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ESSEX APPEAL

BY CHRIS WILSON

Two hours with Alan Davies. . . it was a prospect that turned my female friends green with envy. A quick ring round revealed a passion for the stand-up comedian and TV actor usually reserved for Leonardo DiCaprio. "He's totally gorgeous," said one girl. "I'd like to take him home and mother him," gushed another. A third woman had more explicitly physical plans for the 32-year-old idol.

It was with trepidation that I awaited Davies's arrival in a cavernous photographic studio in north London. Quite apart from his good looks, his skilful characterisation of a magician's maverick assistant-cum-detective in the BBC1 drama Jonathan Creek and his hit stand-up video, Urban Trauma, have made him one of the Britain's most admired men. And success and modesty rarely walk hand-in-hand.

When he appeared, he looked smaller that I'd imagined. His long face seemed narrower and his dark curly hair was thinner than it looks on the small screen.

The strength of his nasal Essex accent (he's from Loughton) also came as a bit of a surprise as did the almost-tangible feeling of benevolence emanating from him as we chatted at a coffee table.

Davies the comedian is a very different beast from Davies the TV sleuth.

He's chatty and urbane. And on stage he has a friendly rapport with his audience who lap up his observational musings about cats treating their prey as art exhibits or the Queen Mother's myriad hip replacements.

His persona is boy-next-door - with a naughty twist. There's scatological material about bodily functions and saucy routines like his re-enactment of Monica Lewinsky pleasuring President Clinton without using her hands.

Davies laughs heartily when I tell him about a party of elderly Jonathan Creek fans at one of his West End shows who sat through the raunchier routines in stunned silence. At the end of a particularly salacious section, one of the old fruits was overheard telling her husband: "He's not like this on the telly, is he?"

Coincidentally it's a line that Davies himself has used in his act to wring a final laugh from the Lewinsky routine - in the same way that blue comics often send up the nature of their material with the verbal footnote: "I am available for children's parties."

Davies is aware that the success of Jonathan Creek has presented him with a special challenge as a stand-up comedian. Most star funnymen on tour have the advantage of playing to their own comedy constituency; the fans who know and love their material.

That's only partially the case with Davies. He also has to entertain a following of fifty-somethings who are rather hoping the inscrutable Jonathan Creek will appear in his duffel coat and crack a few murder mysteries before their incredulous eyes. "There are people at my shows who have never seen a stand-up comic before," he admits, "and I have to deal with that and win them over."

But he has no desire to tone down his act in response to his mainstream television success. "Stand-up is my little place where I can go and not have to do all that," he says. "Anyway, most people don't want me to be Jonathan Creek on stage. Comedy's a separate thing for me. I still do all the scatological stuff because it's funny."

Davies is himself as a stand-up: an amiable and highly-sentient man with a child-like take on life - but an admirable eagerness to keep humiliation out of his humour.

Performing live recently at London's Comedy Store, he was in his element headlining the famous club's "Essex Night". A packed house of shiny-suited or track-suited geezers with girls collectively sporting miles of cleavage and acres of peroxide blonde hair had made the Capri-powered pilgrimage to the West End to pay homage to their local heroes.

All the performers hailed from Essex and there was a good variety of comedic types and personas: the Cheeky Chappie (John Mann); the Fat Gagmeister (Ricky Grover); the Bitter Council Estate Bloke (Keith Dover); the Talented Mimic (Terry Alderton); and the Posh Slag (Mandy Knight). They were all funny - but none displayed the star quality of Davies.

His act was immaculately tailored to the Essex audience. Davies doesn't take success for granted. Throughout, he made no reference to Jonathan Creek and kept his mind on the people he was addressing, from his initial reference to the paucity of consonants in Essex speak, and a funny opening story about having been prosecuted for speeding in Essex. "The police said I was doing between 106 and 108 miles per hour - '107 then,' I said."

He deftly acknowledged he no longer lives in Essex but made north London sound like Romford: "Green Lanes - it's a misnomer. It's only green on Saturday night when people are throwing the salad off their kebabs!"

