Just Ignore Him: A BBC Two Between the Covers book club pick

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Neither my editor nor I would have agreed to the interview if Davies' terms had been put to us, in advance.

A: It’s tricky, Ginny, because I don’t want to talk about that in the interview or outside the book. In September 2012, Davies made his first appearance on Channel 4's Big Fat Quiz series, winning The Big Fat Quiz of the '90s alongside Phill Jupitus. To pad that out, Alan reminisces about his childhood, TV programmes from the 1970's, favourite toys, teachers and housekeepers, friends and relations. Davies says it has taken him until now to be able to address properly what happened to him as a child.I didn't know this so let me clarify this and repeat this back to you to make sure I fully understand. It is believed to have been a victim of the cuts at the BBC subsequent to the reduced licence fee settlement. He says he has always enjoyed his work and he thought that being famous would be fun "although that turned out to be a very mixed bag, as you can imagine .

In Just Ignore Him, Alan Davies reveals the profound effects of enduring childhood sexual abuse, opening up a door that most victims keep well shut, forever. In 2007, Davies starred in the second episode of ITV's You Don't Know You're Born and on The Unbelievable Truth.Davies's first book, the autobiographical My Favourite People and Me, 1978–88 was published by Michael Joseph ( Penguin Books) in September 2009.

I struggled with the method used for chapter subjects and didn’t enjoy the lack of flow although I appreciate how Alan’s early life experience has impacted his whole life, even now. I feel he deliberately revels in making the reader (or maybe just me) uncomfortable by mentioning and dwelling on things and I don't mean the abuse that I wish I had not read and can't unread.Some readers might find it surprising that the grief and abuse described in this book are woven seamlessly into daily life. He graduated from Kent University, where he read drama, in 1988, also the year he did his first stand-up comedy show. John Lloyd, creator of QI, told me his favourite novel is Dune by Frank Herbert, set on a desert planet in another galaxy. He is so evidently super-bright that I had assumed – before reading the book – that he was a smart grammar school boy (in fact he went to the same private school as his father and grandfather) who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge; his natural destination, as an acknowledged "brainbox" before he went off the rails as a teenager, becoming a compulsive thief and vandal. Picking up this book, his memoir about his childhood growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I wasn't expecting to find something so utterly heartbreaking and bleak.