STEPHEN DIXONreviews My Favourite People and Me 1978-1988By Alan Davies, Michael Joseph 373pp, £18.99
PETER KAY has a lot to answer for. The Sound of Laughter,a collection of funny stories about his north of England childhood, was a massive best-seller in 2006, causing publishers to start frenziedly waving cheque-books and contracts at any passing comedian who might have a pot of gold at the bottom of mum and dad's garden: Alan Carr, Dawn French, Russell Brand, Roy "Chubby" Brown, Paul O'Grady and, now, Alan Davies.
Alan who? Oh, you know him. He’s a stand-up turned actor (Jonathan Creek) and you might have seen him swapping badinage with Stephen Fry as a regular panellist on the whimsical BBC quiz show QI. Laconic, witty guy with floppy, curly hair and a slight lisp. With this plethora of comical childhood reminiscences around, changes obviously have to be rung to make each new entry stand out. Davies has chosen to present his memoir as a kind of expanded Nick Hornbyesque list of his favourite people, often footballers, other sportspeople or rock icons of the 1980s such as Paul Weller and Debbie Harry. So reading it is sometimes a bit like being buttonholed in a pub by a bloke celebrating his 43rd birthday too enthusiastically.
While the autobiographies of O'Grady and French also proved to be huge, it's probably unlikely that My Favourite People and Mewill repeat their success. Davies comes over as a most engaging character, warm, kind, highly intelligent and principled, but the descriptions of his childhood and adolescence simply aren't very riveting, and are unlikely to find enormous resonance here except among his fans.
Born into the middle classes in Essex, he attended a minor public school and the cosiness of his stable existence was shattered by the death of his mother when he was a child. This tragedy engendered in him magpie tendencies – terrified of loss, he never threw anything away – and also a profound identification with the dispossessed and victims of injustice: as a drama student he was a keen supporter of CND, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Anti-Nazi League and the Labour Party. And, of course, the Labour Party in Britain in the 1980s was well-worth supporting, with grand figures such as Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock, Billy Bragg and Arthur Scargill involved. They are all among Davies’s favourite people, along with Dennis Potter, John Peel, Brecht, Chekhov, Woody Allen, Rik Mayall and Liam Brady.
An undercurrent of withering anger and acute disillusion runs through some passages: “Elected unnoticed to Parliament for the first time in 1983 were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, beginning their 14 years in opposition.
Like the rest of the Labour Party, they turned their backs on the 1983 manifesto, which had included plans to nationalise the banks, lest the forces of unrestrained capitalism were allowed to follow an inevitable path to excess greed and profit, thereby putting the entire world economy at risk.”
There is still something of the eternal student about Alan Davies as he slouches in his chair on the QI set, making flippant remarks and pretending to sulk when Fry awards him low marks. And long may he remain so, for when you switch on the TV and see that sleepy face and tousled hair you know you’ll soon be laughing.
While his book will never top the Irish best-sellers list, Alan Davies is a likeable companion for a few hours. And if you have a special friend who happens to be an Englishman in his early 40s with old-fashioned lefty tendencies, then that’s your Christmas present sorted.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist.
