YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Davies

lines on the record: 39
first: 2026-01-16
most recent: 2026-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's really odd, and I know, I really know, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do it. was I know that if I play to audiences in theatres for maybe a thousand or even two thousand people, I know there are lots of people sitting holding those experiences. And so it's nice to be able for them to.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's there all the time. And I started a work on this stand up show that I'm touring in the autumn. And so I talk about it. And I say to the audience it's not the actual physical experience, your first sexual experience being with your father is not, it's uncomfortable, but lots of sex is uncomfortable, right? Often one or both of you is hoping it will be over soon. No, it creates an awkward laugh, right? But that's where we are. And find a way to talk about it. Because the actual experience is awkward and uncomfortable. But what became most difficult was I never knew when it was going to happen. So someone going past my bedroom door, even now someone being outside my bedroom door might come and create a kind of a tightening in my chest and the shortness of breath and this kind of PTSD reaction.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What came from it, and a couple of people who work training therapists or talking to students or studying psychiatry, these kind of people or in the health professions have said to me, I show your book to my students. I show it to them. And that means the world to me, you know.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's about clearing things, setting things down, not really cathartic, but it's about organizing and working on it. Katie and I've talked together about, we knew when we were getting married and starting alive together, we knew this thing had happened in my life, but we hadn't really thought through about. How it might impact us. As you'll read in this book, it had a very serious and negative effect right through into my 40s and 50s. I was still, I was going to fuck everything, you know. You're battling it morning, noon, and night, dark thoughts. You go to a place, constantly go to a place where everyone in this room will be happier if I wasn't here. That's the default. Position that you start the day with often. And it's awful what people do to kids. And so I just get upset, but I didn't.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it didn't. I felt Always thank people for telling me, you know, I would just say thank you. I don't want anyone to feel like, oh, I'm sorry to trouble you. Oh, I don't want to bother you, but I always say thank you for telling me it's very important that people are able to say. And I feel as though it wasn't the intention that I set out with. My intention was to write my story. And for that to be, and I felt the book was the best place for it where I could really control it and work on it and make it right and true and to set down also the book. A lot of it is about my mum and remembering my mum. And I literally wrote down everything that I could actually remember. And I wanted it to be for my kids as well. And I realized in the writing of that book and this book how much damage Can be done for their lives.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not the same as taking the plunge and saying what's on your mind. But I didn't really think, I do now, but I didn't really think of stand up at the beginning as saying what's on your mind. I would just say whatever made them laugh. And now I've realized that having got the skill to do that, now I can maybe say something that's worth saying.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was no opportunity to crowbar in anything pre-written. It was all off the cuff. No one knew what was going on. And you had to get the ball in the air and you had to collaborate and to create who knew what was going to come. And I like that. I preferred that. So it was a different thing. Also, it came along for me at a time where I'd stopped doing stand-up. And so those weeks doing QI every year with 600 people in the audience was my opportunity to be in front of an audience and to be silly and daft and playful and drive Stephen mad. And for a while I kind of kidded myself. Well, I've got this thing every year where I do this. Live thing. But actually, I realized, although it's fun and as you say, it's really nice to have all these other people around.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was really fun, and Jimmy Carr and Bill Bailey, fantastic comedians who fill theatres and do, but very happy to be playful and silly. And I think what happens on QI is a lot of the atmosphere that you get off stage. This venue is often used for stand-up, and there's a room back there with sofas where we sit. And the atmosphere in that sort of room is kind of what QI is at is like when it's at its best. I really like the idea from the beginning because”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Stand ups would tell you that they really would just like to have the microphone for themselves. And that's why QI is quite interesting because You couldn't get this line up now because we're not allowed to have it. There's one I remember one show where we had Jimmy Carr and me and Bill Bailey and Claudia Winkleman. And anyway, we got Stephen laughing about something. And if you can get Stephen laughing, that's really good fun because he's quite giggly and he can't get it back and he's really trying to get it back.