The Irish comedian who even got the IRA laughing
Ahead of a Dave Allen biopic, fans – including a former Irish activist – tell Chris Harvey why they loved his jokes
The great Irish comedian Dave Allen was coming to the end of his Seventies heyday by the time I was old enough to get his jokes. To be fair I hadn’t had a lot of practice; he was on TV after 10 o’clock, and though my dad (Irish, Catholic) loved him; my mum (English, C of E) thought he was lewd, crude and offensive, which meant a dearth of stay-up-late passes. The odd glimpse of Allen wearing a three-piece suit, sipping from a whiskey glass, telling stories, merely reinforced my sense that this was for adults only. I heard my dad laughing, which made it worse.
There had been no one like Dave Allen in comedy before he came along in the mid-sixties after leaving Ireland at the age of 19. In his heyday he was the most controversial comedian on TV. His laid back, iconoclastic, anti-establishment comedy took such deliberate aim at the Catholic church that he was banned by the Irish state broadcaster RTE. Mary Whitehouse objected to one particularly explicit joke about sex. He even upset the Australians, finding himself banned on TV there after telling a producer to go away and masturbate.
This Monday the BBC airs a new biopic, Dave Allen at Peace, starring Aidan Gillen, who reprises some of Allen’s more notorious routines. Many of these were first shown on Dave Allen at Large on the BBC in the Seventies and included one in which Allen, dressed as the Pope and flanked by nuns, performed a striptease on the steps of St Peter’s Church. In another he dressed up as a bishop with a crozier that goes from flaccid to erect in the presence of a young nun. Unsurprisingly they prompted a flurry of complaints from viewers. The Lord Provost of Glasgow even accused the BBC of giving Allen free rein to destroy the Catholic Church, but the director general defended him personally.
Yet Allen’s attack on Catholicism was never gratuitous, but rather, deadly serious. As a child he’d suffered beatings at the hands of nuns and priests under the guise of a Catholic education. “My Church accepts all denominations,” he joked, “fivers, tenners, twenties.”
“He never talked down, or even clowned,” says comedy writer and Allen fan David Quantick. “At the time when the Paddy stereotype was rife, Dave Allen was always dignified. His shows were a conversation between you and him.”
Nor was there anything sectarian about Allen’s humour: his famous sign-off “Goodnight and may your God go with you” said as much. However, a 2013 BBC documentary God’s Own Comedian claimed his comedy had struck a potentially lethal nerve with Ireland’s sectarian factions. “Both Dave Allen and the BBC personally received death threats from the IRA and Provisional IRA,” it claimed. It even showed a black-and-white clip of Allen discussing how, “If somebody says I’m going to blow you up, you don’t take too many chances over them.”
Were these threats really made? “I just refuse to believe it,” says former member of the Provisional IRA Danny Morrison. Morrison was director of publicity of Sinn Fein until 1990, and says there was an established protocol that meant journalists could “contact the IRA and say, this has been said, is it true? A spokesperson would come back maybe 24 hours later, and say, no, or yes, this is our position… Why would the IRA suddenly take offence at an Irish comedian?” He rejects the idea that Allen’s anti-religious stance would have angered Republicans, however badly it went down in rural Ireland. “The relationship between the Catholic Church and the IRA is quite a hostile one,” he says. In fact he suggests the IRA were extremely fond of Allen. Morrison was interned in Long Kesh in 1972 and remembers watching Allen there on the black and white TV. “It was The Dave Allen Show that we looked forward to most,” he says.
It wasn’t just what Allen said that made audiences sit up, but the inimitable way he said it. In the biopic, Gillen captures the dapper look, the studied movements, even the Dublin accent, but that oh-so-unhurried timing of his remains tantalisingly out of reach. “It’s very unusual,” says Quantick of Allen’s unique, observational delivery. “It’s almost like a Frank Sinatra nightclub-style comedy, letting the audience in on the joke, not going very far to make them welcome, being friendly, but not being too outgoing.”
Allen, who died in 2005, had honed his act as a Butlin’s redcoat in a succession of English seaside resorts in the late Fifties, gradually relaxing from a zany Jerry Lewis-style delivery to a persona that, says the biopic’s screenwriter Stephen Russell, “had a great deal of him in it”. He continued developing his easy, conversational style on Australian television, where he bagged his own chat show in the early Sixties. On his return to the UK, he began appearing as a regular guest on Irish crooner Val Doonican’s BBC One show, and his popularity led to ITV giving him his own series in 1967.
But his roots were not in light entertainment. He was born David Tynan O’mahony in Dublin in 1936. His father, Cullen O’mahony, was the managing editor of the Irish Times, a noted raconteur and drinking buddy of Flann O’brien, who wrote a satirical column for the newspaper. Young David, who adopted the stage name Allen because English people couldn’t pronounce his surname, was steeped in storytelling and poetic licence.
Some of his tallest tales were the ones he told to explain how he lost part of a finger on his left hand. He’d actually caught it in the cog of a water mill but over the years “… and that was how I lost my finger” became a regular punchline, with stories such as how he’d dangled it in his whiskey glass for so long that it had been eaten away by strong drink.
Allen was married twice, first to the actress Judith Stott, with whom he had two children and one adopted daughter. He was also a stepfather to Stott’s son from a previous relationship. Actress Maggie Smith was a close friend and talked in the 2013 documentary about spending time in Devon with the Allen family and her sons, all the children trailing around after the comedian as if he was the Pied Piper. He married his second wife, Karin Stark, in 2003. “He was quite private about aspects of his life,” says Russell, who in the drama focuses on the deaths of Allen’s father when he was 12 and his older brother, an alcoholic, after a fall from a fifth-storey window in 1986.
Allen had been a big influence on the alternative comedians of the Eighties, but had been off screen for most of that decade before returning with a number of shows in the Nineties, during which he continued gleefully to offend.
“He was always an outsider comedian,” says Quantick. “He never took that path of the dodgy club circuit, the dodgy jokes. He had mass appeal, but it is intelligent comedy that assumes you are not an idiot.” Is it possible to imagine a comedian like him existing today?
“Yes, but that person would probably be more extreme, provocative and furious. Allen’s comedy was full of the absurdity of organised religion, but it was never angry.”
Dave Allen at Peace on BBC Two this
Monday at 9pm