Alan Davies: Master Blaster

Comedian Alan Davies. Photo / Supplied

It’s an interview of two halves as Chris Schulz meets Alan Davies, the veteran British comic coming here for his biggest New Zealand tour yet

The pleasantries lasted for at least 10 minutes. We exchanged greetings, discussed his upcoming New Zealand tour, and even swapped stories about raising - and being terrorised by - small children.

"Mainly it's me resisting the urge to maim them or throw them out the window," says Alan Davies, the father-of-two laughing down the phone from his London home office.

"They're so tiny and precious and fragile but I just want to knock them out. It's a very strange dichotomy."

I'd been warned about Davis' ability to turn on journalists during interviews, but so far, so good. At this point, I'd describe the 49-year-old British comic - due here for an 11-date, 10-city tour in July that spans the length of the country - as pleasant company.

He's certainly known for being an engaging and entertaining live stand-up presence, delivering a brand of deceptively simple and witty observational humour across a 25-year comedy career on radio, several long-running TV shows and the occasional movie.

Despite taking a 10-year break from it during the noughties, stand-up comedy is his first love, and Davies' return to it in 2011 proved rather popular. His 2013 tour here played to packed houses even with his show bearing the rather ominous title, Life is Pain.

"I was anxious and concerned when I got back into it," he admits. "I thought, 'How is it going to go? Is anyone going to come? Will people laugh? Has the comedy scene changed? Are people going to be too shocked? How are they going to cope?' I needn't have worried. It was all fine."

This time, the star of long-running British TV shows QI and Jonathan Creek will be bringing his new and rather more optimistically titled show Little Victories here. He promises it will be "better than my last".

"It's all very tongue-in-cheek," Davies says. "I wanted to call this show Sex is Painbut my promoter said we might attract the wrong sort of audience. Little Victories refers to anything really, like getting one over my 5-year-old or persuading my father to eat blackcurrant jam, which he didn't want to do."

It will also be "more personal, more me".

"It's all about me and my life, and I think it's richer and funnier for that. If you're going to be in a theatre for two hours with an audience, they want to know about you and there's got to be a reason for them to be there."

Of course, there's another side to Davies - one that anyone who reads the occasional overseas tabloid will know about. He's a regular feature in them, with scandalous headlines like, "Alan Davies and the man left stuck in a lift," and, "Actor Alan Davies 'grabbed climbing instructor's throat at leisure centre in front of his children' during scuffle on the stairs".

To ask Davies about these is risking copping an earful. But, just as comedians have to tell jokes on stage, journalists have to ask questions. And that's when our conversation takes a turn for the worse: "I've been doing this for 25 years [and] there's an endless list of bullshit articles [about me]," he says, sounding exasperated. "I regret living in a country that has a sadistic level of tabloid press. Lies and distortion is fed to the public. It's shocking - they'll write about anything. Anything can end up in the paper - you can't believe it."

Davies says those headlines - from the end of last year - didn't happen that way. In fact, he went to get help for the man stuck in the lift, "but the paper ran it anyway". And he says the man who caused his daughter to "cry hysterically" at the pool was the result of an altercation on a stairwell.

"He was hostile, the children were frightened. It was very obviously because he recognised me from the television, and that's how my life is. It's just the way it is here.

"Can you imagine how I feel now? I'm on the phone to a journalist in New Zealand, going away from my family for two weeks to earn money to pay for the house and so the kids can go to school, and I've got to talk about what this guy did. It's online forever, it's absolutely untrue, one of the worst people I've ever met in my life, and there's nothing I can do about it."

It sounds like two weeks in New Zealand away from the British press is exactly what Davies needs. Make that observation though, and this is his fiery reply: "I'm not bringing my children, so they won't be insulted by any arseholes."

And that, it seems, is the point in the interview where Davies realised he's complaining about the press, to the press.

So there's no goodbye. There are certainly no closing pleasantries. Just a journalist sitting listening to a dead phone line at the end of a topsy-turvy 20 minutes with Mr Alan Davies.

Who: Feisty-but-witty British comedian Alan Davies
Where and when: Regent on Broadway, Palmerston North, July 21; Municipal Theatre, Napier, July 22; Founders Theatre, Hamilton, July 23; Auckland Town Hall, July 24; Bruce Mason Centre, Auckland, July 25; Regent Theatre, Dunedin, July 27; Memorial Centre, Queenstown, July 28; Civic Theatre, Invercargill, July 29; Horncastle, Christchurch, July 31; Opera House, Wellington, August 1; TSB Theatre, New Plymouth, August 3.

- TimeOut