Alan Davies review – the QI man plays it safe

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/apr/13/alan-davies-review

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"It's marvellous being a standup comedian," says Alan Davies halfway into his new show, "You can totally indulge yourself in pointless egotism." In fact, standup need be no more egocentric than other art forms. But Davies is sticking with what he knows here: his own life, his kids, his dad, and his midlife flatulence problems. The highlights come post-interval, when the material (memories of his 70s childhood, mainly) is less generic. Elsewhere, this is conventional 90s-era laddish autobiographical standup, which finds the QI man so far inside his comfort zone, he might as well be wearing slippers.

The first half casts our host as the now-doting, exasperated dad to two young children. One anecdote finds Davies treading painfully on a Lego brick; in another, he struggles to coax his kids into the car. This may all true to Davies' life, but it's insufficiently different from dozens of other comedy parenting routines. Notwithstanding the enjoyable image of the 48-year-old squeezing himself through a foam mangle in a soft-play area, 40 minutes of it is too much of a familiar thing.

Act two is more engaging. They may be decades old, but Davies' stories of growing up in a single-parent family in 70s London, and of a school trip to Italy, are fresher and more idiosyncratic than the stock fatherhood material. There's lots right – the accrual of character detail, the child's terror of adult recrimination, the sheer randomness of it – about the routine in which Davies incurs dad's wrath by spending a then-extortionate 85p on a tennis ball. A later tale pictures one schoolmate "pitched into the Bay of Naples and powering himself around the isle of Capri" by force of masturbation alone. His closing section on marital sex and farting returns Davies to better-trodden territory. Which is regrettable, because the further he ventures from it, the more compelling he is.

• At SECC, Glasgow on Thursday. Box office: 0844 395 4000. Venue: secc.co.uk. Then touring.

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