Children are GREAT (but bad for your marriage!)

Alan Davies tells how having a family’s totally transformed his life – for better and for worse...

Alan Davies is waiting for his kids to come home from school. ‘My wife’s gone to collect them and the whirlwind will come through the front door any minute,’ he jokes. Very often it’s Alan who does the school run, and he says he wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘I work unusual hours so I’m really like a mum because I’m at all the kids’ activities: music groups, playgroups, school run, all that – I’m quite often the only dad there.’

Alan became a household name in 1997 when he landed the role of Jonathan Creek, a magician’s assistant with a talent for solving unusual crimes. Subsequently he’s become the longest-serving panellist on quiz show QI, and he’s the first to admit his life has been transformed over the past ten years. Once synonymous with volatile relationships and eternal bachelorhood, the 50-year-old is now a happily married family man after meeting children’s author Katie Maskell 12 years ago backstage at QI, where she was visiting with a friend.

In fact, he now chooses jobs to maximise the amount of time he has at home in north London with their children Susie, seven, Bobby, five, and Francis, one, which makes the return of his comedy chat show As Yet Untitled – currently on its fifth series – all the sweeter. ‘I harbour no ambitions at all on the work front,’ admits Alan. ‘I like working, but you change your priorities when you become a parent. I’m not pushing for acting jobs like I once did because then you’re on location 60 hours a week. As Yet Untitled is really fun and the guests are hilarious, we only film for two hours and the studio is really near where I live.’

He and Katie celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary earlier this year and while he couldn’t be happier since becoming a dad, he’s honest about how having children has affected their relationship. ‘It’s really hard, especially when you have the third one,’ he admits. ‘It’s horrible because the thing you lose is your wife. You have to make sure you don’t wreck what you had at the start. We had a family holiday the week before Christmas so we could build things up again, because you can look round and the kids have grown up and you don’t even know each other any more.

‘You change and you have to allow for that and work at it. Every cliché you’ve ever heard about marriage and parenthood is true. Parenthood is the greatest joy but fatigue is your enemy so you really have to try to go to bed a bit earlier. Something has to give and unfortunately it’s the sauvignon blanc. When we watch TV at night, we don’t drink wine any more, you can’t be selfish – though we made up for it celebrating our anniversary.’

Alan is now at peace with how life’s panned out. Growing up in Chingford, Essex, he was deeply affected by the death of his mother from leukaemia when he was six. He received no counselling. ‘The attitude was, the least said the better,’ he recalls. ‘I was never encouraged to talk about her. My father was left to bring up three children while working full time in the City. ‘I loved primary school. After mum died my teacher really looked after me and when I was ten, before we went up to the final year of primary school, I remember the head teacher coming in and telling us, “You’re doing so well with Mrs Thorogood, she’s going to teach you next year too.” Everyone cheered but I was in the corner with tears in my eyes because my father had decided to take me out of a school where I was thriving and send me to his old all-boys public school a year early.

‘It was a disaster, a terrible decision. I ended up in all kinds of trouble as a teenager and dropped out of school after the lower sixth form. But because of that I went to college to do media studies and drama, and if I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have done comedy and I wouldn’t be where I am now.

‘If I hadn’t done Jonathan Creek, I Alan with his wife, author Katie Maskell

wouldn’t have been asked to do adverts for t he Abb ey National. They were directed by John Lloyd, who created QI, and he invited me to do the pilot. And if I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have met Katie backstage after a show. Everything connects back to the appalling decision my father made.’

Alan gained a reputation for extreme behaviour in the past. In 2007, the worse for wear after the funeral of Jonathan Creek producer Verity Lambert, he bit a tramp’s ear when he was approached in the street. His wife said in 2010, ‘Every few years he does something that he gets in trouble for. There’ll be another one, you know. That’s part of his personality.’

Is that still true? ‘Hopefully not,’ he laughs. ‘I don’t really go out any more so it’s not a problem. I do get recognised but people look up and think, “Oh, it’s that bloke” and then go back to what they were doing. I don’t get mobbed. But you never know when you’ll encounter someone who wants something that you’re unable to give. It’s not all roses being recognised.’

After the success of the Jonathan Creek Christmas special, will there be more? ‘I’m told that did really well, so there’s obviously an appetite for it. It depends on David Renwick, the writer; he’s 65 and I don’t know how he’s written the episodes he has, never mind any more. He hasn’t killed Creek off, though there was a moment when I was reading the Christmas special where I thought, “This is it, my Victor Meldrew moment!”’ he says, referring to the death of Renwick’s other famous character.

Meanwhile it’s onwards with As Yet Untitled, in which Alan holds an unscripted round- table discussion with four guests. Each episode begins untitled – hence the series name – but a title is chosen at the conclusion of the episode related to one of the guests’ anecdotes. Alan says one of the joys of it is that he gets to meet a lot of up- and- coming comedians. ‘There are loads of people on this series I hadn’t met, like Gemma Whelan and Tom Rosenthal, and we can now go back to series one and two and think, “Who can we invite back?” So we have Katherine Ryan, Jack Dee and others. We don’t just have comedians though, we have people like Melanie C who was happy to indulge us asking about the Spice Girls.

‘It’s a great job for me so I’ll keep it going for as long as possible.’

‘I ended up in all kinds of trouble and dropped out of school’

Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, Tuesdays, 10pm, Dave.