Dave Allen: God's Own Comedian

This programme contains some strong language.

And now you're going to meet a very funny man. Welcome Dave Allen.

Your host for the evening, Mr Dave Allen.

The other fellow going across the road

and every time he puts his foot down...eeek...cars,

eeek.. cars and the fellow goes up and he says, "There's a zebra

"crossing up there," and he says, "Well, I hope he's having better luck than me."

Watson, if the poison from this dart is not

sucked from your posterior within the next 15 seconds, you shall die.

So what's going to happen?

You're going to die.

Before the show, probably outwardly, I am very

calm and very quiet, but inside it's like a train terminal at rush hour -

things all zinging and zinging

and my words and what I'm going to talk about.

I often wonder whether God has got a sense of humour.

I hope he has. I'm in trouble if he hasn't.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

When you hear the name Dave Allen, what do you think of first of all?

Finger, alcohol, smoking.

Very good-looking, very Irish-looking.

Sitting on a stool, telling stories.

Glass in his hand making people laugh. You know.

Priests, they want to get married. I feel that if a priest

meets another priest and they like one another...

For me, Dave Allen was constantly full of mischief and outrage.

You look at the controversy that he sparked.

I'm an atheist, thank God.

I think that's how important he is, as a comedian and a comic.

He had a genuinely serious side

and thought he could say something important.

My mum likes you.

I meet people now and if they find out I'm Dave Allen's son,

they kind of grab me and they go, "You don't understand.

"Your dad made such a massive impact on my parents' life, we loved him."

As you know, my name is Dave Allen.

I'd also like to tell you I come from a little country in the world

called Ireland, and, like most Irishmen, I live in England.

LAUGHTER

And in Ireland we have a very old saying in which we say,

"When you can see the mountains it's going to rain,

"and when you can't see the mountains, it's raining."

Davey's grandmother was a journalist, poet

and her sister, his great aunt was the poet Katharine Tynan.

I was born in the country.

We lived in a kind of big rambly house

about five or six miles outside Dublin.

I know he and his brothers liked to get up to mischief,

playing and getting into trouble and getting grubby.

I was five years of age when I started to smoke.

My brothers, they smoked so I smoked because I wanted to be like them.

My parents would spend all their time going, "Come on, come in,

"Come on, in, in," and like a pack of dogs, woof-woof, in we'd come,

and we'd all sit there and say, "What'll we do?"

"Well, let's go out again"

My father was known as the clown prince of Irish journalism.

He was a great character in Dublin journalism.

People say to me, "Oh, your dad was a wonderful man."

School was a huge influence for Davey.

He found the schools he went to very authoritarian.

Of course, there was, you know, huge emphasis on Catholicism.

It's extraordinary, I mean, when you're seven years of age

and you've got to go confess.

And you get into this little dark box and confess. I used to make them up.

Kids were evil, weren't they?

Had terrible impure thoughts and had to be moulded into

what the Church wanted them to be, or teachers thought they should be.

They hit me, they pulled my hair, they punched me, they demeaned me

and, I mean, now I kind of think about it and I'm quite angry

because none of them were qualified teachers. None of them.

Luckily enough, he was bright enough to question it,

and he continued to question it and he always questioned it.

I was educated by the Carmelite Nuns, the Gestapo in drag.

LAUGHTER

'Have you ever burnt yourself?'

Yeah, I burnt myself on the candle.

'What was it like?'

Very sore.

'Can you imagine that pain all over your body?

'That's what will happen to you if you do not love God.

'What do you think of that?'

I love him. I love him!

LAUGHTER

I think what was going on with Davey at school was completely

the opposite of what was going on in his home life.

It was very open hearted and open minded.

My father was quite a story teller.

One of our great joys on a cold night was to have a big fire

and for him to tell stories, and at the end of the story we were

sent off into this rattling house - frightened the shit out of you.

I have extraordinary dreams too about my father, where I find him.

And he is now younger than I,

because I'm past him now,

and I always ask him why he went away, why did he go away?

And he has some sort of reason that he had to go.

He couldn't tell anybody but he had to go.

Losing Cullie, I mean, couldn't have been more momentous.

The effect for the family was huge, and their life became very insecure

financially and in every other way.

When Davey was about 16, the family came to England.

I think as he grew up it was almost taken for granted that he'd follow

in his father's footsteps and be a journalist.

I came to England, hoping that within six months

I would be the top of the pile on Fleet Street and have my own by-line

and would be the great reporter.

But the gentlemen who sit at the editorials table

didn't quite agree with me so I went to Butlins.

# Butlins, Butlins

# Butlins by the sea

# There's a holiday that's full of fun for Mum and Dad and everyone

# At Butlins by the sea. #

I got a job as a Butlins Red Coat for the summer.

# See a show if you want to. #

The Red Coats used to put a show on themselves.

Kind of a review type thing.

# At Butlins by the sea. #

They stole bits here and sketches there and odd songs

and we wrote a little song and things like that.

And I was in it. I was in some of the sketches.

