Little Victories

The central anecdote here hinges on petty revenge: baking a sponge cake for a stern father and deliberately lining the layers with blackcurrant jam because the man hated blackcurrant. Watching him take a bite and explode in anger was one of the few triumphs of a difficult childhood. Decades later, that small score settles into the centerpiece of a set about aging, fatherhood, and the strange relief of seeing past resentments soften.

Filmed at the Wellington Opera House in New Zealand and directed by Leon Kirkbeck, the show was released in late 2016 following an international tour. By then, Davies had spent more than a decade cemented in the British public consciousness as the resident fool on QI and the titular investigator of Jonathan Creek. He had returned to stand-up four years earlier with Life Is Pain after a twelve-year absence from the club circuit. While that comeback leaned partly on broad, crowd-pleasing material, this follow-up narrows the focus to Davies’s own domestic life.

Davies was forty-seven when he wrote the hour, and he sounds like it.

He talks openly about the friction between exhaustion and desire, dealing with children who pick up swear words with alarming speed, and the peculiar indignities of middle-aged health. The contrast between his own chaotic parenting and his father’s austere style grounds the set. His father, now in his eighties and living with Alzheimer’s, has mellowed into an unrecognizable gentleness—a shift Davies treats with affection rather than sentimentality.

Between the family material, Davies works the room by surveying the audience on which decade they were born, building nostalgic detours around school trips to Italy, combat radios, and Mr. Men stickers.