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Used to it now, and it's not what I think about. I think of it as something that happened then. You know, we've got three kids, Katie and I, that's your focus all the time. There's so many things to think about with their schools and what's happening. Extracurricular obsessions, and so there's ballet and then there's guitar and then there's cricket and football at the same time. There's a lot to do, it's very, very different life from sitting on your own in your own flat, contemplating yourself, you know, videotaping your appearances on television. Obsessively, every single one of them and keeping them in boxes, which Katie would happily burn. So knife's a bit different when you've got someone other than yourself to think about.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And was exposed live on channel four, please do not swear, at that moment. And that's one of the things that I hadn't really thought of that until I started properly writing about it.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was invited to go on and do two minutes of stand up. But I had enough of an ego even then to say, no, I want to be interviewed, like all the other proper people. But what the hell are they going to interview me about, right? I've been doing stand-up for five minutes. So I do my two minutes, goes okay. It's live on channel four, I was crapping myself. I'm handshaking like this. Finish the two minutes, and then I need to go, good night, and run off, and instead of which Jonathan, who I revered, because we used to watch him when I was a student. Jonathan Ross is coming towards me. Live on telling it's going to start talking to me as me. And I immediately just became mumbling and diffident and whatever, just like comedy show, you know. Contrast between what I was like and what I was presenting was so marked.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've got, I don't know, Nicholas Ball or someone's there. He was in Hazel. He's going to talk to you about what it's like. One morning, I mean, literally overnight, people start to stare and my friends would say, I go to Arsenal with. Say it's really weird walking behind you because every time you go past someone they start whispering about you and pointing and you have got no idea what's going on behind you all the time. So I became, there's a story in the book about I went on Jonathan Rosseter, a five nights a week chat show in the early 90s.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't like it at all. There's a story in the book. I mean, don't get me wrong. There are pros and cons and I really love Doing stand up comedy, working on the radio, acting. These are all the things I wanted to do. And sometimes it's a real boost to the ego to be recognized. And it's really, really nice when people want to come to your shows and they say, oh, we love your program, you know, all of that's great. But there are some times where you just don't want it. And you can't turn it off. And no one... You a talk, you know, when you're about to say yes to a prime time Saturday night television series with 12 million viewers, you don't get sent into a room with someone from HR to say, are you sure you want to do this?”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was so frightened of it coming out. I was so frightened of the story. I was so frightened of what people would think. I don't know, it's hard to explain because it's not even really conscious of your fear. It's really inside you. It's from the seabed. It's from the base of you. It's kicking up the whole of everything and clouding all the waters. And I've spent all my professional life trying to make sure everyone's, I can't even buy a stamp in the post office without getting a laugh. I mean, I'm a nightmare to go for shopkeepers. I must think, oh God, here he comes. Just laugh at whatever he says. Everyone's an audience, you know, it's a real affliction.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was getting the paper delivered the next day. And I didn't sleep all night and I heard it. guide delivers a paper at the weekend he throws it from the road and it hits the front door so I heard it hit the front door and I went down at five in the morning and I opened it up and this picture of me nice photo that's good And the first question, it was framed as a Q&A and the first question was you were abused as a child by your father, why have you chosen to write about this now? You never ask that question of me and then they put an answer as if I'd answered that in which I would have said, I'm not answering that. It's in the book. So I felt quite betrayed by that. Was really upset about it. But of course, the reason I was really. Naughty of them”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I absolutely was terrified. I was really frightened. You'll very, very frightened if you're a victim of abuse. You'll just carry the fear with you. You don't tell anybody. It's really strange. The average amount of time is a website called one in six.org, which I recommend on this subject. The average amount of time for a male victim of childhood abuse to tell their story is 25 years, average. So some people get it out earlier, some people are carrying it for 40 or 50 years, some people take it to the grave. agreed to give an interview to a newspaper And they were going to run an interview and they were going to do parts of the book, extracts of the book. And I said, I don't want to talk about the abuse. I don't want to talk about the abuse And they said, fine, fine. So I did an interview, all fine, and then I...”