Alan Davies
Interview (Crackin' Magazine)
Those loose-lipped monuments to inconsequential vacuity, the 3am girls, would probably put it like this: "Shhhhh!!! Which floppy-haired comic actor is so busy smoking crack / bedding his co-star / terrorising local farmyard animals that the rehearsals for his first stage play are like watching the dramatic equivalent of someone trying to nail jelly to the ceiling?" As usual, they couldn’t possibly say, but it definitely wouldn’t be Alan Davies, that’s for damn sure as hiccups.
Besides, he holds no truck with the gossipmongering of said ladies of the night. “Oh, they’re just silly.” Not a big fan of unsubstantiated tabloid tittle-tattle, garnered from pissed celebrities at showbiz bashes then? “If you ever get invited to premiers and parties, just don’t go. I went to one and some showbiz prat comes sidling up to me and just tells me to fuck off! I said to him, ‘Look, mate, I don’t know who you are. I have no clue who you are!’ Then he writes something like ‘Alan Davies is an arsehole. He swans around rooms demanding if people know who he is’ and stuff like that.” A slight misrepresentation of the actual course of events, some might argue. “They said I got thrown out of the comedy awards for being drunk, but it was on telly! I was there until the end! You can see me!”
Alan Davies, then. I’m assuming you DO know who he is. If you don’t, I’ll fill you in– For starters, he’s only this continent’s finest thespian. And what’s more, he’s just back from Monte Carlo to prove it. “I’m just back from Monte Carlo,” he confirms, helpfully. He was there because erstwhile ITV hit ‘Bob and Rose’ had knocked the cream of European telly into a cocked hat and cleaned up at the annual TV awards. So that must have been pretty glamorous – was it all rubbing shoulders with permatanned megastars and eligible princesses from minor continental principalities? “It was a bit of a celebrity fest,” he concedes, “but it’s all really weird celebs. Roger Moore was there. I don’t think he actually leaves Monte Carlo. And the really disconcerting thing is that…he talks like Roger Moore.” I can imagine must have been very tempting to walk up to Roger Moore as he’s about to sit down to his meal at the ceremony with a microphone and thrust it into his face, and when he says “Do you expect me to talk?” you could just say “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to DINE.” Or something.
Alan was, of course, too busy picking up his gong to entertain any such thoughts: “So there I was. Picking up my award. For Best Actor. In Europe. In a drama series. On TV. That the judges had seen. Recently.” So you’re a famous face on the continent are you? “Well, I got up there, and I said ‘I bet no-one knows who I am!’ And that got a laugh. And then I waved at Roger Moore, and that got a laugh. And then you look around and you can see people like Tori Spelling and Carmen Electra.” There must have been further furrowing of brows, or as much furrowing as heavy botox reliance will allow, when the show romped home with all the top honours, Lesley Sharpe winning best Actress and then Bob and Rose taking best drama.
Davies enthusiastically describes Bob and Rose (penned by Queer As Folk creator Russell T Davies) as “the best script I’d ever read” – it’s already becoming an international hit, and there’s interest from people like the Sex And The City creators in making an American version, though if previous watered-down and sanitised remakes such as Men Behaving Badly are anything to go by, then they’ll probably gloss over Bob’s gayness and just make him, I don’t know, a Jehovah’s Witness, or something.
But such televisual success must already have you expectantly reinforcing your mantelpiece for the frenzy of BAFTA-shaped bits of shiny metal that are bound to be wending their academy-backed way in your general direction? “Well, you don’t generally start getting BAFTA’s until you’ve built up more of a body of work. I’ve only done a couple of series. Though last year Lesley WAS nominated for the BAFTA for Best Actress, and it was the last award of the night, and we all really wanted her to get it, and they said, ‘The award goes to…Julie Walters.’ Of course we both really love Julie, but we just thought – oooh, you cow!”
So to Alan’s new-found interest in treading the boards. Already an enviably established Edinburgh favourite, he’s hitting the festival this year with something new, taking the leading role in a play called “Aunty and Me” by Canadian writer Maurice Panych, at The Assembly. It’s a dark comic two-hander that looks at the relationship between a young man and, I’m sure it comes as no great surprise to reveal, his (dying) aunty. “She’s on her deathbed,” Alan explains, “and this guy had hated his family and moved away long before. Anyway, she sends for him and he thinks about it and decides he should go and he goes and then she…doesn’t die. He sits there by her side for a year. There’s a lot of mental unravelling, and it all unfolds through lots of monologues. That are delivered in a really entertaining way.”