And one night I ran on stage to get into this sketch and I caught

my arm in the tab or the curtain pull, the rope on the side

which pulls the rope without knowing it and I ran straight on stage

and this thing came to an end and just threw me right up in the air.

I mean, I did a total flip and landed on my face

and the audience laughed for two minutes solid and everybody on stage

laughed for two minutes and everyone backstage laughed for two minutes.

And I didn't feel any pain because of the laughter,

but once the laughter was over I felt enormous pain,

and people were saying to me, "You've got to keep that in"

and week after week I would try and do it and it never worked.

Then they gave me a kind of five or six minutes spot on the Red Coat Show

and that was really where it developed.

I suppose there was a kind of dormant fool lying in me,

and then when the summer season came to an end I decided that

I would go to working men's clubs which they have in England

and try and earn a living at it

and I starved for about two years but I was learning.

My surname is Tynan O'Mahony and I'd arrive at places

and it would be Dave O'Malley or Maloney.

I, by then, had an agent, Richard Stone,

and I was sitting looking at his list of clients

and there was nobody with an A so I thought, well, if I had

a surname beginning with A I'd be top of the list.

So I changed my name to Allen, so I'm stuck with it now.

# Walking back to happiness

# Whoop-ah, oh, yeah-yeah

# Said goodbye to loneliness

# Whoop-ah, oh, yeah-yeah

# I never knew I'd miss you. #

He had a real affinity with the Beatles.

Coming from Liverpool,

they had an affinity with Irish culture and Irish wit anyway,

and so there was a natural connection.

That was an amazing experience

and it drew him into the pop culture of the 1960s.

I worked with Sophie Tucker in South Africa.

I meet this amazing woman. She was absolutely extraordinary...

# I'm the last of the red-hot mamas. #

..and she advised me to go to Australia.

Without me knowing, she wrote to the agent in Australia and said,

"I've seen a young comic and I think he's quite good and if you ever have

"a chance to offer some work give him a chance. I think he's worth it."

He's just completed a tour with Sophie Tucker

and he's a very funny man.

Welcome, Dave Allen!

APPLAUSE

Thank you very much. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Morning, chaps.

LAUGHTER

Some of us are going to lose limbs, some of us are going to lose life

but I am not afraid.

One of the soldiers stepped out and he said, "Why is that, sir?"

He said, "I'm not going."

Stop, stop, don't.

Don't stop.

'The company or A television company offered me

'a pilot show for a chat show.'

Ladies and gentlemen, how about a great big warm welcome, please, for Miss Rose Takali.

'And they wanted to do a kind of Tonight type show

'like a Jack Paar American-type chat show.

'They gave me a pilot and it took off.'

Is there any story behind the missing finger?

Oh, yes!

-There is a little.

-Shouldn't put your fingers where they oughtn't to be.

'It had an open end so it meant that

'if it was going well at 90 minutes, you didn't chop into it,

'you finished maybe 10 or 15 minutes longer

'but it was, it was great because it was live and you had to learn quickly.'

He was an iconoclast, and he was an individual,

and he had his own view of the world.

The Australians are iconoclastic,

they don't take rules from anybody very much

and so Dave, of course, of all things, they loved him.

Where were you born?

-In Ireland.

-Whereabouts in Ireland?

A little place called Dublin.

What colour pyjamas do you wear?

None.

Oh, I don't know!

'There was always games going on,

'the crew had a rubber python

'and suddenly this thing comes from nowhere.

'A four-letter word came out, everything,

'it's as close as I ever came to shitting myself.'

I went to Australia

and we played, we played all the theatres

that Dave had played

and I used to say rather garishly

he's a great friend of mine, you know.

Well, then they all went raving mad.

I didn't know what he was,

who he was or why there was... I was only six.

My first memory of him was

seeing both my mother who I adored...

..and David embracing

and seeing my mother happy for the first time in a couple of years.

For as long as he was there making my mother happy I was happy.

Looking back it was obvious

that they were a sort of mini Airfix golden couple.

He books into a hotel, comes down to see the desk clerk.

He said, "I'd like to change my room" and the fella said, "Why?"

He said, "I don't like it." He said, "Well what's wrong with it?"

He said, "It's on fire."

Thank you.

'The BBC offered me a series with Val Doonican as a resident comedian,

'which was exactly what I needed.'

And I remember as a kid watching him on the Val Doonican show.

He had about five minutes a week and he made an instant impact,

people talking about him because he wasn't like anything else.

If it wasn't for the fact that you wear different clothes

and you are obviously about ten years older I would have...

I would have sworn you were Dave Allen.

Now, you're not, you're not related to him in any way are you?

No. No not at all.

'I would say that would be the break in English television for me.'

# Tiptoe through the window

# By the window... #

Mr Henry Cooper.

All the way around!

And they pay you money for that?

They say that the only way to get out of a car under water

is to allow the pressure on the inside of the car

to be exactly the same as the outside, is that right?

That's absolutely true, yes.

'The car thing was actually quite an interesting piece of television,

'it was experimentation,

'it was live television,

'it was necessary to do things like that.

