Dave Allen (comedian) - Career

Career

Born in Firhouse, Dublin, Ireland, the son of Cully Tynan O'Mahony, managing editor of The Irish Times, and an English mother, David Tynan O'Mahony left school aged sixteen, after attending the secondary schools Newbridge College, Terenure College and the Catholic University School and followed his father into journalism. He joined the Drogheda Argus as a copy-boy, and went to London, aged nineteen. He drifted through a series of jobs before becoming a Butlins Redcoat at Skegness in a troupe that also included the British jazz trumpeter and writer John Chilton, and hosting pop music shows. At the end of the summer season, he did stand-ups at strip clubs and for the next four years he appeared in night clubs, theatres and working men's clubs. When entertainment work was slow he sold toys in a Sheffield store and also worked as a door-to-door draught-excluder salesman.

He changed his stage surname to "Allen" on the prompting of his agent, who believed that few English people would be able to pronounce "O'Mahony" correctly.

Allen had lost the top of his left forefinger above the middle knuckle, after catching it in a machine cog. However, he enjoyed telling many differing stories as to how that happened and this became a minor part of his act. One version was that his brother John had surprised him by snapping his jaw shut when they were children, resulting in him biting it off. Another was that it was done deliberately to avoid National Service. A further explanation he gave on his programme Dave Allen at Large was that he often stuck his finger in his whisky glass and it had been eaten away by "strong drink". He also said the cause was repeated brushing down the dust from his suit with his hand causing the finger to be worn away. One of his memorable stand-up jokes was that, when he was a boy, he and his friends would go see a cowboy movie at the local cinema, then come out all ready to play "Cowboys and Indians". Staring down at his truncated finger, he would mutter, "I had a sawn-off shotgun." On his show he told a long, elaborate ghost story, ending with "something evil" attacking Allen in a dark and haunted house. Allen grabbed and bit the attacker, the studio lights came back up, and it was his own left hand.

Allen had his first television appearance on the BBC talent show New Faces in 1959. In early 1962 he was the compère of a pop music tour of England headlined by Helen Shapiro that also included The Beatles, then little known. In 1962 he also toured South Africa with American vaudeville star Sophie Tucker, whom he described as "one of the most charming and delightful performers with whom I have ever worked". Tucker was impressed with him and suggested to him that he try his luck in Australia. Moving there, he worked with Digby Wolfe on Australian television, becoming Wolfe's resident comedian.

While on tour in Australia in 1963, he quickly proved successful and accepted an offer to headline a television talk show with Channel 9, Tonight with Dave Allen, which was very popular. However, only six months after his television début he was banned from the Australian airwaves when, during a live broadcast, he told his show's producer — who had been pressing him to go to a commercial break — to "go away and masturbate" so that he could continue an entertaining interview with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. The ban was dropped quietly when Allen's popularity continued unabated.

In 1964 he married actress Judith Stott, whom he had met in Australia. The marriage ended in divorce in 1983. Their son, Edward James Tynan O'Mahony (professionally Ed Allen), is also a comedian.

Allen returned to the United Kingdom in 1964 and made a variety of appearances on ITV, including The Blackpool Show, Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium and on the BBC on The Val Doonican Show. In 1967 Allen hosted his own comedy/chat series, Tonight with Dave Allen, which earned him the Variety Club's ITV Personality of the Year Award. He signed with the BBC in 1968 and appeared on The Dave Allen Show, a variety/comedy sketch series. This was followed, 1971–79, by Dave Allen at Large, which introduced his trademark solo joke-telling-while-sitting-on-a-stool-and-drinking routine. This stand-up routine by Allen led to handsomely mounted sketches that continued the themes touched on in the preceding monologues.

Allen's trademark satirising of religious ritual, especially Catholic, throughout each episode caused minor controversy, which coupled with sometimes comparatively frank material, earned the show a risqué reputation. In 1977, the Irish state television network RTE placed a de facto ban on Allen. Routines included sketches showing the pope (played by Allen himself) and his cardinals doing a striptease to music on the steps of St Peter's, aggressive priests beating their parishioners and other priests, priests who spoke like Daleks through electronic confessionals, and an extremely excitable pope who spoke in a Chico Marx style accent as he ordered Allen to "getta your bum outta Roma!" New seasons of the series, renamed Dave Allen in 1981, were made until 1990. In the same period, Allen also made The Dave Allen Show in Australia (1975–1977) for his old employers, Channel 9 in Australia.

His final series for the BBC in 1990 caused considerable controversy because of the strong language that Allen used freely (in contrast to all his earlier BBC series), and his behaviour was even raised in the House of Commons. In 1993, he returned to ITV, where he starred in the Dave Allen show, which was to be his final regular television series.

By the late 1990s Allen was in semi-retirement, though he made occasional chat show appearances and presented the six-part The Unique Dave Allen (BBC, 1998), in which he talked about his career in between clips and extracts from his past series for the BBC. As he grew older, he brought a rueful awareness of ageing to his material, with reflections on the antics of teenagers and the sagging skin and sprouting facial hair of age. He was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the British Comedy Awards in 1996.

Allen's hobbies included painting, which he became increasingly enthusiastic about in his later years. His first exhibition, Private Views, was held in Edinburgh in 2001.