One of Davies's great strengths as a comedian is his apparent ordinariness, coupled with an extraordinary ability to tell funny stories on stage as naturally as he might to his mates in a pub.

And he doesn't preach. Even when he raises the issue he feels most passionate about, animal rights (he makes large donations to animal causes and has been vegetarian for most of his adult life), he warns his audience not to blindly trust his statistics ("I read them in an anti-farming book"). And soon he returns to safer territory: Christmas shoppers, working life and oral sex.

The key to Davies's success as a stand-up is that while most comics tell semi-fictional gags about their own lives, he finds very funny things to say about the lives of his audience. After he said goodnight to his Essex crowd to rapturous applause, he'd flattered those people subconsciously - and they walked out grinning like Lewinsky.

Off stage, comedians are notoriously dour. Davies however is full of joie de vivre and even chuckle at your jokes. He likes to laugh. But some of the cards life has dealt him have been far from funny.

His mother died of leukaemia when he was six. It was a tragedy followed - in quick succession - by the deaths of three of his grandparents and the emigration of the fourth. His youth, he admits, was a ghastly mess. His father sent him to a private school - Bancroft's in Woodford Green, Essex - and he hated every second of it. "It really screwed me," he says. "I loathed the place. Arson was an option. Bancroft's was really academic, sending kids to Oxbridge. But it wasn't working for me. It might have helped if my teachers had asked me: 'Are you all right?' But they just said: "Detention!"

He particularly disliked the school's "appalling arrogance that we were in the top two per cent of the population". But his suffering was somewhat ameliorated by a precocious interest in girls - a fondness they reciprocated. He started dating at the age of 14 but quips that he can't reveal details of losing his virginity because he "might be prosecuted!"

"My first girlfriend was called Susan and was nice. But I don't know if you would call what we did together 'sex'," he says. He was somewhat delinquent at school, twagging off classes to go shoplifting. And he found the sensitivity and banter to attract girlfriends. "I've done my fair share of shagging," he says casually.

He left school to take a Media Studies course at Loughton College of Further Education followed by drama at Kent University, and became more contented and less promiscuous. "You're supposed to drop your pants at every opportunity at university," he reflects, "but the funny thing was I had more sex before I got there. A couple of girls at Kent took up almost my entire time."

Upon graduation, joblessness or an Enterprise Allowance Scheme - in children's entertainment - beckoned. He plumped for the latter as a way of funding his plan to launch himself on to London's burgeoning stand-up comedy scene.

Davies was 22 going on 12 and looked like a work experience comic, which in a sense he was. But he hit on a quirky routine that was popular with audiences. "It started because I had a bee in my bonnet an animal rights group that had bombed the wrong building at Bristol University," he says. "Then I read about the US Navy using dolphins for bombing missions because they were very intelligent. So I wrote a routine asking why animal rights people didn't train dolphins to do their bombing and I did a whole thing about being a dolphin, which got a laugh. It was about seven or eight minutes long and got me booked at every club I went to."

Well, almost every one: the promoter of London's Chuckle Club suggested he take up ventriloquism - a piece of career advice he'd also given to the young Jack Dee.
By the early 1990s, Davies was a rising star on the comedy circuit, picking up rave reviews at Edinburgh and once again having a sexual riot. "In one Edinburgh Festival you can make up for an entire youth. A few years ago, there was a different woman every night scenario," he confesses, adding that he's had "getting on for a coachload" of sexual partners.

He explains: "I get on great with women, although I had a couple of ropey relationships two years ago. I got dumped, which can tarnish your view of an entire sex. Wounded pride, sleepless nights and a couple of drinks and you find yourself saying that you can't be bothered with women. But it doesn't take long before you're introduced to someone new, have a couple of laughs, think 'she's gorgeous' and. . ."

For the past 18 months, he's been dating American singer Catherine Porter. They live together and have talked about starting a family. It could be love, says Davies. He's "settled down" and no longer covets other women.

