‘I used to say awful things’: Alan Carr on divorce, dating and the skit that haunts him

Alan Carr, plate in left hand, cutlery in right, is perusing the lunch spread. He’s starving. Absolutely starving. We’re in a big echoing loft with wood floors and he’s talking to his team as if they are all on stage and I – sitting in the corner – am the audience. He wants to know why one of them is picking bits out of her salad. He doesn’t accept that she’s allergic to coriander. Whoever heard of being allergic to coriander?

He lays off to discuss someone he met recently, a Love Island contestant. Although most of what he says is full volume, the name is sotto voce. The idea is that I won’t hear it, but the panto broadcast/whisper only exaggerates the effect, like a page censored with black marker.

He’s wearing a dark baseball cap, but the rest of his clothes are loud: a red and cream oversized lumberjack shirt; red, gold and green trainers. When I peer, he supplies that they are Gucci. “Yeah. Sorry,” he adds, chucking the words over his shoulder with a flick of his neck. It’s not clear if he is apologising for being fashionable, or because I can’t afford them, or both.

There are six of us in this photo studio, including Carr’s manager, makeup, wardrobe and a publicist from ITV. He picks up the coriander and stuffs it into the mouth of the woman who said she was allergic. “See!” he declares, triumphant. “You’re not really allergic. If you were, you’d be dead by now.” He cackles. Everyone else cackles. It’s like the canned laughter of witches.

He comes towards me. He points to the small table for two where we’ll do the interview and says: “Here? Oooh, it’ll be like we’re on a date.” He swivels to repeat this to the others, then turns back to me, lips twitching with amusement. A shift has taken place, I realise, the energy in the room has transferred. They’re the audience, I am the one who will have metaphorical coriander stuffed in my face. Carr sits, and clasps his hands in a well-go-on-then pose.

His persona is outlandish; cartoon extrovert. He carried it across what he calls the “shiny floor TV studios” of his presenting career (The Friday Night Project, Chatty Man), across regional stages for standup, on to quizshow panels (Eight Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, RuPaul’s Drag Race UK), radio shows (Alan and Mel on Radio 2 alongside Melanie Sykes) and his podcast Life’s A Beach.

He has written two autobiographies, Look Who It Is! and Alanatomy, and even they are in the distinctive voice he describes as like “a seagull fighting for a chip” but I receive as trilling reverberations of Kenneth Williams in his scratchy Carry On heyday. As a comedian, Carr’s DNA is 60% Williams, with dollops of a softer camp reminiscent of Frankie Howerd, Julian Clary, Larry Grayson and Dale Winton.

But wait. I’ve been reading about the terrible two years Carr has been having. How he was divorced last year from his husband of three years (partner of 14), Paul Drayton, an actor and party planner. How his beautiful red setter Bev – a present from Drayton in the first year of their love – died. How much he’d struggled in lockdown (he put on three stone in seven months), not just because Drayton is an alcoholic but also because Carr is a workaholic who was on the phone daily to his agent, badgering, hounding, desperate for something to do. If it wasn’t for comedy, he told one magazine, he would have had a breakdown.

So, I ask, is he happy?

“Never been happier,” he declaims flatly. There’s an uncharacteristic pause. “I said that so miserably, di’n’I?” He turns to our audience: “I said that in another interview, didn’t I? And they said: ‘You don’t seem happy, Alan.’” He cackles. They all cackle. But no, he insists, turning back to me, he really is happy. Really, really happy. Here he is: 46 years old and going through a purple patch. He’s not being mean to Drayton saying that. Just that it’s no good being married if neither of you are happy. He says: “You come out and you think, ‘Oh, I’m happy now, taking a bit more control of my life.’” In the end, he says, Drayton’s addiction “just got too much for me”. For his part, Drayton posts regularly about his battle to stay sober (including the hashtag sometimesthehardestdecisionsaretherightones on a post about their breakup).

Carr has moved from Sussex, where he and Drayton shared a farm, and is “falling in love with London again”. He’s also “tentatively looking” for a relationship. “But I mean, how do I even meet people?”

Sex he can take or leave, he says. What he is looking for is “probably companionship, which makes me sound so old. I mean, I spend my whole time either alone on stage, or alone sitting on a seat interviewing people one-on-one. So it’s just nice to share, because I have the most amazing experiences.” He doesn’t want to date someone known – “I need somebody who’s like celebrity adjacent, who knows the business and understands the long hours and that I might be away.”