It may come as a shock to those people that spend time thinking about this kind of thing to find out that this is Davies’ first live theatre role. Surely he must have been in Art? The turnover is so high for that show that I’m practically sat by the phone waiting for them to tell me it’s MY turn. “I was offered Art,” he says. What happened, then? Was he gazumped by Eastender’s Trevor, or perhaps one of the extras from Smack the Pony? “Well, I was also offered Abigail’s Party and The Death of Joe Egg. I was kind of interested but then I’m not sure about revivals or taking over from people. I want to do something that’s not been done before.”
So given the West End’s current state of barely-restrained clamouring for theatre that stars anyone who’s been within spitting distance of a television screen, why not just storm straight down Shaftesbury Avenue and into box-office nirvana? There’s a strategy, it seems: “It IS my first play, so we thought we’d take it up to Edinburgh and see how it goes. It’s a relatively low-risk, protected way to do it as most of what goes on at the festival is…fairly shit.”
But what of the play itself? A cursory discussion of the main themes reveals that we’re dealing with a spectrum of emotions that don’t exactly inspire thoughts of belly-laughing your way through the show. “Well, it deals with issues surrounding loneliness, dysfunctional families and not having any friends.” Sounds more like a therapy session for born-again Estate Agents. “I was telling one of my friends about it,” Alan says, “And she said – a little too knowingly I hasten to add –how on earth can YOU relate to any of THAT?”
Sarcastic hints at typecasting aside, Davies appears to taking it all in his stride. “Well, it was all going very well up until we started the rehearsals, and I suddenly realised that the play is pretty much eighty pages of mainly me! It’s just me coming out with all these monologues…all delivered in a scintillating way that shows a very different side to me, of course.”
Davies has performed at the festival before, taking his almost universally-acclaimed stand-up there many times, the last, and most awkward time being last year. “I did twelve days because they were a bit stuck, and I told them that I hadn’t written any new material and it would be a load of old gags, and they said that was fine and that it was a look back at the last twenty years, or whatever.” Sounds like a pretty cosy way to get through the festival. “Yeah, but than I got an absolute battering off the press for doing old material! I’d had no pretence of doing a new show, and if I’d have done that this year, it would have been much the same, but then this play came up.”
Thank goodness for opportune tangents like this, eh, Alan? After all, life’s complicated enough. Ah yes, the Abbey National commercials. When the ad campaign started running, you’ll remember, there was many a column inch devoted to portraying Alan as the poster child for the sell-out comedian, trading in his principles for a swift mortgage repayment at the first whiff of whopping great piles of cash. There seemed to be so much chin music about him taking the corporate dollar – not that anyone who has seen Davies’ stand-up would have him down as a raving anarchist anyway. His observations are keen and intelligent, but he’s hardly Bill Hicks.
I put it to Alan that he did seem to get unfairly singled out and receive a disproportionate amount of criticism – after all, it’s not like he, for example, jumped into bed with a rondent-faced member of the theatre establishment and started attending the inauguration ceremonies of right-wing politicians. “Well, it’s just old fashioned jealousy,” he says calmly. “It’s different seeing it from my position because no-one ever said anything to me. Some of the things that journalists wrote they wouldn’t dream of saying to my face. It seems like most of the time, they’re all writing for each other.” Now I hardly think that’s very true, do you, Julie Burchill and Mark Lawson?
But you can understand his indignation – maybe we’ll see a level playing field when journalists start to get offered voiceovers. And frankly, who ISN’T doing bank commercials these days? It’s not as if the popular press are up in arms about the thirty gazillion clams that Samuel L Jackson no doubt happily pocketed to wander up and down a dirt track spouting nonsense for a couple of days. Hell, he was probably doing that ANYWAY. The film crew probably just turned up, shot him and then whacked a bank logo on at the end. “Exactly,” Davies agrees, “Jack Dee used to get all kinds of stick for those beer ads, but they’re all doing it now. Is everyone going to get the same kind of character assassination? Rik Mayall was doing games console ads in Japan for years – he’s even got a place in Devon called Nintendo Towers. No-one knew. Rowan Atkinson is the face of Fuji Film. Everywhere. Except here.”