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Books and privacy, and I began to write about my father and workshop it in this little room with six other students and Blake Morrison as one of our tutors and they would talk, and there we were talking about the writing and I thought this is really like a safe space. Anyway, I did not go towards the loss with that first book, and it kind of collapsed, it didn't sell. The documentary series was pretty good, actually. The guy made it was brilliant and the soundtrack he put together was great, but it wasn't really to do with me somehow. So when I did just ignore him, that was what I think of as a proper me, and this is part two.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it really stayed with me. And the loss for each person in the room means something else. Everybody has their idea of what the loss is. And I knew what the loss was for me. And if you're not going towards the loss, you're not doing it right. And she said she had a great mistrust of people who said, I love writing, it pours out at me. And she said, if it's easy, again, you're not doing it right. And I found her to be really inspirational, Claire Keegan, and that was one of the great things about that course was you meet other writers and then writers would recommend other writers to you and I found myself in this world of”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he kept asking me about my dad, and I wouldn't answer him. And I wasn't able to say it, you know. So the book was kind of all around the target and not on target. Then years later I went to Goldsmith's College and I did a master's in creative writing and we used to have authors come and talk to us. It was brilliant. I loved it. I love being a student at 50. I really like going back to college. I mean Frank Skinner said to me once, lessons are good. That was as a motto. And I so agreed with him. And we had Claire Keegan come to the course. And she's a fantastic writer, Claire Keegan, if you're not familiar with her. She's brilliant, a short stories are amazing. She had an hour with us. Sometimes she'd do a weekend retreat if she had one hour. And she said to us, Go towards the”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was about five books at once. Didn't get a lot of help from the editor because they wanted to stick my face on the front and it's a celebrity hardback, right? And then that's fine. It doesn't really matter what the content is. Didn't get any traction. One journalist wrote about it and they said probably ghostwritten, which really, really upset me because I typed it like this for months, you know. And then we made three-part documentary for Channel 4 based on the book. We interviewed a lot of the people who are in the book, people like Billy Bragg or Neil Kinnock or Lord Tebit. We interviewed loads of interesting people. And my dad was interviewed. And I know that the director of the documentary... Definitely could tell that something was up”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel very strange about it. Of it's My first book was called My Favorite People, and I had this idea that when you're a teenager or in your 20s, you're very influenced by everything that's around you. If you see a film, you think that's the best film I've ever seen, this is the best record I've ever heard, that's the funniest comedian I've ever seen. And if you say to people when they're in our age, say, what's your favourite book or favourite film, it may well be something they saw at that age. So I was very convinced about how we're... but we're changing all the time. So I wrote about heroes and I wrote, 44 chapters, loads of them about sport, should have taken all them out. That's a separate book, incredibly boring for people who are not interested in the...”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them are really famous, said to me, oh, that happened to me when I was a kid. So it's an incredible amount of... Secrecy around it. So, this is a book about Doing the thing that I wanted to do Trying to do it and realizing as I was going along that I was kind of swimming in a sort of a quick”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that took me a long time to realize that you just carry everything with you. Wherever you go and the present, the past and probably the future is with you wherever you sit and that you better have a reckoning. At some point you're going to have to turn around and face that. Otherwise, it's going to fuck up your marriage, your kids, your family life, your future. It will get you and you have to deal with it. And so my principal rage is about people who do things for kids. And I've tried to write a book, and this is a kind of second part of that book, which says, first of all, you can do the things you want to do despite that. And secondly, someone will listen to you. And if you say what's happened to you, someone will listen to you. Because lots of people wrote to me after my last book and said, I've told someone for the first time. Several people who I know well.