'So we got a big tank, we got a glass tank,

'we got underwater cameras

'but we couldn't get a cameraman so we had to strap them in the back

'and we dropped this car into the tank.

'And we had two air tanks just in case something happened

'so we could breathe.

'And the car is filling up with water and I tapped one of the tanks

'and one went "bong"

'and the other one went "bing"!

'They'd only put one full tank in

and I thought, "Jesus, if this goes wrong you're going to see the real underwater fight."'

OK, there's quite a bit of water coming in now.

OK, I think we'll start to see them get out in just a few moments.

'I got quite a lot of letters

'and I still keep in touch with somebody in Glasgow.

'They'd taken their son to Ayr one day and they'd parked on the harbour

'and they'd gone out to get an ice cream

'and they turned around, the car had gone into the harbour

'and there were people diving in left right and centre

'and suddenly the kid popped up and they said, you know,

' "How did you manage to do that?

'And he said, "I've seen Dave Allen do it." '

Well, ladies and gentlemen, that does complete the show,

I hope you have learned something tonight,

I don't mean that you're all going to go driving off and go into a river

but if you do ever, by chance, go into a river

allow the car to fill up with water

and stay there for a long time.

Goodnight and may God be with you.

There was Morecambe and Wise, there was The Two Ronnies.

And they were the big vehicles, I suppose, at the time.

The Morecambe and Wise shows, The Two Ronnies shows,

they were sort of quite traditional entertainment structured shows.

But Dave Allen at Large was a little bit different.

Because of the nature of his comedy

you had to construct a different shape of show.

There was a special thing, "Dave Allen's on tonight",

"Dave Allen, oh, I love Dave Allen", "Oh, Dave Allen's on tonight."

He just sat there.

Attractive, beautifully Irish,

and told the most outrageous jokes.

Two Irish fellas open a bar and nobody ever comes in.

Nobody comes in to drink

and one says, "I think we'll open a brothel."

He said, "Ah, that'll be no good, if you can't get them to drink beer

"how the hell are we going to get them to drink broth?"

You enjoyed seeing how much your parents enjoyed it

because as a kid you didn't understand a lot of it,

you wouldn't get the bits your parents were howling with laughter about.

You'd say, "What's funny about that?"

They said, "I'll tell you when you're older."

I'd sit there laughing, my English dad would sit there laughing

and my Irish mum was crossing herself furiously.

It would start with the gentle slow one at the start

but by the end it was like you could power small farms

with the energy created by my mum crossing herself.

I think Dave Allen at Large was a fairly simple format really,

it was about half Dave chatting and half sketches

and I think that was the basic idea

and the linking of the sketches was very sketchy.

Oh, for God's sake, don't do it!

ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS

I think when you are a kid you used to enjoy the stupidness

of his sketches and bits of comedy, the slapstickness.

Have you got a last request?

Si, I see I would like my brother to go,

he had nothing to do with the crime.

Oh, I believe you. He may go then.

He had this obsession with Mexican firing squads for some reason.

Fire!

One of Dave's classic jokes, I think,

was he was going to be shot at dawn.

You are entitled to one last request.

And of course we all know what it's going to be, he asks for the girl.

Caramba!

The rest of the soldiers

are smoking a cigarette, looking, eating.

Then you get dusk, you get nightfall

and suddenly then you get, you know, early in the morning sun rising

and they're all tired, they wake up,

and of course eventually the officer goes up and bangs on the bunker door.

Senora?

You're too late.

He's dead.

It was very simple joke and I wish I'd written it.

'A lot of gags, sketch gags can come from observation,

'I did a sketch gag of a street cleaner

sweeping up and I was watching

when I was sitting again in a traffic jam

and watching this man sweeping the streets

and he came to the edge of the kerb

and I really wanted him, in my own mind physically,

I wanted him to bend down and pick up the edge of the kerb

and sweep the dirt underneath.

Most of his notes were written on the back of disused envelopes,

dry cleaning bills, and receipts.

And you'd pick up a piece of paper and it would say

"hypnotised chickens"

or "nuns farting next to lilies"

and that would turn into

some material typed up on PV's manual typewriter.

Spies again?

He had an enormous

number of writers sending in material

and I was editing and so we were filming quickies all over the place.

5, 4, 3, take 1.

Try it again.

520, take 2.

Action!

Your Majesty!

The original team that started was

Ronnie Brody, Michael Sharvell-Martin,

Ian Burford and myself and we were the four.

327 take 2.

What game do these knights play, Merlin?

'Tis said he who... "He who?!" I'm sorry!

'Tis said that he who draws..

'Tis said that he who draws the stop...

I did nuns, I did sleeping beauty I was always old ladies,

and one of the very first sketches I did

he was standing there, natch, as a priest! The whole idea was

that the flames of Satan came

spewing out from the grave at a vast rate.

Well, it didn't work on the first take so some prop boy went off,

came back and went into the grave hole

and we all... OK, get ready, take two.

The prop boy threw a match

into the grave.

He'd filled it with petrol.