Fearful of sounding sincere, he jokes about the trials of dating a celebrity. “Don’t we have to combine our names like Brangelina? So if it was Rylan, it’d be Ryl-alan. Ry-la-la-an.” He peels off into a story – there’s a celebrity anecdote for every occasion – about how he was at Rylan’s house, skinny-dipping. Unbeknown to him, Rylan filmed it and the next day he awoke to messages from mutual friends: “Someone had a good time last night!”

“And there’s the Instagram stories. Me karaoke-ing. Oh gawd. Rylan’s like, ‘We had so much fun! We must do that again!’ No, we must not. I’m doing it with clothes on.” He sighs. “It’s the tequila, innit?”

So, emotionally, he’s having a rebirth. Creatively, too. He threw himself into work post-divorce and has written a standup tour and a sitcom – “the comedian’s version of a novel” – for ITV called Changing Ends. It’s set in 1984 and based on his childhood in Northampton, where Graham Carr moved his family when he became manager of Northampton Town.

“The ridiculous thing is, you say to people, ‘Oh, I’m writing a sitcom based on my life, where my dad’s like a northern, tough-talking football manager and his son’s camp as a row of tents’ and they say, ‘Oh, that writes itself.’” He narrows his eyes. “It does not write itself. You have to put in a lot of effort.”

His plan was to write something deliberately light because he found “a lot of sitcoms now tug at the heartstrings rather than tickle your funny bones”. From what I have seen it’s sweet and nostalgic, a sort of gay Wonder Years. Carr narrates while Oliver Savell plays him as a schoolboy, in large black NHS specs, who is interested in birdwatching and reading Agatha Christie. We meet him just as his best friend, Charlie, has been banned from hanging out with him because his parents think he’s “camp”.

The tension is in watching a child with Carr’s flamboyance unknowingly navigate the rampant homophobia of the 80s while his mother, Christine, fiercely beats away sneering neighbours. In one scene, Graham and Alan are sitting in their bronze Audi Quattro on the drive. “I don’t think you know what normal is, Alan,” his dad says. Modern-day Alan crashes in with a voiceover: “Hey, snowflakes! This was therapy, 80s style.”

I ask what his parents think of it and he says Christine loves it – although she loves everything he does. “I mean, she’s Team Alan. She won’t have a bad word said. Someone would knock on the door and say, ‘Your Alan’s done this.’ ‘My Alan wouldn’t do that!’ she’d say. At parents’ evening, the maths teacher said I was not good at arithmetic. ‘Well, he can’t be good at everything,’ she said. I can do the shittiest show on telly and she’ll ring up and say, ‘Well, that was great!’”

What about Graham? “My dad found it incredibly sad. Which is not what you want to hear when you’ve made a sitcom.”

The gentle humour is only partly because it goes out before the watershed. It’s also what Carr calls “a different muscle”. The world has changed since he first launched in an era of wall-to-wall fat women and ableist jokes, and the mocking of anyone with a foreign accent. “I used to watch Joan Rivers’ Fashion Police religiously. Like, so harsh. And I used to say awful things. On Chatty Man, when I did my monologue,” he winces. “Punching down, that’s a phrase that’s come around. No one wants to punch down now. The world is so out of control, there are so many arseholes out there. Whereas I used to maybe slag off someone from X Factor, I think we’ve realised now who the enemy is. You should use your platform against someone worse than a poor reality star who can’t really sing.” He pauses. “So now I punch across.”

While Carr doesn’t mind flailing himself, he stiffens when I ask if he fears people trawling his oeuvre. “I’ve been going now for 20 years. I’m sure there might be something out there, but people have to understand time. I haven’t got the time or the patience or crayons to explain time to them. And if they don’t understand how time works and how tastes change, then just don’t bother me.” He turns to our audience. “Am I right? Am I right?” To his manager: “I’m always right, Alison, aren’t I?” She confirms that he is.

That said, there’s one particular skit that haunts him: his 2008 impersonation of Amy Winehouse at Amnesty’s Secret Policeman’s Ball. He repeats for me now that impression of her squawky north London accent: “‘Aw’ight, Blake!’ I’d be tottering around with my beehive. Now I go, oh my God: in the public eye with addiction. I feel like such an arsehole. Because that poor woman. But we were just dressing up – ” he repeats – “‘Aw’ight’. And now I’ve lived with someone with addiction and seen how out of control it is and the emotional turmoil. I was completely naive. Twenty-four years old thinking, ‘Isn’t it funny – look at her, staggering around with her pumps.’” He shudders: “Oh, Alan, you bloody idiot.” Problem is, he says: “In your 20s you think you’ve got all the answers. You get to 40 and realise you’ve got no answers at all. You are just stumbling through life, messing up and apologising.”

