Alan Davies: Little Victories

Please welcome to the stage, Alan Davies!

Hello!

Welcome.

To your own city.

How are you? Well?

Yes!

Excellent news. Very nice to see you all.

Any parents in, got any parents in?

Yes. Parents of young children? Yes.

Oooh, did you hear the weariness?

They can barely manage it. "Yeeeeah."

It's a babysitter tonight, is it?

Yes.

A few of you. The rest of you just left them.

Teenage daughter of a friend -

that's quite a good option if you want a babysitter.

If you have gone for the teenage daughter of a friend,

I don't want you to worry about her

smuggling her boyfriend in about half past eight.

Don't think about that.

Don't think about how she unzips his fly on your sofa about 9:00.

Followed by full anal in your bed about 10:00.

Don't...

Don't think about... Don't think about that.

Put that out of your mind. Why are you thinking about that?

Think about the evening ahead, relaxing, it's your time.

So what can I tell you about?

Well, I was a babysitter for a while, when I was younger.

Not a very good babysitter because I was a bit of a thief.

I was more concerned about what I could nick

than the welfare of the children.

Anyway, they're a nice family, nice family.

They had two daughters and a little toddly boy,

little boy, and a dog,

and I would go over there some evenings and sit with them.

And they left out some cakes for me one evening, which was nice.

That's what people did in the '70s. Didn't get on television for baking.

That's just how people fed one another.

So they were quite...

They were little sponges in paper cases

with the top scooped out

and then a bit of cream in them and the top back on.

- What are they called? - Butterfly.

Butterfly. Butterfly cakes. Of course. That's what they were.

15 of those.

Not bad, eh? On a little platter like that.

Anyway...

The little boy woke up, so I went upstairs to look at him.

And I went back downstairs and the dog had eaten all the cakes.

And they're all gone

and all the cakes and all the paper cases are missing

and the doily that the cakes had been on.

So now I'm worried about the doily,

that is what is worrying me, is the doily.

There's a doily in the dog.

And I'm quite up on the dangers of that

because I've seen a thing on television about things in pets

and I know that you must...

'Cause it will reappear at the back end

and you must not accelerate the progress of anything through a pet.

It is very important because it's all tangled up in there, right?

If you yank it, basically you will evacuate your dog,

is what you will do.

You will empty it out.

You will need a tray, as if you were draining the sump oil out of a car,

and then - foo, phoo!

The whole...

You'll have a hollow cat or a hollow dog on your hands.

You must not do that.

But the key thing is the dog will try and get it out,

it will see it and feel it and want to get it out

and you've got to stop it,

you've got to stop the dog doing that.

It's going to hurt itself.

If anything, you've got to get it back into the dog.

The dog's not going to like it.

It doesn't matter how strong your bond is with the animal,

there will be a struggle over this issue,

such as you've never known before.

Really, you need a cone.

You need a cone for the dog from the vet.

You know, the kind of thing, so they can't interfere...

...with nature taking its course.

If you do get a dog with a cone on,

it's quite good fun, you must do this, get some Maltesers.

Or any spherical confectionery will do.

And just flip one in.

It's quite hard to get it past the dog because they love Maltesers,

they're not meant to have chocolate, they don't know that.

They love Maltesers.

So you might have to sell a little dummy, but once it's in there...

Honestly, they will not rest. They will...

And they never seem to think to just tip it out and get it off the floor.

About two weeks later the dog died.

Yeah, I know.

I was concerned about it because I thought

it might be something to do with the cakes and the doily,

so I went over, I had to confess,

because I didn't tell them at the time.

And they said, "No, you're alright. Don't worry, don't worry.

"It had a liver complaint."

Anyway, they replaced it, they replaced it with a new dog.

And they called this dog Sunshine.

And my father in particular thought that was a stupid name for a dog.

"How can you have a dog called Sunshine?

"You can't go walking with it in the forest and then call out,

"'Sunshine, Sunshine!'

"You'd look ridiculous calling for the weather."

But then he got a dog and he called Cindy,

which I didn't think was an improvement.

Dogs have got to have dog's names unless you are really posh.

If you are top echelon posh then all the women have dogs' names

and the dogs have people's names - that's how they roll.

I know this because I went in a posh house once in my life,

a really posh house,

and the women were called Pidge and Snowy

and the dog was called Elvis - that's true.

But really, I think, my father was annoyed or he was irritated,

I think it was just from jealousy.

He wanted a dog himself. He was very keen to have a dog.

We couldn't have a dog because my mum had passed away when I was small,

I was 6 when my mum passed away,

and I had an older brother and a younger sister.

So for a long period there was no-one in the house during the day,

the house was empty all day long,

and it wasn't until my father remarried 10 years later

that he was able to get a dog, and he got a dog immediately.

It was pretty obvious to everyone, not least my stepmother,

that he'd only remarried so he could have a dog.

That was the main motivation.

He virtually came out of the registry office

and went straight to the pet shop on the way to the reception.

By the time he was in the photographs there was a dog there.

Where did the dog come from?

And once he got this dog, then we saw a side to him we'd never seen before.

He was full of love and affection and kindness and warmth.

He was tactile,

he talked up the qualities of this animal to strangers

and within his own family.

In fact, he imposed characteristics upon it that were quite unrealistic.

He'd say things like, "She's always smiling,

"always smiling in the morning."

What are you talking about? It's a golden retriever.

They don't smile, right? They don't smile.

They have the same gormless expression on their face

their entire lives.

They don't even retrieve anything!

They take it, they will get it and then they'll come near you with it

and then they'll just fuck off and hide it somewhere.

It's a golden hider. That is what you've got there.

Never changed the look in its face.

The only time it changed the look in its face

was if it was defecating in the garden

and then, in an effort to get its nose as far away

from the business end as possible,

it would pull a slightly pompous, regal expression.

The sort of look I imagine the Queen Mother wore

when she was on the lavatory.

But I think in that respect I admired the retriever.

I felt that in that area,

the retriever had in fact evolved beyond humans.

I was quite impressed by that.

Because not only did she get her nose as far away from what was going on

as she could, when she'd finished what she was doing,

she just left it, just walked away.

And I find that most admirable.

That is something that none of us can do.

You can't do that, I can't do that, no-one can manage that.

It's something that only the retriever can do,

it takes him to a whole other level of sophistication

beyond which we cannot... You can't.

We sit over ours, we'll sit over ours for hours on end,

on Facebook, scrolling through our phone,

mentally comparing what we've done to yesterday's.

Try it tomorrow. Try just walking away.

Try it. You can't do it.

The truth of the matter is that, really,

it started to really bother me,

my dad and the dogs, when I had my little girl.

My little girl is five now

and when she was born I was expecting or hoping

that he would be as affectionate and tactile and warm

and loving towards her as he was with the dog.

But no, he wasn't. It didn't really come,

he wasn't very affectionate and didn't really go near her, in fact.

Now, in his defence, he is suffering from the early stages Alzheimer's,

and so he is not always certain who it is he's dealing with

at any given time, though he seems to remember the dog every fucking time,

but not with...

But still, he would ask questions of her

as if we had chosen her from some which comparison website

according to her characteristics.

I'll give you an example.

This is one of the questions he asked of my little girl.

He goes, "What's her range of vision?"

I said, "Well, she's a human.

"She's got the human eyes, so...

"..similar to your own, Father, really."

You know, without the blinkers, without the myopia,

without the racism.