Dave Allen (II)

David Mills interview

Focus people! David Mills returns to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with brand new, razor sharp rants delivered with his signature cocktail swagger and his biting, acerbic wit. Martin Walker attempts to persuade this cross between, Dave Allen and Larry Grayson, not to quit comedy and take up alternative dance.

Radio Times review

"Over the years that I've come to know the members of this platoon, I've grown quite fond of them, but I can't help feeling sometimes that I'm in charge of a bunch of idiots." It's not often that Captain Mainwaring is quite so scathing about his platoon, but he's prompted by a classic piece of long-windedness from leering loon Private Frazer. It's a towering moment in the midst of some lightweight field-exercise shenanigans, but you'll enjoy the effete expression from Wilson tanning his face while his captain blethers on, and another brief but heavenly example of under-the-influence acting from Arthur Lowe.

Fans of 70s comedy will enjoy the sight of Dave Allen stooge Michael Sharvell-Martin as the Lieutenant.

Comedy review: Fern Brady & Stuart Mitchell, Glasgow

Stuart Mitchell has a wince-inducing medical history that most comics would give their right arm for, even if he's only missing a few finger tips. Denied his Unique Selling Point in comedy lore by Dave Allen's legendary missing digit, he's young to have a colonoscopy routine too, usually a rite of passage for middle-aged comics.

10 of Dave Allen's funniest jokes

As BBC Two celebrate the Irish comedian with a night of special programming, we look back at some of his best moments.

Jo Caulfield: My comedy is therapeutic

Angst, relationships and Dave Allen inspire Jo Caulfield's stand-up.

In the '70s, the parish vicar was a staple sitcom character. Steptoe & Son would regularly be thrown into paroxysms of nervous guilt by the prospect of the local god-botherer coming round to tea, while Terry & June were forever tying themselves into unlikely knots in the run-up to a dinner party with the Reverend Austin Doyle (note to younger readers: Terry & June was like Him & Her with milky tea and stairlifts).

Now we get to find out why these men of the cloth were in such demand at social functions with the baldly titled Some Vicars With Jokes, a half hour of genial clerics cracking wise and acting the goat. And that's pretty much all there is to tell. The wisecracks themselves are, shall we say, of a certain vintage, and all sound as if they've been ripped from the Dave Allen jokebook, but there are at least couple you might find yourself slipping into your own repertoire.

The decision to place the drollery against a flat, putty-coloured, computer generated backdrop is rather offputting, but the saintly stand-ups are good enough company to give this a look. Pick of the bunch is Reverend Paul Turp of St Leonard's in Shoreditch who comes across like a depressive Micky Flanagan by way of Harold Pinter.

The mystery of Dave Allen's missing finger solved?

On April 29th at 9pm, BBC2 aired a documentary about well-known Irish comedian Dave Allen. The programme, entitled Dave Allen: God's own Comedian went through Allen's glittering career, showing clips of some of his more outrageous sketches and interviews with those who knew him best - his family, friends and coworkers. However, one question remains unanswered - how did he lose his finger?

In '73 Dave Allen was at the top of his game as TV's most controversial comedian. 
"He just sat there, beautifully Irish, and told the most outrageous jokes," said Steven Berkoff in Dave Allen: God's Own ­Comedian. My mother, who fancied him, would ­second that. From the gen­eration of comics inspired by him, Kevin Day said: "As a kid I didn't understand his jokes but I really enjoyed seeing my parents laugh at them." I'd second that; just Allen in his chair was exciting. Look, he's drinking whisky! Now he's brushing fag-ash from his sleeves as casually as he'd attack organised religion! But what hap­pened to the top half of that ­finger?...

This was a fine tribute to the master of the quiet, laid-back, furious monologue who died in 2005 and is rarely reshown, though this was his doing. 
I knew nothing of his early shows and their ridiculous stunts, so footage of Allen in 
a submerged car was almost 
as thrilling as him in his 
chair.