He recalls a time when he thought alcoholism was like jet lag, something you had no sympathy for unless you had it yourself. In Alanatomy he writes that he was “hugely inconsiderate with Paul at the beginning. I thought he was being self-indulgent. ‘You can stop, you’ve just got no willpower.’ I foolishly used to be the same with eating disorders – ‘Oh, shut up and have a cake.’ And depression – ‘Cheer up, go and see Cats.’ Boy, has that changed now.”

Further, he admits “there have been times” when he questioned his own drinking. There was Palm Springs when he awoke after a night of apple martinis and saw Drayton had the imprint of a flip-flop on his forehead. Carr had gone wild, he learned, attacked Drayton and ransacked their hotel room. There was the 4am police statement he has no memory of signing outside a McDonald’s in Liverpool after Elliott, his tour manager, had been severely beaten by a gang, leaving him with a shattered leg. There was the last Chatty Man show after which he accosted Harrison Ford, who was in the corridor on his way to the Jonathan Ross show. All he could remember was waking up on the floor of his dressing room at 3.25am locked in London Studios. So yes, “there have been times”. But “I know now that I’m not [an alcoholic] and seeing [alcoholism] first-hand, I realise I was nowhere near becoming one.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t have other ailments. He was plagued by psoriasis until his 30s, later by IBS, night terrors, anxiety attacks and then a disorder that gave him a sensation of wanting to pee when he was stressed. He has a “tight” hip, which he jokes is caused by “mincing”, but is actually all the running he does to stay fit and may mean one day he has to walk with a stick. (One of the team shouts that they’ll look after him. “Oh no. You’re awful,” he replies. “It’d be like that film, Misery.”) When I probe into anything psychological – comedians, famously, have a higher incidence of mental health issues compared with the general population – he bats me away. “I don’t have that dark side. I would love to have a BBC Four or Sky documentary: The Other Side of Alan Carr.”

His former Friday Night Project co-host, Justin Lee Collins, did, of course. When that dark side became public in a 2012 court case, Carr says he was torn. “I don’t know what people do in their private life and I don’t want to throw him under the bus.”

But when he said Collins was “a lovely guy”, he got into trouble. And then he got into trouble because – disparaging voice – “People say, ‘Oh you’re not friends any more.’ I don’t think it’s a reflection of whether I drop people like a hot brick; I also worked in a factory and at Tesco, and I don’t speak to any of them. Life goes on.”

Pausing to reflect, he says that this is all part of human nature. That people are “good and bad and a million things in between”. The problem is that the public “like to place their celebrities – ‘Oh, you’re like that’; ‘They’re like that’.” To him, it feels like a straitjacket. “You can’t really evolve.”

He’s less philosophical about comedian Louis CK – who was revealed by the New York Times to have masturbated in front of several women – and he gets me to turn off my tape recorder to say how appalled he is at another big-name comedian who faces accusations not yet public. A few comedians turn out to have problems with women, I suggest.

“It’s the power thing,” Carr says. “Some people get famous because they want their own plane, some want their own chatshow, some people do it so they can talk to women like shit.” Why did you do it? “To meet Wonder Woman and to treat women like shit,” he says, deadpan. The audience cackle. I ask if his oft-repeated story, that he used to fantasise about greeting school bullies in a chauffeur-driven car wearing a fur coat, is true. He says, “I was being facetious.” So what drove him? “I don’t really know why. I wanted to get out of the call centre.”

* * *

Carr was born in Weymouth, Dorset, in June 1976. For his first five years, he was looking at the sea, eating ice-cream, going on donkey rides, playing at the arcade. After they moved to Northampton, his brother Gary was born, but Carr’s relationship with Christine was firmly established. They were an indestructible unit – crucial, Carr believes, to his confidence, thick skin and his love of storytelling; his mother was a great raconteur.

He was academically bright, loved reading (although he likes to play this down, saying on Desert Island Discs that his book of choice would be the Argos catalogue). He went from school to drama and theatre studies at Middlesex University. From there, he floated through a series of temporary jobs – the factories, Tesco, the call centre – that furnished him with rich material for his standup. Which, incidentally, is a distinctly unglamorous profession when you’re starting out. It’s scrabbling around the country’s darkest corners being jeered at and humiliated. In those days, he might be paid no more than a tenner for a routine. It barely covered accommodation or the train home.

Depending on how you view it, standup requires either nerves of steel or sadomasochistic streak. But Carr prevailed. In 2001, he won the BBC New Comedy award. By 2008, he was best entertainment personality at the British Comedy awards. He never won the Perrier at the Edinburgh fringe: “But then again, that’s never appealed to me,” he wrote in his autobiography. It was Chatty Man (2009-2017) that really established him in the public consciousness. Among his interviewees were Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Adele, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Bette Midler, Mariah Carey, Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus. The format included Carr offering his guests alcohol from his globe drinks trolley. Consequently, many were squiffy. Watching it back in an era when stars are even more tightly controlled by publicists, it’s difficult to imagine such mayhem.

