Alan Davies

I feel really funny when I'm up there, even though every now and then there's a pause and there's a turn off the comedy road for a moment and then we're back on.

And that's how I work it.

Do you think the audience appreciates that you've opened yourself up like this?

i'm sure they do yeah i'm sure they do perhaps not everyone um some people just want to purely escape and they can in the show the show's as funny as i possibly can be and there's there's a lot about elderly parenting and

There's a fair bit about things that don't work and I spend more time in the pharmacy than the gym.

That's the byline.

So there's a lot of very relatable day-to-day stuff as well as, you know, reflections of what it means to have lived a life with all this story in my head while I was doing comedy shows for years and not talking about it.

Once you've made the decision to share and not be ashamed, then you feel ridiculous that you didn't do it years ago.

Has it been good for you?

It's been good for my family life, I think.

I think what I didn't want was my father acting on my kids, you know, through me somehow.

And I wanted to protect them.

So turning around and facing things and addressing it and writing about it and talking about it and discussing it and therapy for years and doing all these things to address what went on, to kind of own it and have some control over it

how that affects me and my family and my children in particular, is very important.

And I could feel the possibility of things going awry if I didn't do that.

And it's certainly what I talk about in this new... The new book is there's a lot of anecdotes about Jonathan Creek and QI and being a comedian, and it's kind of masquerading as a showbiz memoir.

And within it, there's this...

understanding that if you don't deal with the demons of your past you're going to mess up your present and your future so you've kind of got to even though someone's done terrible things to you and it's not your fault you've got to be you know what you've got to do the heavy lifting and fixing it because no one else can

I mean, it's this kind of, you know, anybody will understand that.

the temptation of alcohol, which is that it's very numbing.