In your first memoir, My Favourite People and Me, you picked Kylie Minogue as one of your favourite people – but added that you stopped loving her when I Should Be So Lucky came out. To make this a question: how dare you?
Ah, Kylie. She’s completely adored everywhere she goes, and I adore her as well. I fell for her when she was Charlene in Neighbours – I was a student studying drama in the 80s and the only drama that any of us cared about was Neighbours. Australian girls were the pin-ups for everybody in England.
There was a studio in the UK called London Studios where we filmed QI for years until it closed down. There was a picture outside my dressing room of Kylie Minogue singing to Kermit the Frog. She looked so exquisitely beautiful, and Kermit, of course, is very cute as well. After a wrap party, I’d had a few wines so I tried to get it off the wall to take it home. It was so screwed on that all I did was crack the glass and cut my finger. I was like, “Oh my God, what am I doing?” There was almost certainly CCTV in that corridor. And blood splattered on the picture.
I am very enamoured of Kylie Minogue. Subsequently to the picture incident, I actually ordered a Kylie wristwatch. There is a picture of her on the face of the watch, which presumably is lifesize because she is a very, very small lady.
You are about to tour Australia for the first time in a decade. After all your visits, is there anything you still don’t quite understand about it?
The antipathy towards New Zealand! It’s so extraordinary. The hostility is off the scale. New Zealand’s beauty doesn’t take away from the extraordinary natural beauty of Australia. You’ve got fantastic marsupials. There’s no denying it. Why do you guys hate each other? But it’s the same if you go to Devon and Cornwall. These are two of the most beautiful counties in Britain – and they detest one another! The thing that kills people who live in Cornwall is that you have to go through Devon to get to it.
What is your most controversial pop culture opinion?
Will Ferrell should have won an Oscar for Blades of Glory. They never give it to a comedian, do they? In that film you cannot take your eyes off him. It’s an astonishing performance. There’s one bit where he’s got no shirt on – I love him because, like a normal person, he hasn’t been to the gym. He’s just a regular bloke with three terrible tattoos. He turns around and says to someone, “Checking out my ink?” It just makes me laugh so much. I also think he should have won an Oscar for Elf: “You’re sitting on a throne of lies!”
Where is the weirdest place you’ve been recognised?
There is always a urinal involved. I was at a festival where they had these urinals in the gents where you all face one another – so you’re obscured from the waist down, but you end up looking people in the eye while you’re trying. There is nothing that stops the flow quicker than someone staring you in the face. Anyway, someone started shouting, “Oh, it’s him. It’s him. It’s that bloke. You’re not funny. You’re the one with the lisp on that show.” You know, loads of abuse. I’m standing there thinking, can you all just shut up for five seconds so I can wee? Eventually I left without peeing.
Me and the kids absolutely love The Mandalorian – looking back now, that’s the moment to be a Mandalorian, in your helmet. No one would ever be rude to a Mandalorian. He’d wipe the floor with you, while he’s having a wee.
Do you ever get called Jonathan Creek?
Oh God, yeah. “Jonathaaan!” I’ve also been called Jonathan Ross. Wrong Jonathan – and I’m not even Jonathan! Nowadays people think I’m James May from Top Gear. I get that a lot. I was on a train and I saw a kid coming up from about three carriages away, looking at me the whole way. He stood right in front of me and said, “Oh no, that’s not James May.” And he turned around and went away!
Once, when I was a teenager, someone – very generously – compared me to James Dean. I don’t look like James Dean, obviously, but I liked the comparison! But to go from James Dean to James May is a terrible, crashing descent. No disrespect to James May, but he’s not James Dean. Also, James Dean died in a car crash and James May has been driving like a lunatic for 30 years. Life is unfair.
What is the best piece of advice you have received?
“Enjoy yourself.” It was said to me by a Canadian comedian called Mike Wilmot, who is a gnarled and grizzly old guy and a very funny, quite dark comedian. I was coming back to standup in 2011 after 10 years away. I’d become very recognisable from television and I missed standup, but comedy clubs were sometimes very tricky for me. It upset me, because it’s the thing I love to do the most. So I got some stuff together and went to try some new material at a night in London. I was waiting to go on and I was obviously giving off trepidation and fear, so Mike Wilmot came up to me and said, [gravelly voice] “Hey. Enjoy yourself up there.” Honestly, I remember that before every single gig I do now.
Do you get hecklers?
Not really. I actually try to encourage it because, when you’re touring, you want to find out a little bit about the place you’re in. I remember doing a show in Blackburn in Lancashire. I said, “What’s Blackburn like? What’s the absolute shithole of the area?” And they all went, “Burnley!” They hated Burnley, which is about 20 miles away. So I went, “Is anyone in from Burnley?” And a load of people went, [cheerfully] “Yeah!” The people from Burnley said they refer to Blackburn as just “Bastard” – they won’t even say the name of the town!
I like a bit of interaction with the audience. The best heckle I ever had was when I was younger. I used to wear these lime-green moleskin trousers and someone shouted, “Are you colour blind?” The audience all laughed and it took me a couple of minutes to get them back. If you really want to upset a comedian, heckle them about their appearance.
What has been your most cringeworthy run-in with a celebrity?
I was lucky enough to meet and work with Bob Monkhouse, the famous comedian and TV host. When he met new people, he would put his hand out with a big smile on his face, and he’d say, [reassuringly] “Bob Monkhouse.” Which I think just put people at ease, because everyone knew it was Bob Monkhouse. So I thought, “Oh, that’s really good, I’m going to do that.”
So one time I met Kriss Akabusi, who was this Olympic medallist who has a very effervescent personality – he was popular and had a television career after his hurdling career ended. When I met him, I put out my hand, and I said, [reassuringly] “Alan Davies.” And he said, “Nice to meet you, Dave.”
He had no idea who I was. I’m not Bob Monkhouse. Some people know who I am. Some people think I’m called Jonathan. But Kriss Akabusi had no idea who I was and to this day I cringe about it. Why did I do it? I’d be better off saying, “Bob Monkhouse.” He’s such a nice bloke, Kriss Akabusi, but he thinks I’m called Dave to this day – we never met again.
Are you able to wheel out facts you learned from being on QI?
I only have one fact that has stayed in my brain, because I can’t remember anything. Multiple times on the show I’ve said, “I don’t know how I know this but … ” and they go, “You know this because we did it in series G!!!”
This is the fact: when the Vikings left Scandinavia in their longboats and went looking for land, they took ravens with them. They would release a raven and it would fly incredibly high – and, if it saw land, it would fly towards it. So you follow the raven, right? If it doesn’t see land, it comes back to the boat because they can’t land on water. That’s the only fact I can remember and I’ve been doing QI for 23 years.
What is the strangest thing you’ve done for love?
Katie, my now wife, and I were in Germany. We’d been on a boat on Lake Starnberg, which is south of Munich. Beautiful place, you can see the mountains of Austria and so on. But we couldn’t see anything that day because there was an absolutely terrifying electrical storm. We thought we were all going to die. So we got off the boat at this little place called Tutzing. There was a guy who ran a kiosk on the jetty there and it was really raining, so we’re hiding under his awning and he said [in a German accent] “You want a beer?” So we did. Then he went “You want some snuff?” I’ve never had snuff in my life but I said OK. So he gave me this menthol snuff – it was like chewing gum for the brain! And about two minutes later I proposed to Katie. So the strangest thing I’ve done which resulted in love was snuff. We’ve been married for 18 years – worked out all right.
