Comedians are in short supply these days: a comic, a storyteller, someone that you can relate to. A person you listen to intently, someone who raises a smile or chortle a chuckle. I might be getting old but it makes me appreciate the fact that I was lucky enough to be born at a time where I witnessed some of the finest comics: Mike Yarwood, Billy Connolly, Tommy Cooper, Tony Hancock, to name but a few. But there was no one that stood higher than Dave Allen, the boy from Tallaght, Co. Dublin.
Dave Allen was born to cause a scene or three. Back in 1963, and only six months into his career, he was thrown off Australian TV for telling the producer, who wanted him to cut short his act for a commercial break, to go and masturbate as he wanted to continue his interview with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
Allen liked to shock. He especially loved to comment on the Catholic Church. He was banned from RTE in 1977 for a mocking parody of the Pope, where he did a striptease on the steps of the Vatican. Some 200,000 viewers complained to the BBC. But when you are pulling in 10 million viewers on BBC 2, a few moaners isn’t going to make you change your ways.
Perched mostly on a stool with a cigarette, in the days when you could enjoy yourself on TV, and with a glass of whiskey in his hand for a prop (I later found out that the hard-hitting tumbler of whiskey was in fact ginger ale & ice), he would hold the nation with tales of the common man.
He was especially brilliant at noting day-to-day situations: the banks, the supermarkets, the airlines, smoking, post offices, doctors…
His observations were charming, witty, funny and, at the odd time, controversial.
His frequent use of the F-word led to questions in the House of Commons in 1990.
“The hierarchy of everything in my life has always bothered me," Allen said in 1998. "I'm bothered by power. People, whoever they might be, whether it's the government, or the policeman in the uniform, or the man on the door – they still irk me a bit.”
From school, from the first nun that belted me.
When all is a said and done, Dave Allen was a master storyteller.
He left a legacy behind that is still seen today.
For without him you would have no Little Britain.
His take on ‘Time’ back in the ‘80s was funny then, and it still is now:
“We spend your lives on the run,” he said. “You get up by the clock, you go to work by the clock, you clock in, you clock out, you eat and sleep by the clock, you get up again, you go to work – you do that for 40 years of your life and then you retire. What do they f….ing give you? A clock!”
And, in the words of the man himself:
© Words Paul Gallagher/ ZANI Media
