The Good Housekeeping Guide - interview
Alan Davies plays Raymond
As soon as he read Tony Basgallop's screenplay for The Good Housekeeping Guide, Alan Davies knew he was on to a winner.
"The litmus test for me with any script is whether I can finish it in one sitting," reveals the actor, who has previously starred in such hits as Jonathan Creek, The Brief and Bob and Rose, and who has made a huge impression as the regular foil for chairman Stephen Fry on the inspired BBC TWO panel game, QI.
"If I get 30 pages in and drift off, it's obviously not working. But when, for instance, Russell T Davies' scripts for Bob and Rose arrived, I read all three episodes in one go. I was up till three in the morning, absolutely glued to them.
"Suffice it to say, I read The Good Housekeeping Guide in one sitting, too! It's so nice to get such a great script - there aren't that many of them around, I can tell you."
A charming, relaxed interviewee, Alan continues: "It's such a witty screenplay. It's also really well put-together - you feel it's been properly thought through.
"The characters work very well, there is absolute clarity in the stage directions and the juxtaposition of scenes is neat. It's like looking at a table made by a really good carpenter. There are no wobbly bits!"
Alan plays Raymond, a downtrodden house-husband whose world is turned upside down when his glamorous and high-powered wife Jenny - played by Michelle Gomez from Feel the Force, Carrie and Barry and Green Wing - announces that she's trading him in for a younger model.
Raymond is left to look after the teenage children - nerdy Sara and wayward Robinson. His only consolation is that he gets to stay in their gorgeous suburban family home.
Even that is jeopardised, though, when Jenny decides to buy him out and evict him from the house. Raymond becomes desperate to find enough money to stop her plans, but there aren't many ways of raising cash when you're an unemployed mechanic turned house-husband.
When he finds out that his cheery neighbour Lydia - played by Doon Mackichan from Beast, Smack the Pony and I'm Alan Partridge - is in fact working as a prostitute to supplement her and her daughter's lifestyle, he's initially shocked.
Soon, however, Raymond realises that his housekeeping skills are surprisingly transferable…
Alan, who was brought up in Loughton, Essex and turned 40 earlier this year, explains his character's predicament.
"He's a desperate man. The house that Raymond built is on the market. He's going to lose everything - his wife, his house and his kids - and a new man is going to take his place.
"As you watch it, you think, 'Oh God, Jenny just wants a younger version!' It's completely credible that a younger guy would be attracted to Michelle Gomez - as I'm sure many younger guys already are!
"Raymond does the odd job for people, but he has no real prospects of earning any money. He's at a moment in his life where everything crashes and burns around him. I'm afraid that happens to people with depressing regularity."
But Raymond has a brainwave when he discovers how his neighbour Lydia is earning a living.
"When he finds out that she is working as a prostitute, he realises that there are large sums of cash to be made by opening his house as a brothel," continues Alan. "He suddenly sees a way of holding onto the house."
Lest you think this all sounds too heavy, Alan is quick to emphasise that The Good Housekeeping Guide is full of laughs.
"It's very much a comedy," he observes. "All the same, it's important that it has credibility in the way it portrays working girls. Doon was very keen to make sure we understand why someone might find herself in Lydia's position. In many ways, Lydia is very similar to Raymond - her partner has walked out, too."
The twist is, of course, that it all takes place behind the privet hedges and net curtains of a quiet suburban street.
"The fact that this brothel is in a pleasant suburb adds to the humour," Alan concludes. "It's like Blue Velvet; there's more to the cul-de-sac than meets the eye - although, I hasten to add, in The Good Housekeeping Guide, there isn't a human ear lying in the grass and Dennis Hopper does not black out under the influence of a noxious gas. This is very much more at the My Family end of the spectrum!"
Alan took up stand-up comedy after graduating from the University of Kent.
"You go into this profession for two reasons," he reckons. "First, you want to be liked, and second, you want to earn a living without having to do a proper job! You think, 'God, I can get 60 quid a night for performing at some tiny comedy club - of course, I'll give up the day job!'
"There is a long and honourable tradition of people chucking in respectable jobs to become stand-ups. Jo Brand, for example, had a distinguished career as a psychiatric nurse before giving it up for comedy."
Alan was an immediate hit as a stand-up - he won the Critics' Award at the Edinburgh Festival and Time Out's Best Young Comic Award and had several sold-out West End runs.
Soon, he started being offered plum acting jobs in programmes such as One for the Road and A Many Splintered Thing.
For the past three years, Alan has enjoyed great success as a regular on QI, BBC TWO's hugely entertaining panel game about arcane information.
"I love doing that show," he beams. "I get to be playful and inquisitive and irreverent and all the other things I used to enjoy as a stand-up.
"The relationship with (the chairman) Stephen Fry works really well, too. It's evolved by accident, but now it's a bit like a sitcom. I have a great chemistry with Stephen.
"Certain people I know - like Frank Skinner and Graham Norton - are effortlessly funny all the time, to the point where you think it might almost be a sort of affliction to find comic connections in absolutely everything. Stephen's the same - he's effortlessly funny all the time.
"Making the show is not hard for me because I don't have to do any preparation. They used to show me the questions beforehand but they were always incomprehensible! I think I'm better being spontaneous.
"For everyone else involved in QI, though, the show requires an enormous amount of work. They're talking about making a fifth series next year, and the producer John Lloyd is already discussing getting the researchers together now."
But perhaps Alan's most celebrated role thus far is the lead in David Renwick's brilliant BBC ONE comic detective drama, Jonathan Creek. Intriguingly, Alan says that he would be delighted to reprise the part of the eccentric magician's-assistant-cum-amateur-sleuth.
"We've made 25 episodes of Jonathan Creek over the past decade - and it takes five months to make just six episodes. That's a huge amount of comic invention and mystery that David has had to conjure up over the years.
"He is an astonishingly imaginative writer, but it would be a lot to ask David to go back to that and dream up more spectacular plots. Having said that, if he agreed to write some more, I'd do it again in a flash."
Whatever happens, Alan will be eternally grateful for the chance to have played such a memorable character.
He concludes with a laugh: "I'm lucky that the thing I'm best known for is really good, rather than, 'Aren't you that bloke who lost the plot on Big Brother 5?'"
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