Just Ignore Him

 

Just Ignore Him by Alan Davies (2020 Little, Brown softcover 274pp)

 

Alan Davies first came to my attention in the late 1990s when he took on the title role in the comedy-mystery-drama series Jonathan Creek. Created by David Renwick who had found success with his earlier TV comedy One Foot in the Grave, the series concerned a stage magician’s technician who lived in a windmill and had a side-line in solving locked-room mysteries. I was a fan although over the years much of what made the programme special was diluted away until it became just another detective show. Davies was already an up and coming comedian when he started playing the role although I don’t think we’d really seen anything of him here. He dropped out of the limelight a few years back and nowadays can only be seen on the panel show QI where he seems to have the role of village idiot.

Marketed as yet another celeb memoir full of childhood japes and memories of glory days, this book actually takes a darker turn. I picked it up and by the time I was 30 pages in we had seen the present-day Davies struggle with what to do with his elderly father’s pornography collection before flashing back to his fond memories of his mother who died age 38 when Davies was 6. Then we have memories of his father making the young boy have ‘special cuddles’ in bed.

Although it does deal with some lighter material – school days and family outings etc, its clear that this is mainly a record of Davies coming to terms with his disturbing childhood and how much of his life has been affected by those events. His mother was dying from Leukaemia but the medical professionals actually kept that information from her and Davies’ father hid the information from his own family including the children. His mother was simply wiped from existence in their household and then the child abuse began. Although a star student at school and talented in many areas, the young Davies rebels against the world and his family, eventually becoming something of a drop-out before turning his life around when he discovers comedy.

The latter part of the book deals with the author’s efforts to take legal action against his father (now in his 80s) and all the complications that arise from that. Now with a family of his own, he muses over some of the big questions in life thinks back to times when he himself failed to take the high moral ground.

So, not what you might expect from a book of this type but very readable and thought-provoking all the same.