All I can say is I then saw a Mr Allen

with singed eyebrows, singed hair, luckily he kept his face.

The gags, they had to have a flavour of realism.

You know, from a designer's point of view that's what made it really interesting.

You couldn't just cod up a church, because it didn't work with Dave.

One day we built Stonehenge

and it was very nearly full sized.

I mean, it was absolutely enormous.

And it was all made of polystyrene.

The sketches were fun but actually, for me,

the monologues were the iconic moments.

And I walked into a pub the other day where a dog had done something.

And I stood on it and skidded right across the room, boom!

Nearly broke my head on the wall.

I get my booze and I'm sitting in the corner

and a fella comes in and he does exactly what I did,

he went phew, schoom! Straight into the wall.

And I ran over and picked him up and said, "I just did that, he nearly murdered me!"

When we first started he actually had the script in front of him

and you could see him looking down which wasn't very good.

And later on we had the script or the ideas for the script

on idiot cards.

We sat in the front row with these big boards in front of our knees.

The way Dave remembered paragraphs or pages or material was very often

by a single phrase and some of these single phrases were outrageous!

There is a really intriguing thing about Dave Allen

when he talks to the audience, he's brilliant,

he's very much a bar room raconteur in some ways.

And we were in a bar and we'd had a couple of drinks

and somebody started to talk about the unknown, the spirit world.

And he had a way of going sideways at jokes,

it was never sort of full on.

It was that I accepted a dare or a bet

that I would stay the night in the cottage beside the graveyard.

He sat down, he was relaxed,

he'd have his arm on this little table,

he'd pause and have a whiskey,

blow on his fag, and he'd just talk down the lens at you.

And I felt something on my chest beginning to move.

It crept slowly up my chest.

It came closer, nearer,

and I grabbed it,

and it was wet and cold and I bit it.

Aargh, screamed with pain!

And that is how I lost my finger.

And now for all the people who had nothing to complain about

in last week's show

get your pens out because it's complaint time.

I wish to protest most strongly about The Dave Allen Show,

last night's show was disgraceful.

The sight of Dave Allen getting cheap laughs to his mixture

of smut and profanity is to say the least nauseating.

I think they got it wrong, the Church is dangerous and the politicians,

he was just showing you how ridiculous they were.

How the BBC censors could allow such blasphemous rubbish

to be shown at Easter time or any other time is beyond my comprehension.

I think it's a very difficult thing, censorship,

because what you are doing is you are putting your code

on millions of viewers which is a very difficult thing to do

and with the BBC, they've been very good to me.

I mean, I do get away with a lot of things

that other comedians wouldn't even attempt,

but that is me.

And if I'm... If they put reins on me it's not me,

it would be a shadow of what I am.

Dave Allen was far more subversive

than just about any other comic on TV.

He did a sketch about apartheid.

Hey, you boy.

Yes, sir.

What are you doing in this church?

You know blacks are not allowed in this church?

Oh, yes, Father, but I am cleaning the floor.

Ah, cleaning the floor, eh?

Good, but don't let me catch you praying.

I remember turning to my dad and saying what's that about

and my dad explained apartheid to me on the back of a Dave Allen sketch.

He had a huge sort of personal integrity

about what he wanted to say.

I even had a telegram from Rome.

From the boss himself!

Hey, what's the matter, David baby?

I could understand why he was considered dangerous by the Catholic Church,

why he wasn't popular in Ireland because of it.

Ireland in the '60s and '70s was a very deeply conservative country,

in any rural Irish village, the priest is pretty much

the most important person in there.

The usual, Father.

God bless you.

The sketches, they were just silly,

but they undermine the authority of priests.

If somebody is saying I am going to blow you up,

you don't kind of take too many chances about it.

Was it because of your gags?

Yes, I think so, I suppose so.

What type of gag would they have objected to?

Most of them.

Dave said what he wanted to say,

he was an adult, he was a professional,

he worked out a way to say it,

but you didn't get very far saying to David, I don't think we should do a joke about the Pope.

The concept at that time of the Pope in anything less than

15 layers of linen stuff and a gold thing over the top,

that's how you saw the Pope,

and suddenly you could see his naked leg.

It was shocking, I mean it genuinely was shocking.

It upset people.

I mean teachers at school would tell us off for watching it

and my mum was horrified by it.

And she would sit there telling me and my dad

that we would go to hell for laughing.

How do you become Jewish quickly?

Some people think Davey was anti-religion

and actually he wasn't, he had huge respect for religions,

but what he didn't like was being told what to think,

he didn't like brain washing,

and he didn't like a sort of prescribed guilt.

Goodnight and may your God go with you.

With my family and my children,

I mean they know that I have something to do with show business

but they're not all that sure what I do,

except that I'm not a real daddy,

because real daddies go to work on trains.

You know, certainly when I was young I didn't really know who he was anyway but you just wouldn't.

You know we weren't allowed to watch that when we were little.

Too rude, Mummy said.

I think I really wanted to be like him.

