Jim Davidson: A bigot? My wife’s Alan, he’s black

Kind or not, I scold, you’re a menace. You really shouldn’t go around calling people “shirt-lifters” on telly (as he did on Hell’s Kitchen in 2007). “Why?” he protests. “All my friends who are gay call each other ‘poof’.”

Some of my black mates call each other the n-word, I say, but they’d be shocked if I did it too. Comedy pause. “Well, get some different friends, then,” he scoffs. “How precious is that? ‘I can call myself a n***** and you can’t’.” As I said: unbowed.

Amazingly, 10 years ago he was the king of family light entertainment, the overlord of the BBC’s Big Break and The Generation Game. Now he’s comedy kryptonite, the comic other comedians dare not get close to. Eddie Izzard once crossed the street when he saw him coming. The general public takes less umbrage (he still packs them in on tour and is a big pantomime draw) although he says he sometimes gets grief from “Big Issue types” who yell, “You f****** racist!” at him across the car park at his local Waitrose.

Mostly he finds the haters funny, although he is not too pleased to have become the flagbearer for the legacy of Bernard Manning. Is it fair?

Davidson has had his dicy moments — remember Chalky White, the West Indian dolt he used to do in the 1970s? — but today he lives a varied life, has normal friends (some of whom are black — natch), owns an iPad, talks about Ugg boots and has produced five doting children who do “nice” things such as philosophy degrees. He lives in a cottage in Stockbridge, Hampshire, with his fifth wife. Alf Garnett he ain’t.

He built his career on bullying the bullied — blacks, gays, “cripples” — trading on stereotypes that are hideously past their sell-by date. He hasn’t done a lot of the broader material for 25 years, and some of his routines can be very funny, sophisticated even, but determined to surf the line. Desperate for a reaction, he seems to have a duff ear for good taste or not to know when he’s hurting someone.

For someone so black and white, Davidson is decidedly grey. He’s also self-aware. So much so that the play he’s performing in Southampton, Stand Up and Be Counted, is a self-penned drama about an old-school comedian on the slide. Or in Davidson’s words: “Eddie Pierce, a bigoted arsehole making a few idiots laugh and turning everyone else against him.” He’s taken the role of Eddie himself, implying a hitherto unknown taste for self-examination.

Such a confounding career development even earned him a grilling from Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last week, in which he insisted that Pierce wasn’t him but the popular “perception of what I’m like”.

Is the play his mea culpa for Chalky? “I do apologise for any upset I did cause anybody,” he replies, quite humble. “I didn’t set out to do it, [but] I used to do jokes with black people in them, not racist jokes.” I splutter into my water glass. That is a patent lie. What about once announcing conspiratorially — halfway into a joke about Jamaicans — “Before we all get carried away, have we got any in? You can’t see ’em — they hide in the dark corners. I’ll get halfway through this and get a blow dart in my arm.” (Boom boom.) He doesn’t really see the problem. “The nearest to racism I got was Chalky going across a zebra crossing — now you see me, now you don’t.” He’s not proud of these gags (hardly surprising — they’re not very good) but is far from mortified. “Then cue Ben Elton and suddenly not only did everybody hate that sort of thing; we hated the people that had done it. I stopped doing Chalky in 1980.” He shrugs. “But it was all just a load of old jokes.”

Does a joke have no duty beyond being funny or unfunny? Plus, jokes aside, Davidson can be plain offensive. For example, in 2007 on Hell’s Kitchen he referred to Jason Gardiner, the Dancing on Ice judge, as a “shirt-lifter” (he says it was edited to look as if he said it to Brian Dowling, the second Big Brother winner). Why do it? It’s horrible. He harrumphs a little. “Just ask any gay man who knows me if I’m homophobic,” he says. “That’s how you stand up and be counted.”

Whatever, I say. Bandying the word “shirt-lifter” around as an insult on primetime telly isn’t on. Thanks to systematic bullying with words like that and “poof”, a gay teenager is four times more likely to commit suicide than his straight peers. “Why?” asks Davidson, genuinely confused. “Is it because of the state of all the bloody ugly men in Britain?”