I tell Carr I love Rihanna, but on his show she seemed a little, ahem, dazed. “Yes. You’d go into her dressing room and there’d be a shower cap over the smoke alarm,” he says. He didn’t mind because “she just laughed at any old thing I would say. She’s just smiling. She’d had her first hit but there was no massive list of things you couldn’t talk about. She was just really fun and lovely.”

Whereas most guests arrived in a tracksuit, smoking a fag, Lady Gaga arrived in “a tapeworm dress with antennae” before changing into rubber. “She got so drunk and couldn’t get out of her outfit. She had to piss in a bin in the dressing room. She must be so relieved now,” he continues, “that she has a normal, inverted commas, persona where she can just wear a pretty dress and have her hair up. Those outrageous outfits must’ve been exhausting.”

His weirdest guest was probably John Cleese, whom he’d been excited to meet, but who spent the interview either pouring drinks over Carr’s head or throwing nuts at him. Exasperated, Carr finally retaliated, pouring his own drink over Cleese. To the viewer, it felt like revenge on the bullies. “Obnoxious,” Carr mutters at mention of his name. Nonetheless, he feels bad about what happened. Why? “Because he’s a comedy legend. But he’s an odd man.”

He leans across the table and stage whispers: “Please tell me they’ve scrapped that Fawlty Towers reboot – that’s going to be awful. Do something else. Do maybe a garden centre? Don’t do Fawlty Towers.”

Carr has always maintained that some of the nastiest people in television are our national treasures; that it’s a problem that the British public so revere their celebrities they want them to be nice, forgetting that television is pure fantasy. “Why is it that we need them to be nice?” he asks rhetorically. “And then people think if they’re not nice, they’ve somehow been lied to.”

One notable exception to the nasty national treasure rule is Adele. Carr melts when I raise her name. He and Adele were such good friends that she stayed in his spare room in 2011 when she was going through a breakup. In return, she organised his entire wedding to Drayton, which took place in her garden with her officiating – yes, you read that right – and on top of all that, she paid for the whole event. Recently, he joked he’d won custody of Adele in the divorce, but today he is reluctant to talk about her. “Because it gets just clickbaity and then everyone thinks, ‘Can’t he talk about anything else?’”

Instead, we discuss how, in his 40s, he’s finally comfortable in his own skin. In the past, he’d never watch his own appearances – not even one episode of Chatty Man – because he hated his looks. He always thought he was overweight and his teeth were gappy – although he’s astute enough to know they enhance the caricature, the brand, much like Kenneth Williams’s flaring nostrils. The younger generation has taught him a lot about gender and sexuality, and how to be, he says.

He asks if I’ve seen the film Swan Song, then tells me he feels like Udo Kier’s character, who escapes from a care home. “He’s a proper old gay, got a cigarette holder and a trilby, and he’s sitting on this bench. These two gorgeous gay dads come along and they’re picking up their daughter and he goes, ‘God, I don’t even know how to be gay any more.’”

Just now, he continues, he was in a bookshop and when the assistant handed him the book he’d bought [The Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson], he noticed the man had painted nails. “And I did not clutch me pearls. I thought, ‘Oooh.’ I mean, I wasn’t vomiting, I was thinking, ‘Wow.’ For me, that’s people being comfortable with their sexuality.” He lifts his eyebrows. “Maybe he doesn’t even identify as gay, what do I know? My friend’s kid had blue nail varnish. I said, is he, you know? And they said, ‘No, he just wants blue nail varnish.’ So, we’re all learning. Every day is a school day.”

Getting older does mean thinking about death. Last month, he went to the funeral of his friend the comedian Paul O’Grady, who died aged 67. He was unnerved – by the service, by the burial, by the process of watching the coffin lowered into the ground. At the wake, he could not stop thinking: “But he’s there, he’s still in the ground. So very weird,” he says, adding, “I’m always thinking of death. Not like suicide, but what happens when you’re going to the other side?”

He twists round to throw this to the audience. “Do you think about death?” There is a chorus of yesses. He hasn’t worked out whether he’d do a burial or a cremation yet. Then he perks up. “What about the Viking one, where they set you on fire and push you out into the lake? Yeah, that might be quite nice.” What music would he have? “Hopefully, Adele would sing me off. Someone Like You as I disappear down the River Nene in Northampton.”

• All episodes of Changing Ends are available to watch on ITVX from 1 June