I do remember being out with him sometimes

and people would say, you know, "Hi, Dave" and I'd be going,

"No, he's my daddy" you know, not kind of getting that, I don't want to share him, you know.

When he started out I was a bit young,

I was probably five or six when he started doing Dave Allen at Large

so I got friends of mine

who are kind of a bit older and they are like five years older than me

and they said to me, "Ed, you don't know, like, there would be no-one on the streets.

"Everyone would be watching your dad."

They said, "You don't get it."

We had a house in Devon, it was set in a valley

with a stream going through it and all of us adored it.

Lots of people would come and join us, cousins

and, like, friends of my big brothers from school,

it was a house full of people, people that were all, you know, quite close which was lovely.

It would always be like loads of children down there

and all the adults chip in and have a laugh like kids as well.

The children loved it, they just, they just loved him.

He was like, he'd be like the Pied Piper

and they'd all sort of trail after him.

Well, he found them fascinating and funny

and he kind of discussed things very seriously with them,

they had great respect for him.

Jane and Ed and Toby and I, you know,

we kind of all of us grew up together, we were all the same age.

My memories of Dave were usually very scruffy.

The person I remember had absolutely nothing to do with the persona of the man sitting in the chair

with the cigarette and the drink.

Completely different.

I mean, the cigarette and the drink were there

but where he got the suits from I certainly never saw them.

It gives me great pleasure tonight...

..to present to you ladies and gentlemen...

..the curse of the werewolf.

We used to turn the lights off and he used to just have a candle going

and he would spend half an hour telling a ghost story.

It was just another excuse for him to put the crappers up us

because it was usually something around a fire

and it was usually terrifying

and my brother, Toby, being absolutely kind of, you know...

"Ah, yes, and then, you know, they came and they ate the child"

and my poor brother going, "Oh, my God!"

Just this mass of sort of kids in like one bunk bed, frightened,

jumping at every kind of creek in the house.

All through the time, he was known as a comedian

performing on BBC, he made these documentary shows.

Without a doubt in my mind

the most enchanting place that I have ever been.

They came seeking the great American dream,

equality, tolerance, religious freedom, money.

-Hi, nice to meet you, my name is Dave Allen.

-Oh.

I think people are marvellous,

I would probably draw the line with politicians,

I don't consider them as people,

but in general, I mean, I am very fond of people.

Anyone usually fighting against each other,

I mean, right here in Williamsburg we can all live together.

Eccentricity is in the air we breathe,

it's part of the English tradition,

it's been that way for so long

we've created a special sanctuary for eccentrics.

Dave had spoken to Lew Grade, of fond memory,

about doing what he called a more serious programme.

It all began with a one-hour documentary

in search of the great English eccentric.

For ten years it was the highest rated documentary

on British television.

I've had a bit of a job finding you, I didn't realise you lived in a little house like this.

Yes, try to live here.

How long have you been living in here?

Well, I should imagine 25 years.

It's not a very big bed. I mean, how do you lie down there?

Oh, I can't really lay down,

I put on an extension for the feet as you see.

-Can I see then?

-Yes.

-And you put your feet in there, do you?

-Yes.

The first rule we made was that we weren't going to put

mad people on television.

Now that immediately created the world's most difficult defining line.

Bring your mice to Snowy, all bring your mice to Snowy one at a time.

What we learnt eccentricity was, was passion.

That's nice, isn't it?

And to live your life as you saw it

with complete commitment and complete attention to detail

but not giving a hell as to what other people thought.

Snowy, tell me, how do you live?

I live off my land, yes, I've got two pieces of allotment, you see.

I grow potatoes and also greens, most of them,

January King which are very nice and Brussels and carrots,

whichever the case, so I live off my land, you see.

That's all you eat.

That's all I eat, I eat like a rabbit, you see, vegetables, you see,

and I don't drink nothing no stronger than water.

He loved eccentricity, he was an eccentric himself, really,

and he loved slightly mad people and he loved stories.

If somebody could tell him a story or somebody could show him something crazy,

you know, if a man could suck a ha'penny up his nose Dave would be there watching him, that was Dave.

That's handed over to me now,

-is there any kind of words said or anything?

-No.

Dave never ever giggled.

I mean, he really just thought, you know, how can you... how happy all these people were.

He was capable of suspending judgement entirely.

In fact even that is not quite the right phrase

because he wasn't suspending it, it was as if he had no judgemental thing.

This block here is white, Hispanics, the Negro,

and everybody is together,

but you go up the next block and you've got just Jews.

You don't see nobody else up there, just Jewish people.

They own practically everything around here

and they got us as workers and they don't want to pay us nothing, you know.

In America we, there was an entirely different breed of people

that we found.

Half of them were showmen, which is a characteristic I am sure is built into a load of Americans,

The other half were demonstrating something.

We are out to show that Jewish rights are no less than those of other people.

And that the Jew is not the easy market certain people think it is.

We are tired of having to be the victims.

What you are actually teaching here is a kind of form of militancy.

Yes, yes.

But if you teach this here surely other groups,

say anti-Semitic groups, are going to teach it as well.

