrogation? “I’ve never been asked, and I don’t think I’ve got the physical fitness for it now,” he says. “I saw Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen on a show doing something incredibly physically demanding, and he had to be rescued by a medic. I mean, what were they doing to him? He’s in his 60s!”
Davies himself turns 60 next March but his most pressing focus, beyond the book, is his autumn stand-up tour – his first in a decade – where he’ll weave in some “bleaker childhood stuff” for the first time. “I feel comfortable with the tour. But the book? Who knows? It’s like you put a boat onto a boating pond then you have to see if it sinks or floats.” Or sails beautifully towards a sunset-drenched horizon.
- White Male Stand-Up by Alan Davies is published by Monoray and is available to purchase now
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