Davies is getting to the point in his career where serious, grown-up possibilities are, er, a possibility. On first meeting he doesn’t come across as obsessively driven, but I’m convinced there must be some kind of latent ambition nestling in there somewhere. How about it Alan? Film? “It’s not very realistic to have ambitions in that direction because you’d end up just doing your head in,” he says with marked diffidence, “I was offered a British film, and it was rubbish. But to build up your profile, go to America and live there? It seems like everyone with five minutes of success on British TV is pissing off over there – they all do rubbish and then come back again all bitter and twisted. I just don’t think I’ve got the energy.” Alan Davies, then – the man without the plan.
“In terms of six degrees of separation, you can see the possibility of doing a huge feature,” he continues, “But at the end of the day, the best writers and actors in the UK work in telly. Films don’t get made here.” This is readily apparent as the news breaks that very day that Film Four are in trouble, and they’re the ones that make the GOOD British films. We talk about projects like High Fidelity that Davies seriously thought could have been an ‘in’. Alan had previously reprised the main role for a radio production. “Then you turn round and John Cusak’s doing it in bloody America! It’s set in Highbury! Where I live! It’s me!” He bemoans the fact that potentially great projects go begging for lack of money, and that if profits remain the driving force, we should just have set Trainspotting in Detroit and The Full Monty in Pittsburgh. It must all be a bit annoying, really. “You just can’t have these ambitions,” he laments pragmatically.
An empty-ish diary posits the question as to what he’ll be doing post-Edinburgh. There are no definite projects, outside fronting a documentary on John Lennon (“I think I’ve got a Beatle’s Greatest Hits somewhere at home…”) for the BBC and filming another three episodes of his breakthrough TV hit, Jonathan Creek. I tell Alan that I went to college with someone who was actually, and rather bizarrely, called Jonathan Creek. “Really? How unfortunate. What’s he doing now?” he asks. Probably living off the fame, I expect, opening supermarkets as ‘The Real Jonathan Creek’.
Anyway, filming the detective prestidigitator (kind of like Columbo meets Paul Daniels) will take him up to the end of the year. Is he thinking about a return to stand-up after that? I sense Alan is unsure: “I’m really not sure. It doesn’t really satisfy me any more just to make funny observations. Lately I’ve found myself talking about quite bleak stuff, so it may be a period when I just do a bit less gigging. Plus, when you’ve been doing commercials and loads of TV, it’s hard to do a set down the Comedy Store without there being an uproar.”
Davies feels that stand-up comedy has lost the socialising and personal aspects that it seemed to have when he started up. “You used to have a personal relationship with the promoter,” he says. “Now people are booking for six clubs at once and the person who booked you isn’t even there. I mean, whoever’s going to be brilliant on five year’s time is still in a comedy club somewhere. It’s just very different.”
Is he giving up on writing completely? “No, I’d love to be really creative again like I was when I was gigging. I just got a bit tired after doing the TV and the ads and getting recognised everywhere I ever went.” He’s not playing the ungrateful, martyr-like celebrity here; it apparently just came as a bit of a shock. “I hadn’t quite bargained for it,” he remembers. “I’m better now but I used to go out and just be on edge all the time. You think every person that goes past is going to say something. A bus driver drove past shouting at me and almost took a busload of people straight into the front of a pub just so he could take the piss.”
But Alan has seemingly taken being likeable to new heights. Surely you didn’t get much in the way of actual abuse, outside of the unsolicited obscenities you got from showbiz reporters for the tabloid press? “I’d be doing stand-up and there’d be hecklers shouting ‘Abbey National’ or whatever and then all these pissed girls would shout out ‘Leave him alone! He’s lovely!’ and all the other comics would be backstage pissing themselves.” He seems much more at ease these days. “Most people are fine,” he admits. “They just come up to you and go, ‘It’s you! It’s you!…What’s your name?!’”
In any case, it’s hard to see Alan Davies as the charmless posturing braggart that some vindictive hacks would have you believe, though equally, there’s the sense that he’s not quite the curly, smiley, fluffy old sheepdog of a person that he also seems to be routinely caricatured as. OK, one last chance to admit that you’re secretly planning systematic world domination. “I think,“ he says, “You just have to bumble along, hoping that nice things happen in your life.” Fine. We’ll admit defeat. We’ll just have to take his word for it. For now.