Unless this force stands up now and says that's it...

..then what happens in Germany will happen here.

I think the heartbeat of Dave Allen

was really curiosity, that he always asked the question why.

It was just going out and finding people

and spending time with them and talking to them

and showing them as they were.

In his reporting one of the things that stands out was the fact that

he approached it almost like he was by your side

rather than standing above you telling you things,

that he made you a fellow observer and that was something

that made his work so intimate and so engaging and so real.

He again really pioneered a way of doing documentaries that went on

to inspire the likes of Louis Theroux and many other people.

'At Speakers Corner in London

'anyone can stand up

'and say exactly what they like.'

A minister has to mind his Ps and Qs,

well, I am the world's greatest dictator.

Great Britain is the most beautiful country in the world.

There is only one thing wrong with it, the English.

There are days obviously that people, you don't want people,

but there are days that you adore the world,

you love people to a great extent.

I think people are people.

I am a people person. I'm people

and I would hope that I would treat people

as they in turn would treat me.

I know this sounds a bit farfetched

but my feeling was that Dave

was looking for the meaning of life.

You have a philosophy in life.

Well, I don't, I don't call it philosophy, you know, there is too much of a loss in that,

I like to be on the gaining side of things.

No matter how weird they were

there was something that he was learning from people in that way.

I recently became legitimate.

You've got filthy minds!

By that I mean I became a straight actor.

As far back as late November

I played a part of a straight actor in a straight play.

It was a very important part of his persona,

he was an artist and he saw what he did as one branch of being an artist

and so when he was offered the opportunity to play some

pretty substantial roles

he jumped at it and he was very good in them.

Who's the father?

-Fathers.

-You shut up.

'I remember going to see him

'in the Edna O'Brien play at Royal Court Theatre.'

I wouldn't mind a chaser.

'I knew that he had been offered'

the lead role in it.

To which he had refused

because he had never actually done much straight theatre

and he took a part, which was the part of a doctor, it was a wonderful performance.

Doctor, can I have a word with you in private?

Look all the private shite is over,

it's now in the public domain.

I suggest we set out in the morning,

yourself the boss, your mother and me, and find your Romeo.

There was a few punch-ups

outside the theatre when the show was on you know.

He enjoyed championing events and being involved in them

if they were going to challenge people's conceptions

and also challenge the authority and the establishment.

Is that your homemade blackberry wine?

It is.

Do you have any gin, any dry Satin Gin?

I think he appreciated the art of performance

and that made him, for me, someone special.

Dave always wanted to stretch himself as an actor

and he really admired playwrights like Alan Bennett

and so when One Fine Day came along as a project

he was very keen to do it.

He's threatening to take me to a topless steak house.

Cheer up.

I always got the impression he was quite choosy,

and, you know, it was, you know, good for us that he picked us up,

that he agreed to do it.

How is your good lady?

How is the carpentry? Has she put up any more shelves?

No, I think we're well catered for in the shelf department.

She's a remarkable woman.

She's in Colchester for a few days looking after her father.

Colchester, really? I once had a Chinese meal there.

It was comic so you wanted someone with a sense of humour

and you wanted someone who was thoughtful, you know,

where there was more going on inside behind his eyes, inside his brain.

So you are playing somebody who was thinking a lot.

Well, Dave never stopped thinking, you know,

if you are a stand-up comic I guess that's what you do.

It was untypical of Alan's writing, normally Alan wrote about these

northern comic characters

like Thora Herd and Patricia Routledge,

and this was a much more sort of impressionistic piece.

HE WHISTLE

He could hold the camera,

if you'd start a shot he could keep it interesting, that's what movie stars...

You start watching them and then you follow them

and there's no need to cut the camera because they're inherently interesting.

You just believed in him, he was in front of you,

you believed in him that was all you needed.

My name's Richard Dangerous

and this is Adrian Dangerous.

People often say to me, "Alexei,

"what is alternative new wave Marxist comedy?"

And I say, "Sod off, you nosey bastard!"

When alternative comedy came along

Dave had a sufficient field of his own which they didn't impinge upon.

He had the ethos of alternative comedy before we did

in that comedy could be not only funny but challenging.

Before alternative comedy he was a man who went out there and said,

"I don't give a fuck about what they are saying. This is the truth, this is what I want to say, I'll say it."

He did the Strand Theatre

and on the first night it was who's who of the young comedians.

They all turned up to see Dave.

I know comics who would say that man inspired me to get up on stage,

he was inspiring people like us to get up and to do it.

I did a load of photographs in the dressing room

cos at Fairfield Hall in Croydon, not many people see this, you know.

The intimacy of the dressing room before he goes on stage

and, you know, he's getting ready,

and got DJ on and looking in the mirror,

and he's very quiet, you know, not much talking,

and just before he goes on stage

he was standing in the doorway of his dressing room.

Took a couple of shots and he's standing there with a glass of champagne

just looking away from the camera.

Very, you know, just the moment before he has a sip and then walks on.

You're offering yourself up in a way.