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not written for them either. It's just that's what I was called. The other title could have called it Angry Boy because throughout the book I refer to, it follows on from my last memoir, just ignore him, which was about being abused by a father as a child and losing my mother. And it's quite a sad book. It's a very sad book. But it was meant to be. Then I started to do stand-up and I thought... That I still had the idea when I was in my 20s that the future was in front of you and the past was behind me.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And nowadays, I mean, honestly, the BBC had to actually say to the producers, particularly Mock the Week, you do have to book someone other than just all these blokes. They didn't want to. And now it's a very different world. They've made it a requirement to find space for people from all backgrounds, and there are quotas, but also there are loads of really funny women. So it's a very, very different environment now. It's all the better, really. And it's just this was the time. That's what we were. That's why I thought to myself as. So it's not a manifesto for white men, and it's not white men are great, you know. I mean, some of them are. Obviously, a lot of them lead the Reform Party.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of dominant form of comedy through the 90s. And so I was very aware quite early on that people weren't quite sure that what they wanted was comedy clubs full of white male stand-ups, but I was one and Eddie Izzard was one and I suppose Harry Hill was one and maybe Bill Bailey was one. They all felt very different to me. Lots of them were cold by extreme cocaine addiction in the 90s so that opened up a lot of space. And then, of course, now I talk about it in my act. I talk about how when I audition for Jonathan Creek, I was one of 38 white men to audition for Jonathan Creek. I was the 38th. When we did the QI pilot, there were five white men. And for most of the first eight series, there were white men and Joe.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of those ones. And what they meant was it used to be a wacky world of cabaret and X-Street performers and jugglers and double acts and singing groups. There was an app called Randolph the Remarkable. Wonderful comedian. He would get on stage in a pair of pantaloons. He was bare-chested. He had an enormous belly and his finale was he would fall forwards onto a washing up bowl and the washing up bowl would stick to his stomach and that was his act. Randolph the remarkable that was the kind of act that was there at the time and all kinds of other people Ainsley Harriet was doing the Calypso twins. There were lots of different sorts of acts and then gradually one by one they fell away and most were replaced by yet another white male stand up and it became the”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were far, far more men, but you're absolutely right. Joe and Caroline were two of the best, most loved by me as well as the audi It was a working title, and it was what we were called. It was, I remember starting out in the circuit in the late 80s and being in a restaurant, and someone was bemoaning the fact that the circuit was filling up with white male stand-ups. And I remember thinking, oh shit, that's me.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't a thing then. But Ricky Grover was one of my favourite comedians, and one of his best jokes was he said, I missed dyslexia by a year. I was just thick. Because those kind of diagnoses didn't happen in his day or mine. And nowadays you can't move without comedian bumping into new and telling you that they've been diagnosed with ADHD or something. In fact, most of the shows at Edinburgh seem to be about. Either childhood abuse or their recent diagnosis”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of those people it was a very odd bunch of people came from all walks of life all kinds of backgrounds some people from fringe theatre backgrounds some people from cabaret some from street performing some people who had a job i remember working a lot with kevin day and he was a civil servant for years and didn't want to do it joe brand i worked with for years who was a psychiatric nurse for 19 years and wanted to do comedy my good friend keith dover was working at ford's in dagenham for years whilst going out in the evening and doing gigs and so people came from all those places and just wanted to get off their job and onto the stage and they didn't have an ambition to become rich and famous they just had an ambition to do stand up and the circuit could absorb anybody and it absorbed a lot of addictive personalities quite a lot of what is now known as neurodiversity”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'm used to. I'm comfortable with that. The circuit when I went onto it in the late 80s, there wasn't a route through to fame and fortune. There were some people who'd been on the circuit, had become well known, Ben Elton in particular, from hosting Friday Night Live, Harry Enfield, who was on that show. That bunch had broken through on channel four. That was still pretty back corner of the TV world. This wasn't Des O'Connor and Saturday night. This was still a weird bunch of weirdos. There was nobody now comedians who start out can see a route through the comedy circuit and the comedy store to Michael McIntyre or to Lee Mack or to any number of people who are selling astronomical amounts of tickets, huge television profiles, and yet connected up to the circuit that I came from. So no one was setting out to be what I was.