You are so unreconstructed, I marvel. He twinkles naughtily and thwacks me on my shoe with his hand to say he’s joking. That said, we’ve hit the nerve. At the heart of the Davidson problem is the fact that he is deeply rankled by the idea of any person — no matter their back story — enjoying protected status from the great leveller of comedy. Clearly, in making this argument it doesn’t help that he’s a white, Tory monarchist with a fetishy devotion to the armed forces and not, say, Chris Morris of Brass Eye fame, who infamously poked fun at people who overreacted to paedophiles.

“Gay people are a protected species,” he soldiers on. “You can do whatever you want in anyone’s company and no one can touch you.” Don’t be daft, I say. “Well, what card can I play? I haven’t got a card.” What are you on about, I say. I’m gay and I haven’t got a card either (maybe it was lost in the post).

Then he proclaims: “Political correctness fuels bigots” — as if the only rational response to the PC brigade is full-throated racism. He is muddled. At the root of it, I suspect, is that he thinks it’s comedy’s place to entertain and that’s that. These arguments don’t interest him as much as getting a laugh. For the record, he thinks BNP members are “highly unintelligent” and doesn’t like the nastier press directed at Muslims, with snide references to terrorism in every sentence. It makes him sad when he’s lumped in, too.

“To my horror I get comments on YouTube with people going, ‘Yeah, c’mon, Jim, stick up for the white people’. I don’t stick up for white people. I hate that.”

So why do people think you do? “It’s like listening to a Pink Floyd album. It means one thing to one person, another thing to someone else.”

What tosh. Comics place jokes with laser precision. Knowing the prejudice they hinge on is crucial to nailing the laugh. “I hate bullying of any kind,” says Davidson. But isn’t lots of his humour just that? “I dunno,” he shrugs — by which he means, “Probably in the past, sorry about that”.

He knew his number was up when the BBC decided to get rid of him from The Generation Game with a year to go on his contract in 2002. He had been on telly since the mid-1970s, when the south Londoner had won New Faces, the last of the “bow-tie comics”. He was still doing televised stand-up a decade ago but the rude words kept being edited out of his act. “A BBC producer told me, ‘A Jim Davidson ‘f***’ is different to a Billy Connolly ‘f***’.” That it was nastier when you said it? “Yeah. Mine didn’t have irony, apparently.”

What comedy offends you? “Ben Elton,” he says instantly. “Just after the Gulf war he was going on about the SAS being in the desert looking for Iraqis and said, ‘They’re in Baghdad you f****** idiots’.”

That really offended you, I ask, scratching my head. “It was too much. It also seemed to be all right to have a dig at the royal family and Margaret Thatcher. I hated all that. I hate having a dig.”

So there you have it, Davidson’s taste test: cripples, fine; soldiers, offensive; Maggie, sacred.

For all this, it’s a surprise he is such good company, warm even. It’s really odd, actually. He manages to push at your buttons while simultaneously making you feel included, that you’re both part of the same stupid world, so relax. He’d be a tremendous dinner party guest if you could take the banter (at one point he says my questions are getting “so poofy” I’ll have to start working for The Guardian instead).

Is your temper better these days? “Yeah,” he says, acknowledging he used to get in terrible rages. How is wife No 5? What’s her name again? “Alan,” he shoots back, deadpan. “He’s a black guy. He’d be here but he’s got mobility problems.”

The gag is so well timed, so against himself, I honk with laughter. You’re killing yourself, I say. These jokes will never work in print. “I know,” he sighs. “But it made you laugh.”

He’s still keen to shake the racist label, so tells a shocker to point out the difference. “Now this is a racist joke,” he whistles. “The rats were infesting Brixton and they put an advert in the paper to say they needed a piper to get rid of them. This piper came along with a green rat and let it out of its cage and all the other rats followed it into the Thames and drowned. And the mayor of Brixton said, ‘That’s fantastic, you haven’t got a green n******, have you?’”

Cue stunned silence from me. “Bernard Manning told that at a royal do in about 1980 that Princess Margaret was at,” he says. Did she laugh? No comment.

Personally, he hates the joke. But I suspect its outrageousness tickled him that night and he wasn’t the only person in the room laughing. That’s the trouble. Lots of people laughed at this stuff for years before they were told it was no longer okay. Davidson was never a Manning but he — and anyone who laughed — became as bad as Manning the day the rules changed. No grey areas allowed.

“Someone needs to be the victim of comedy,” says Davidson in his defence. The trouble is, this time it’s him.