You're not actually placing your head down on a plate,

but you're saying this is it, this is me,

we're going to be here for the next two and a half hours.

All of us, and we're either going to have a good time

or we're going to have a rotten time.

When Dave confronted a real live audience

you could see the change that came over him,

he sort of flowed out to the audience

and, you know, he was a master of a situation.

He commanded that hall, which was sometimes quite a big theatre, immediately.

And you can feel the audience, a sort of wave of love coming back.

There's a funny thing that goes on with that audience

and that audience wants Dave to like them.

I get tremendous pleasure from watching people

physically bend forward and laugh and people wiping their eyes.

I'm bubbling inside.

I mean, there's the other side, I'm a performer,

but inside I'm looking at something

and I say, isn't that marvellous, look at her.

She is, her mascara is running all over the place.

Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you, good evening, and welcome to the show.

As you can see this show has no music, no titles, no actors,

no costumes, no sketches, let's be honest,

it's cheap.

There is something about him, which was eternally young.

Even when he got into his 50s, 55, 60s,

he was a vital comedian.

And a great disappearing lavatory paper act, have you come across that?

No adult when you go to the lavatory,

you don't check to see that the paper is there, do you?

He became much more observational.

Maybe because he had said all he needed to say about the church,

you know, there is only so much hypocrisy you can expose.

The first time I saw him I was quite a bit older, you know, I was late teens.

My daughter Jane, I would take her to school in the morning,

not only would I take her to school in the morning

but I'd take all her friends to school in the morning as well.

He was talking about Jane,

about being at school

and talking all the time and being in the back of the car and...

HE MUTTERS

Verbal diarrhoea pouring in torrents...

And finding that hilarious

because I know that person and it's absolutely true.

I drop them off, goodbye, Belinda, bye Jean,

bye Alexander, bye Vanessa.

Jane would go in to the house,

I'd park the car, I'd go into the house and she's on the phone.

Who are you talking to? Belinda.

Belinda lives next door!

He got a lot of laughs out of me, a lot of laughs you know.

Edward's friends are always ringing.

I pick up the phone.

GRUNTS

He used to do an impression of me opening a fridge.

I remember I went to watch the show with a great friend of mine

who used to spend a lot of time around our house and he was pissing himself.

I was sitting there going, "It's not me."

He was like, "It's you, man, I promise you that's you."

GRUNTS

What?

GRUNTS

My son's name is Edward, maybe they call him Ed? I don't know?

Maybe...

GRUNTS

Maybe he is saying,

"Is Ed in?"

You can't kind of ignore that teenage behaviour.

I mean it's a great source of humour

and also lots of people in the audience got it as well.

Did you say, "Is Ed in?"

GRUNTS

No, you didn't say, "Is Ed in?" dickhead, you said...

GRUNTS

No, he's not.

You wake to the clock.

You go to work to the clock, you clock in to the clock.

You clock out to the clock. You come home to the clock.

You eat to the clock. You drink to the clock.

You go to bed to the clock.

You get up to the clock.

You go back to work to the clock.

You do that for 40 years of your life, you retire,

what do they fucking give you?

A clock!

DIALLING TONE

I would just like to basically say how utterly disgusted I was.

Dave Allen had to ruin a very good show...

Disgraceful, foul language,

Oh he used the fuck word, you're damn right he used the fuck word.

You take a very libertarian line on language.

Yeah, I think it's necessary, language is language.

I mean, language is just sounds,

it's only what somebody says that's not a good sound

or that's a bad sound or that's a rude sound, it's nothing,

it's only emphasis, it's only erm,

it's gut, I think.

We were both rather surprised at the level of the controversy

that happened after that show went out.

Moir who is head of BBC's light entertainment group

has, erm, sent us a statement and he says that,

"Clearly we are sorry if we have given unnecessary offence".

Unfortunately, although the BBC knew it was in the programme,

when the questions were asked they didn't really feel able to support him,

he felt disappointed by that,

and, erm, perhaps a bit abandoned,

and it took him a long time

to feel that he wanted to go back on television after that incident.

We were looking, you know noisy shows, big signings.

And Dave hadn't worked for a time

for the BBC, he hadn't worked for anybody. He'd stopped doing telly,

and we had endless meetings at his house

and I'm sure there was a Chinese meal involved somewhere because there always was,

and we eventually persuaded him to come and do these six shows.

We got a very good team of writers, people like Kevin Day wrote for him,

he enjoyed that interaction with young up and coming writers.

I think the big difference was the ITV show he was standing up and he was angry,

he had more energy than he had in the '70s and '60s shows, far more energy.

Grannies.

Do you ever get behind a granny in a queue?

He was looking for something to get his teeth into,

to argue with almost, as part of that creative process,

it was really fascinating, I loved it.

And I'm sending them the birthday presents because...

and I'm standing behind her thinking, you old geriatric!

For Christ sake, die and let me buy my stamps!

My abiding memory very early on in the process of working with Dave

is him telling me that he was working on this routine

about teaching children to tell the time,

and I distinctly remember, "Well, that's not going to change the world, Granddad, is it?"