There was an amazing postscript to that one, with a Glasgow family regularly writing him their grateful thanks. An outing to Ayr almost ended in tragedy when their car slipped into the sea. The boy trapped inside calmly waited until it filled with water before opening the door, just like he'd seen Allen do.

Radio Times review

I've watched Dave Allen: God's Own Comedian (Monday BBC2; iPlayer) twice now. I'll probably watch it another eight or nine times, in the hope that any of Allen's essence can somehow enter my soul. This was less a film about how to be a TV comedian, more a film about how to be.

Dave Allen had a spark, a glint. He had no fear. He knew he had his s**t straight. He trusted his mind. He was always looking for mischief. He was curious. He loved his family. He never stopped thinking. If it was funny, he'd say it.

You could see it as he bounded onto the stage to present his first big TV show, in Sydney in 1963. At 26, in his second foreign country - he'd left Ireland at 16 and left his friends The Beatles behind in England ten years later - he was brazenly flirting with the studio audience. He had it. Soon Australia had given Dave, unutterably sexy at that point with his black hair and charmed eyes, his own chat show, which from the clips in God's Own Comedian seemed to consist of him larking about aimlessly and assuredly with female co-hosts and, in one extended sequence, risking his life to demonstrate how to escape from a submerged car. Advised to stay in Australia and build on his success, Allen followed his first wife back to England and simply repeated it there.

This documentary about one of the best stand-up comedians in British TV history didn't actually contain very much of his stand-up, because what audiences were buying wasn't a series of jokes, but time with Dave Allen - a share of the drink that was normally in his hand, on and off stage. "They wanted him to like them," explained Mark Thomas, a writer for Allen's later shows. Allen's honest independence was alluring but it took him, quite naturally, to extremely controversial places.

The flint inside the laconic exterior was formed young. Allen's newspaper-editor dad, a major local celebrity, had died when his son was 12, leaving the family struggling. But before that, a Catholic education had woken Allen up. "They hit me. They pulled my hair. They punched me. They demeaned me. None of them were qualified teachers."

Allen's material about the Catholic church wasn't revenge, exactly. The Pope stripteasing, the "nuns farting next to lilies" and the rest came more from his fascination with humans at their hypocritical worst. He grinned widely when asked which of his routines about religion had offended the IRA: "Most of them!" If it was true, he'd say it. Allen was a mainstream household name but did sketches about Apartheid, because he wanted to. His popularity kept rising.

Craven celebs would have consolidated with safe options. Allen wandered off to present a series of proto-Theroux documentaries on eccentric and marginalised people, drawing on his equal fascination with humans at their best. He took a straight acting role as a man in mid-life crisis in an Alan Bennett TV play. Allen was "looking for the meaning of life", said one of his collaborators, and that didn't sound ridiculous.

About the only black note in this fantastic programme - which may have glossed over all sorts of monstrous flaws in Allen's character, although I suspect it didn't and don't much care - was his last full series for the BBC in 1990, which was dogged by green-inkers moaning about the swearing. We saw Allen eruditely explain in a Clive James interview that there are more important things in the world to worry about than "rude sounds", but the Beeb caved and Allen was wounded. It was an ironic, pathetic, trivial but illuminating example of what Allen stood against and why he mattered.

Not that he thought he mattered much, Dave Allen being one of the few things in which Dave Allen didn't take too much interest. He made the best show he could but then went home, exchanged his smart stage garb for scruffy linen, and got on with reading, painting, drawing, and hosting sprawling weekenders for his extended family and friends. The ghost stories he would petrify the kids with at the Allen house in Devon sounded like better gigs than any of the TV ones.

"He had these many many abilities but he held them quietly," observed his widow Karin. Allen knew it was just a ride and, as Cyril Connolly ambiguously said, you can't be too serious. Finally, God's Own Comedian dealt with the mystery of the missing forefinger on Allen's left hand, by refusing to answer it. He'd told everyone something different: as his associates related the tale they'd heard, they had his glint in their eye.

Review: Dave Allen - God's Own Comedian; Vicious

The story of one of telly's best ever stand-ups was a design for life, says Jack Seale in his weekly TV review.