Anyway work weighs heavily on his mind. He gave up playing the clubs regularly four years ago to concentrate on radio comedy. His three Radio 1 series, Alan's Big One FM , gave him a strong foothold, and after TV appearances on shows ranging from Des O'Connor Tonight to The National Lottery Live to One Foot in the Grave , he was cast as the lead actor in Jonathan Creek , which is penned by One Foot's writer David Renwick.

The series was an instant success and rightly so. The scripts and storylines are perfection and Davies performance testifies to genuine acting ability; he convincingly portrays an introverted and unlibidinous character so very different from himself.
Why won't Creek make love to his fellow-conspirator Maddy? Is he wrestling with his sexuality? Davies hoots at the idea. "I don't know,' he says, "She's certainly gagging for it - but I don't think he's gay!"

But he was unamused when Sunday newspaper journalists suggested he was having a real-life fling with Caroline Quentin - who plays Maddy - at the time when her marriage to comedian Paul Merton was falling apart. "She was hurting - it was terrible," he recalls. "It was grim and doubly so because tabloid scumbags were hanging around and insinuating I was having an affair with Caroline and that was why she and Paul had broken up. I was asked: 'So what's this about you and Caroline then?' My instinct was to knock them out."

He blames jealous comedians and their "agents and managers" for spreading lies about him. "They will do anything they can to run me down," he says. "If there's ever been anything bad in any newspaper about me, you can inevitably track it back to an agent slagging me off. It shocks me because I'm just doing my job."

He's also critical of comics who take hard drugs. "I think it's a mug's game," he says. "In the comedy business, there's a fair amount of cocaine kicking around. There are one or two people I know who have got into it and ended up losing their mates. People offer me cocaine but I'm not interested in it. It's the most debilitating thing you can get involved with.

"But I don't want to say what I've done in the drugs department because the tabloids will make a double-page spread out of it."

On the other hand, he supports the legalisation of cannabis.

"I can't understand how cannabis ever got to be illegal. Everybody's tried cannabis, haven't they? I think it's fine. You can take it or leave. It's like saying 'Do you enjoy vodka?' Yeah, I like a vodka but I don't drink it every day."

Davies would love people's attitudes to him to be exactly the same as they were before he was famous.

Yet he knows that cannot be. He's gone up in the world and - with the help of cash from doing a TV advertisement for a building society, ironically - has paid off the mortgage on his three-bedroom house in Canonbury, an expensive quarter of Islington, north London.

He owns three sports cars, a powerful motorcycle, and still has money sloshing around. By contrast, there are plenty of experienced professional alternative comics who play for 30 pounds a night in pub function rooms and live permanently in debt.

"Friends change their behaviour and probably don't even know they're doing so," he says. "They talk about me sometimes in the third person - to my face. It's weird. And I feel for some of my mates who've known me for years. We go down to the pub and everyone stares at us." Other chums, he says, have lost touch with him this year when he was tied up filming Jonathan Creek.

He loves the show but found it hard coping with the filming schedule last year. "I couldn't sleep much and got chest pains," he says. "My doctor says they were stress-related and I should take a holiday. I said, 'No, I can't! I've just started a five-month shoot, six days a week, 12 hours a day." Big black bags appeared under his eyes but he survived and played his part in television's most satisfying show.

Our interview is drawing to a close. The photographer has arrived at the studio to take his portrait. Two hours have flitted by. Alan Davies has been great company, a remarkably modest, honest and amiable entertainer.

Finally I think of all the girls who would have loved to have spent those two hours with him. How does he feel about the adulation of millions of women? "The girl thing's fine," he says. "They're normally just shy and wave at me and say, 'Hello' but nothing else happens. The only girl I've had sex with him in the last 18 months is the one I made love to last night - Cath."

My female friends - who fell over themselves to phone me that evening for the verdict - thought that made him even more attractive. Bloke's bloke, babe-magnet and a great career - Alan Davies has it all. And he deserves it.

© 2000 Chris Wilson