Teach you to read the time.

Why? Because it's important that you know the time.

He does this routine and it was about 15 minutes live

and it got edited down on the show, and he does the entire routine

as an imaginary conversation with a small child.

I mean who else could do a routine

about the second hand and the minute hand on a watch?

There's the hour hand, that's the first hand. The hour hand.

The second hand is the minute hand,

and the third hand is the second hand.

For him to point this out and bring the house down

on the extraordinary contradiction just between how they're named.

So it moves away from the fat hand,

leaving the fat hand at the 1 and the 2

and then it comes over to the 1 here by itself, see the 1?

To the right of the 1 and the 2?

Now, that one is 5.

Because it is, it's 5, 2 is 10,

3 is 15, 4 is 20, 5 is 25, 6 is a half.

Now I know what I can do for Dave Allen,

I can make him the best darn cup of tea he's ever had,

because there's not much I can bring to him in terms of writing

and that, that telling the time routine just summed him up.

It is now what time?

It is not five o'clock, it's one o'clock.

For me the man is a comic genius he's a stand-up genius,

that's what he does.

Shut up!

He really enjoyed working

and put himself absolutely into it with great heart,

but he loved being at home and domestic life and family life too.

Well, Davey and I got together in 1986,

some might have said it was an unexpected coupling,

he was much older than me, although the age gap,

never mattered, certainly not to me.

He was extraordinary and extremely easy to love.

Davey was a very private person and his work was his work

and that was very separate from family life and our life together.

We never courted publicity,

and it was important for him to protect us from that.

In his latter years,

he didn't feel the need to constantly be chasing work,

he used to get offered a lot of work.

I mean, I think there wasn't a film made in Ireland

without him being offered a part in it.

You know, he got offered a lot of television, most of which he turned down.

For the people who will be watching this show

when it is a repeat, good evening, welcome to the show, it is a repeat.

He hated repeats,

I think there was a clause in his contract that they could show one repeat,

one series repeat, OK, and that was it.

Everything is repeated now apart from Dave Allen stuff,

I've got a videotape of Dave, right, I've got a videotape of him.

It's nuts, he's my comedic idol and I've got a bloody videotape.

He was never somebody that seemed, you know,

he had regrets,

or, well, if only I was, you know.

He was really happy, he worked hard, he lived full,

he had a family that, you know, adored him,

and who he loved and, you know, he had passion.

Life was very important to Davey, he had a huge appetite for life,

and he loved his work

but he didn't, he didn't define himself by what he did, you know.

He did his work but he did lots of other things as well.

He loved his painting and his drawing

and being at home and gardening and cooking.

He was disarmingly modest and quiet about his many talents

and I always think he was ordinary and extraordinary.

He was normal and grounded, he was always gracious with people

when they stopped him or recognised him,

and yet he had these many, many abilities, but he held them quietly.

When I think of Davey, I mean, I really do just think of love

and I feel that love is the most extraordinary thing,

for two people to meet and fall in love,

with each other at the same time seems extraordinary.

For that to last for decades seems miraculous,

and for it to only get better seems sort of impossibly lucky.

So losing Davey as I did was,

I mean, hard beyond description,

and it's sort of like being a long way from home all the time,

but three weeks after I lost Davey I had our son Cully,

our beautiful boy.

And I think Davey would be very proud of him.

Death is inevitable, I mean, erm,

life is what you are anyhow,

what you experience now,

and death is going to happen to us anyhow

so there's no sense in spending 70 years worrying about dying,

because if you do, you won't even get to 40 I think.

But, you know, I really do, I, as an Irishman,

I've been, not laughing about my own death,

but laughing about death as a subject for years, coffins and wakes, erm,

and I, it doesn't bother me.

I mean, I know that some people get a bit upset but it's there,

you might as well not laugh at the moon or not accept the existence of the sun.

I wonder what my epitaph will be.

Here lies Dave Allen, a comedy fool

who drank and told gags as he sat on his stool,

his last words on earth the atheist wretch,

time for religion, here's a sketch.

There's the church.

The big question everybody asks me about Dave Allen

is always, "How did he lose the finger?"

I've got time to ask you one more thing

and that's about your famous, the missing joint on your finger.

I've asked him that so many times and he's given me

about five different stories, none of which I believe to be true.

I was about nine, nine years of age...

What did he tell you?

Oh, all sorts of thing starting from nose picking accidents.

I was sitting there and I had something in my back tooth...

He picked his nose and he lost it, how do you do that?

I was actually trying to pick it out, with my finger,

I was trying to get this little bit of meat.

Working up to knife fight in a Paris brothel.

And my brother, John, came in behind me and he just saw me there...

He lost it in a bet with a priest in a pub.

We were wrestling or something like that, he just came behind me

and went, boom, like that

and my jaw closed

and I bit my finger right through.

The final gag, is everyone always asks me that

and they don't believe me when I say I don't know,

but to this day I have no idea, and I think that's fantastic.

Thank you goodnight and may your God go with you.