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know what happens now for young comedians, but I imagine it's the same. There are various characteristics that are essential, monumental ego is really important. So the idea of being the one person in the room talking. That alone is weird and it's happening. This is what's happening now. It's just me. And I'm happy with that”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made no inquiries at all about their attitudes to the arms trade or petrochemicals or anything else. I just took the shilling. Anyway, I went on thinking I could wing it down the store. It was my stomping ground. I always went down a store. I loved it in the comedy store. And people started shouting things out about Jonathan Creek or Abbey National or Caroline Quentin. And I just couldn't manage it. I didn't do standard game for 10 years. And then I think that That was a bad idea. I realised later, and I realised in the writing of this book, that stand up was very important for me as an outlet, as a creative outlet. And without it, I think I became a bit unwell kind of mentally. And I think creativity and having an outlet of”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was awful that night, and that's why I put it in the book. I decided to put some of the most terrible things that have ever happened to me or I've ever done in the book rather than do one of these books where it's a trip through my TV career and here's another anecdote about so-and-so. And there is some of that, if they're a good ones, but I wanted it to be much more unvarnished than that and some version of honest or truthful that includes all aspects of my life. And that night I went out at the store. This is 1999. I was really recognisable both from Jonathan Creek and also from doing Abbey National Commercials, which I had paranoia about and I'd sold out, you know, taken the shilling from the man and I was supposed to be on the left and suddenly I was very much the face of fucking bank.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As though the world's changing and attitudes are changing and I've never felt like some old dinosaur. Stand up still a meritocracy, stand up is still the person who gets the biggest laughs will get booked the next time around. It's you and the audience. And I think for most comedians, that's the number one appeal of it.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a possibility. I mean, it could happen. I don't think I've got too many skeletons in my cupboard, but you don't know what you might get cancelled for. But I've never really been a contentious comedian or sought to antagonize or trip people up or thought it was my role to... that person have always been quite the people pleaser. Think stand ups become more difficult for me because I've decided at this point in my life to talk about some of the things from my childhood and early life which I'd always shied away from as content for stand-up. I've always sort of stand up as quite skin deep. I've always been quite a people pleaser in that respect. So it's more difficult because of the subject matter I want to take on, but I haven't felt”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“then stand up kind of re-emerge really in 2021, 22. And then I thought, well, I'm 60 next year. If I don't go on tour soon, I might die. That is a good motivator because I used to think as a stand up in my 20s your diary would be full of gigs for about three or four months ahead. And then after that, your life was empty, and that seemed great in my 20s because none of us wanted to be in the rat race. We all were proud to not have a proper job and all those kind of attitudes. And now everything is about my stand-up to us called Think Ahead and everything's about thinking ahead because that's what you do as a parent and that's what you do when you get older and that's what you do when you've been ill as I have been. So I thought I'd better get on tour and that's what I'm doing.”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True. I haven't toured for 10 years. I am on tour this autumn. Available Some other website, but no, I did. I mean, I've kept my hand in with stand up. I had a period, there was a period between 2001, I think, and 2011 when I didn't do it at all. And partly that was to do with not having any material and thinking and becoming paranoid about being recognized and fame. I was having a damaged and troubled time. But what was really happening, of course, was really damaged and troubled time was suppressed and hidden from the world. So that was an issue. Then I got back into it and I loved it again. Then I stopped for a bit. We had a third child. He had quite an impact on things. I'd start to do a writing course and I started to write my last memoir Just ignore him. Then COVID”
2026-01-16 · Intelligence Squared · An Evening with Alan Davies (Part One) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT