Comedian Alan Davies is a lovable presence on British TV, especially in his long-running contribution as a panellist on the nerdy quiz show QI, where he comes across as an overgrown schoolboy, ever eager to impress teacher with a correct answer but constantly chastised for getting it wrong.

This is monstrously unfair. He is clearly bright. He nearly gets it right, only to be mocked time after time by the know-all quizmaster, who invariably reveals the impossibly esoteric correct answer in a smugly superior tone. It is this cruel injustice that brings out our sympathy and affection.

It’s a great act, propelling him steadily towards national treasure status. But be in no doubt that this is indeed an act. What we see on TV is a persona, a mask. It is not an accurate reflection of his personality, the real nature of which is ethically and politically important to us, as will soon become apparent.

In truth, Davies is not the nice guy he seems. He has been an habitual liar, a serial thief, and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. As a teenager he punched his little sister in  the face. As a middle aged man he would become a relentlessly grudge-bearing vindictive shit, dobbing in his own Alzheimer’s-suffering elderly father to the police on the flimsiest of grounds, unsupported by his sister (no surprise there!) or older brother, both of whom were fully aware of the facts of the case.

We know all this because he confesses it in his misery memoir Just Ignore Him – the title being an expression his dad used when young Alan was acting up, as usual. After reading the book many might be inclined to say the kindly, patient Mr Davies senior had the right idea: best not to indulge his most difficult child’s constant demands for more than his share of attention. To have done so would not have been in the boy’s own long-term interests  – or so he might reasonably have thought, based on the parenting standards of the time.

Needless to say, this is not Alan’s view of his dad, nor of being ignored. The chasm of understanding between them is at the heart of Davies’ book, which I was prompted to read recently after seeing the author talk about it in the company of fellow comedian Bill Bailey in the TV series Perfect Pub Walks. Ostensibly the book belongs to the ever-growing sexual abuse genre of memoirs, especially celebrity ones. But really it is about so much more – and less, because sex is not really the issue. The problem is not sex but love, or rather its traumatic loss.

The all-too-defining key fact of Davies’ childhood, and perhaps much of his adult life, was his mother’s death from leukaemia when he was six. Left with three young children, the suddenly single father, Roy Davies, couldn’t cope. The problem was not financial. He had a well paid job as an accountant and enough money to have his kids privately educated. He also coughed up for a succession of live-in housekeepers and “tea ladies” to take care of all the cooking and cleaning.

Even community support should have been available, given that Roy and Mrs Davies (who is always just “Mum” in the book) had long been active in the local Cubs and Scouts, which is where they met in the late 1950s. But this was in Chingford, Essex; and, as was typical in respectable middle class nuclear families of the Home Counties in those days, domestic life was largely a private matter. Relatives, friends, and neighbours might be sympathetic to a situation like Roy’s but they did not “interfere”.

Men like Roy were expected to soldier on and do their best – which they did, like the wartime generation before them, who had no choice but just to battle on through adversity in the most literal sense, as actual soldiers. In Roy’s case, he had been independent school educated and steeped in the emotionally repressed “stiff upper lip” culture deemed appropriate for the officer classes, society’s leaders.

Unfortunately, emotional repression was the last thing distraught little Alan needed when he lost his mum in the early 1970s. He needed affection and his dad was not good at showing it. In all probability, reading between the lines, Roy Davies loved his children dearly but was desperate not to show too much physical affection for fear of being more intimate than was socially acceptable. In other words he was minor-attracted but knew he must at all costs avoid the dreaded taint of incest – an avoidance he appears to have struggled with in the case of Alan.

The first sign that Roy found himself sorely tempted came soon after his own mother’s death. Alan speculates in his book that while she remained alive he may have been inhibited by her influence. Whatever the truth of that, Alan would have been around eight or nine years old when Roy came into his bedroom just in his underpants. That was nothing unusual, but Alan “may have been getting changed at the time”. At all events, they came to be lying on the bed together, Alan naked, Dad in his pants. Roy’s “hands became very busy as his cuddling developed into caressing, all without speaking. It was a quiet, librarial molestation.” His dad’s face came close to his own: “I didn’t like the feeling of the stubble. He didn’t speak. He didn’t kiss me. It was a bit unpleasant, but tolerable, given how nice it was to be cuddled.”

Then Dad speaks: “ ‘This is our special cuddle. You must never tell anyone about this cuddle,’ he said. That self-serving parody of tenderness was an improvement on the norm so I went along with that plan…. I was a just a bit confused, part grateful, part burdened by a new secret.”

And that was it. No unbridled, passionate ravishing, no covering in kisses, not even any genital touching, and certainly no exposure of Roy’s own genitals, or penetration of any kind. Just a secret Special Cuddle, and even that didn’t happen again until Alan was twelve or so, perhaps because the intervening presence of housekeepers reduced the opportunity for private moments. His older brother, too, was at times an “unwitting sentry”, as his bed was close to Alan’s.  It is not clear, after that, how often these incidents recurred. In Alan’s account they ended when he was thirteen and  began to object.

There is no reason to doubt he had very mixed feelings about it all. He speaks of embarrassment, which is understandable: as an adolescent he would have been acutely aware that a taboo was being broken, even if the intimacy did not amount to incest as narrowly defined. “I was eager to please him, of course,” he admits, “but how could I do that when it all felt so awkward and embarrassing?” His body was at odds with his head, though, as he tells us:

The last time he did it I was thirteen and I became erect, which is still unbearably embarrassing…. I remember clearly deciding to allow my nubile cock to sink into the flesh of his tummy. He did not flinch or acknowledge what was happening…” Soon he bolted from the room.

End of story. Sort of. No more Special Cuddles. But it was to be only the beginning – or not even the beginning – of a never ending story of towering rage and resentment on Alan’s part towards his father, from which an opportunity for revenge would eventually spring. It is a rage that never stops to question the most insistently asserted yet least well evidenced dogma of our times, that sexually motivated touching in childhood is in itself traumatic. Why would he question it, after all, given that it provides such a convenient, socially rewarded excuse for a great deal of behaviour he would otherwise need to be ashamed of?

The under-examined and, I would argue, primary cause of trauma in his case was the loss of his mother. I am reminded of the Duke of Sussex, or Prince Harry as we used to know him, who lost his mother Diana when he was only 12. His headline-grabbing, apparently permanent, state of smouldering resentment towards his father owes nothing to sexual abuse. Had there been anything of that sort Harry would have trumpeted it around the world long ago given his reckless enthusiasm for destroying the family to which he owes his own privilege and wealth. And Harry, like Alan, also has an older brother who suffered a similar loss but took it more stoically. Sibling differences of this sort could have complex origins, such as proximity to Freud’s Oedipal period at the time of the critical incident; but, equally, they might well be largely a matter of individual temperament. Who knows?

What is more important for our assessment is to understand that Alan’s post-traumatic feelings of resentment predate that first Special Cuddle, so cannot have been caused by it. Even at age three his lowly place in the household pecking order was a matter of sufficient consternation to him to elicit an anxious memory, assuaged only by his mother’s love. This seems to have been a glancing reference primarily to his brother’s resented higher status and perceived nastiness, which appears to have been quite traumatic in its own right. His brother would steal his toys (allegedly!). So much did he hate sharing a bedroom with his sibling that, “I would often go to sleep in my dad’s bed after Mum died, preferring to be put into my own bed only when my brother was asleep.” Sibling squabbling of this sort is of course commonplace but that does not mean it is always trivial. In this case it would later assume epic proportions, again echoing the poisonous rancour between Harry and William, Prince of Wales.

In the Davies household, as with the royals, a key aspect of the dynamic would be the older brother’s tendency to side with their father in any dispute. His sister would turn out the same way, which proved more than poor put-upon Alan could stand. It all kicked off at an airport, coming home from a family holiday. Some sort of mischief had been going on while they were waiting for the flight. Dad doesn’t see it, but inquires accusatorially what Alan has been up to. Sister says he was being stupid. Alan totally loses it and smashes her in the face. Desperate to avoid blame, he points the finger at his father, suddenly blurting out: “You’re a poof! You come into my room at night and touch me up…”

Did anyone believe him? Of course not. Bro and sis had long been wearily used to now 15-year-old Alan’s perpetual lying. The pair of them and their father just stood there glaring at him, “like an unusually hostile… interviewing panel”. Rather than wait to see himself sacked from membership of the family, Alan promptly took to his heels and got lost in the airport!

Possibly to their later regret, the family did not abandon him there, saying good riddance to bad rubbish. They searched. They found him. On the flight back, he was surprised to find Dad being kind, and making sure there was no further trouble with his siblings.

Dad, of course, knew the truth. And so would Alan’s brother and sister, but only decades later, in middle age. Dad was suffering from Alzheimer’s by the time their step-mother discovered and revealed his porn collection, including a folder marked “Teen Boys”. Suddenly it became undeniable that Dad might have been sexually attracted to young Alan (although none of the porn “boys” were clearly minors, being more “twink” age).

Did it really matter? Should it have been such a big deal? Bro and sis evidently didn’t think so. They showed no sign of wanting to make a fuss. But Alan’s ever acute sense of grievance never waned. It seems never to have occurred to him to take some personal responsibility for what went spectacularly wrong in his teens, when he was lazy at school, an unpopular braggart, a vandal, and an habitual shoplifter. Though he lacked for nothing materially (Dad bought him a motorbike and a car), he nicked a lot of money over time from one of the tea ladies – someone who could ill afford to lose it – and pilfered from other staff too.

Where was his moral compass through all this? He apparently felt didn’t need one. His Dad had gently caressed him, and that trumped all other considerations: he was a victim of abuse, which excused everything. His ferocious anger never abated  even after becoming a father himself, with a highly successful career. Indeed, now he had plenty of money he could afford a psychotherapist, who would only have endorsed and reinforced his monumental sense of grievance.

So it need not surprise us that after his dad’s porn cache had been discovered Alan went to the police, with every prospect a conviction would put his senile, octogenarian father behind bars. What sweet revenge, eh, what righteous justice would then be meted out!

But the Crown Prosecution Service were not as gung ho as he might have hoped. Alan may have been “touched up”, but not on his genitals, so the evidence for any sexual motivation on Roy’s part was thin to vanishing. Habitual liar that he was, or had been as a boy, Alan could have literally sexed up his story into a dodgy dossier of false allegations; but in his grown-up awareness that his childhood lying had often backfired he stuck with just the naked caressing.

It was not enough. The CPS declined to prosecute. Frustrated, Alan splashed out £6,000 for a barrister’s review of the evidence. The ensuing report concluded that a viable case for prosecution could actually be mounted, and the CPS eventually accepted this. But where the lawyers eventually supported Alan, the doctors would not: Roy was deemed unfit on medical grounds to stand trial.

End of book, if not of story. Actor Alan has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage. Has his tale been one “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Should Heretic TOC have ignored Just Ignore Him? We could read scores of these memoirs, these never ending stories, but what would be achieved, apart from drowning ourselves in depressing bullshit? Judge for yourselves, dear heretics, but my view is that these whingers need to take a good look in the mirror and should occasionally be invited to do so.

ANYBODY GOT A LONG SPOON?

Anger is among the attributes needed by a comedian, according to Alan Davies. But he is clearly too angry for his own good, as well as that of anyone who incurs his displeasure.

As Aristotle said, anger is easy. But for anger to be virtuous rather than vicious is much harder. It needs to be anger with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and expressed in the right way. Getting all those ducks in a row is not something we would expect to happen very often.

To be permanently mad as hell is not a sign of good character. Nor is it good for us. Angry people have an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. It can takes years off their lives, as a major study reported this month.

Maybe I should tell that to another “look back in anger” specialist who emailed me recently. Just like Davies, he is a figure in the public eye, and his own misery memoir was published to much acclaim a few years ago, including acres of spin-off coverage in the print and broadcast media.

Now he says he wants to involve me in a new broadcast project. As you may imagine, I am more than a bit wary. The details are only very vague as yet. So, wish me luck. I’ll need a long spoon if I’m going to sup with any of these devils.

KIDS BECOME A POLITICAL FOOTBALL

School kids are being used as a political football for the sake of headlines in the run-up to the general election. So says Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, and I could not agree more.

His remarks, reported in today’s Guardian, follow the government’s announcement of plans to ban sex and relationship lessons for children under nine in England – a reactionary, ill-considered move that prime minister Rishi Sunak and his desperate crew must be hoping will allay parental anxieties and give a boost to their currently rock-bottom popularity.

It is a tactic which seizes reflexively on real worries that have been in the air in recent months, notably children’s exposure to potential harm through mobile phone use, as discussed in last time’s blog.

Likewise the Cass Review raised important questions on the genuinely sensitive and difficult topic of teaching in schools about gender transition. The Tories’ crass knee-jerk response is to avoid it like the plague, taking sex education for older children back to the dark ages in which “education” basically meant just trying to scare youngsters off sex entirely by focusing heavily on grim stuff like sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy.

This would be terrible news but for one thing: this government appears to be on the way out, and when it goes their sex education policy will go with it.