Heard the one about the reformed comic? Jim Davidson sets the record straight after years in the wilderness

By Richard Baker


Repentant? After years in the wilderness for bigoted views, Jim Davidson says he wants to get a few things straight


Anyone witnessing comic Jim Davidson’s return to the stage this month could be forgiven for thinking the 57-year-old was getting his comeuppance for the racist, sexist routine he trotted out before a shift in good taste saw him whisked off our screens nearly 20 years ago.

In the play Stand Up And Be Counted, Davidson is bigoted old comedian Eddie Pierce, who is confronted in one scene by a young, black stand-up comic and berated for the years he spent cracking jokes at the expense of pretty much every minority under the sun.

The parallels with Davidson’s own life are more than coincidental. For it was Davidson himself who penned this intelligent, tense script — and the inspiration for the scene in question was based on a real-life encounter.


When in a Southend-on-Sea comedy club a few years ago, Davidson went backstage to congratulate 41-year-old black comedian Matt Blaize after being impressed by the quality of his act.

But, far from welcoming this tribute from an established star, Blaize gave him a furious dressing-down.

He told Davidson how he had been taunted in the playground thanks to one of the comic’s regular Seventies routines involving a West Indian character called Chalky White.

One of Davidson’s favourite jokes involved the dope-smoking Chalky walking across a zebra crossing. The distasteful punch line, delivered in a mock Jamaican accent, had Chalky saying: ‘Now you see me! Now you don’t!’

Jim Davidson (Eddie Pierce), Matt Blaize (Earl T Richards), Rachel Barrington (Ellie Jayne) star in Davidson's new play Stand Up And Be Counted


Blaize told Davidson of the immense impact this crude humour had on the lives of black and Asian people.

Davidson apologised to him. ‘What could I say but sorry? I can see now that it was wrong,’ he says.

So wrong, indeed, that he began — perhaps for the first time in his life — to look inwards and ask himself whether he really was the racist, sexist, homophobe he had been branded, or whether he was merely misunderstood.

The result is his play, in which Davidson and Blaize recreate that confrontation, using the characters of Eddie Pierce as the old-school comic and Earl T. Richards as the young black comedian.

For a man once dismissed as a comedy dinosaur — a crude, brash, hard-drinking, Page Three Girl-loving bigot — it’s a rather astute piece of work.

Can it really be possible that after nearly two decades spent in the cultural and professional wilderness, Davidson is ready to apologise for his past ways and thus rise again from the ashes of his once-lucrative career?

Or is it simply that Davidson is using his play as a cynical way to repackage his old, hate-filled comedy material using the character of Eddie to speak the punchlines in place of Davidson himself?

When we meet to discuss his comeback, Davidson insists that he is a reformed man.
‘I realise the error of my ways,’ he says. ‘It’s just that the climate then was different. No one knew better.

‘I apologise for any offence I caused in the Seventies, but I don’t feel I have too much to repent for. I think I should be judged on what I do now. It’s what’s acceptable now that’s important.’

Despite being denied the millions of TV viewers who once tuned in to watch him, Davidson has shown little sign, until now, of abandoning his crude brand of humour.

Rape victims and the murder of black schoolboy Damilola Taylor have both featured in his stand-up repertoire in recent years.

In 2007, he stirred up a furore while on Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen after using the label ‘shirt-lifter’ in front of gay contestant Brian Dowling.

He walked out because of the controversy, admitting he was a ‘non-PC fossil’, and ITV1 released a statement referring to his ‘unacceptable remarks’.

But these days, he insists he is inviting his audience to laugh at the sheer awfulness of his character and at Eddie Pierce’s bigotry rather than revel in it.

‘I know that’s like having your cake and eating it,’ he says. ‘But it’s not that different from someone such as Al Murray who cloaks himself in the character of the Pub Landlord and can, therefore, claim he’s being ironic.’

Even so, the crass sense of humour that has so often landed him in trouble is still in evidence as we talk.

‘Fat women?’ he says at one point during our conversation. ‘Can’t bear them.
‘I’m going to put thin turnstiles on theatres to keep them out. Otherwise they’ll each take up two seats and eat all the popcorn.

‘Women are meant to be slim and attractive. There’s no excuse for being that fat and they’re a burden on the NHS.’

If Davidson is trying to be funny, then he fails. Despite his protestations, he seems to be strangely out of touch — a throwback to another era.

Indeed, if there is anything that he regrets, it seems it is not so much his professional past but his colourful private life.

‘I don’t have too much to repent in my professional life, but personally speaking, I have so many regrets that I’ve constructed a big brick wall of denial,’ he says.

‘Give me a bottle of whisky and an Ennio Morricone CD and I’ll wallow in regret — that I didn’t stay with my children, that I’ve said and done certain things, that I never invested my money sensibly.’

Davidson with his fifth and current wife, Michelle Cotton, who is 17 years younger than him


Today, he is married to his fifth wife, Michelle Cotton, who is 17 years his junior, and he claims to be content with his lot. But it’s taken a long time to arrive at this domestic calm.

Among many lurid episodes over the years, his third wife, TV presenter Alison Holloway, accused him of being a drunken brute who used to beat her, drove her to have an abortion and led her to attempt suicide.

It was claimed that within three months of their wedding, he had blackened her eyes twice, kicked her downstairs and damaged her ribs with a training weight.

Besides his failed marriages, he has also battled with alcoholism and, in 2006, bankruptcy. He says he still drinks, but ‘differently’, after spending ten weeks in rehab.

‘I got sick and tired of being sick and tired,’ he says. ‘I was drinking far too much and I was taking coke again.

‘Now I don’t do drugs. And I never allow drink to affect my work.’

Money-wise, he is still a world away from the vast amounts he used to earn in the Seventies and Eighties.

He returned to Britain seven years ago, having lived in Dubai for six years — ‘the rat came back to the sinking ship’ is how he puts it — and now he lives a far more modest lifestyle in a two-bedroom house in a village near Andover, Hampshire.

‘I love village life. I even go to church sometimes,’ he says. ‘I like to take my two dogs for a walk. And my neighbour, Lady Gordon — widow of a Lieutenant Colonel — comes round for a vodka and tonic. It’s wonderful. Like Emmerdale.’

Certainly, Davidson still appeals to a certain section of society. In 2001, he was awarded an OBE for the years he spent entertaining British troops serving overseas.

While his views on race may have softened, his old-school Thatcherism hasn’t, which may explain why the Tory Party of today is keen to distance themselves from him.

‘I was asked by a number of Parliamentary candidates if I’d fund-raise for them, and I said I’d be happy to but they should clear it first with Central Office.’

He never heard from any of them again.

‘I must have been seen as very unhelpful to the cause,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be acceptable to the people who don’t like me.’ He quotes Stephen Fry, who once said: ‘I’d hate to meet Jim Davidson and find out he was a nice bloke.’

By the conclusion of Davidson’s play, all those involved are forced to examine their own prejudices. Even the black comedian, played by Blaize, has to admit that all comedy has victims — and that trendy jokes attacking white people and Americans may be just as dubious as those mocking black or Asian people.

But it’s Davidson’s character Eddie Pierce who faces the biggest challenge — accepting that if he wants to continue his career, he is going to have to adapt to the new world.

The same could undoubtedly be said for Davidson himself.

‘The trouble with not looking back,’ he says, ‘is that you never learn from your mistakes.’

Davidson clearly thinks he has learnt from his — but from talking to him, I’m not so sure.


Source:dailymail