TV star Alan Davies has written a memoir about the abuse and pain of his childhood. But when it comes to an interview, he doesn't want to discuss it
Alan Davies, the English stand-up comedian, actor, quiz show panellist and author, has written a new book,– a memoir of his childhood in which some horrible things happen that reverberate through his whole life. It is sad and sometimes funny, fastidiously observed and beautifully written.
Q: Oh , oh ... I didn't know this so let me clarify this and repeat this back to you to make sure I fully understand. The larger point here is that Davies seems both aware and naive about what happens when you write a book and release it into the world. He knows that once this happens, his precious cargo can be picked over and his childhood and life now become public property. But the only way to have kept the genie in the bottle is not to have released it in a book in the first place.
Mainly we talked about subjects around the abuse, the fallout from it; the lifelong depth charges from those formative years of never feeling safe.
He is so evidently super-bright that I had assumed – before reading the book – that he was a smart grammar school boy who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge; his natural destination, as an acknowledged "brainbox" before he went off the rails as a teenager, becoming a compulsive thief and vandal. He graduated from Kent University, where he read drama, in 1988, also the year he did his first stand-up comedy show.
Anyway, that was obviously not a great moment [it happened in 2007, the year he married Katie, 41, a children's book writer; they now have three children – Susie, 10, Bobby, 9, and Francis, 4.] In 2009, the year of the pub fight, Davies said he had stopped drinking "because it's incompatible with two-year-olds bouncing on your head".
He says he has always enjoyed his work and he thought that being famous would be fun "although that turned out to be a very mixed bag, as you can imagine ... but it has nourished me, as it were, and kept me going".
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