IT’S easy to see why comedian Alan Davies thinks other people have an ulterior motive when it comes to asking him questions, even when I ask for his thoughts on Middlesbrough Town Hall as a venue.

He did, after all, become the unwitting fall-guy on TV’s QI where the stand-up and actor gets precious few points from chairman Stephen Fry and is usually declared a dunce in spite of being the quiz show’s resident captain.

“What’s your inference?” Davies counters on my Middlesbrough question before being persuaded I’m not trying to catch him out. “Some of these old halls are fun. These purpose-built modern places usually have an auditorium that’s pitch black – so from on-stage you can’t see anything – and the sound is such that it’s perfect if you’re doing the soliloquy from Hamlet, but when you say something funny you find that the laughter just dies. When you play the Town Hall, or Newcastle City Hall, the laughter reverberates around the high ceiling and you get more or an atmosphere and you get into a rhythm which I much prefer.”

Pursuing a TV and acting career took Davies away from performing live stand-up for 12 years, but it did give him a public persona of drama-comedy character Jonathan Creek, who regularly cracked “unsolvable” crimes.

“People are really confused now about me. They don’t know if I’m the cleverest man on television or completely stupid. That’s the bizarre life I lead. Those who don’t know I’d a stand-up are even more confused by the interval. People come up to me in the street and ask why I let Stephen Fry be so cruel to me.

“I tell them he doesn’t mean it and that he’s harmless. You can’t turn the tables on him, he will just take you down. That’s what I’ve learned over the years. You take your paycheque and stay schtum. QI has been good for my, and John Lloyd who created the show used me after we’d made Abbey National commercials in the 1990s. We did 18 commercials over four years and he said he had the idea for a panel show where you get points for being interesting. I liked the idea and he said he was going to have me as the only regular, which was unusual because you usually have two captains. It took me three or four years to realise that it was purely set up and the classic case of ‘if you don’t know the patsy, then it’s you’. Suddenly, I was Britain’s dunce which John has kind of been apologising for ever since. He asked me the other day, ‘You don’t mind so much these days that people think you’re thick?’ I said, ‘It’s a bit late now’.”

Now married to a Northumberland lass, Katie Maskell, with two small children, Davies has followed his successful 2012 Life Is Pain tour with his current Little Victories show, which is loosely-based on his childhood attempts to prove his eccentric father wrong on foods he refused to try because he thought they were bad for him.

“I should have called my new tour Sex Is Pain, because there is quite a funny anecdote about that in the second half. My Australian producer didn’t know who might turn up if I used that title, so I had to come up with a title that the ticket-buying public knew that it would be two hours of material they’d never seen before. One of the stories involves the things I tried with my dad to stop me going completely mad.

“There’s also a lot about me being a dad and having kids as well,” says Davies, who is interrupted by his son looking for his Action Man. “I’m 50 now and there’s a fair amount of distance between the weird things that happened in my childhood (when his father flatly refused to eat blackcurrant jam) and the smidgeon of wisdom I’ve gained to be funny about things. I think you’re better off as a stand-up as you get older. There’s more to draw on.”

“...and I’m at full stretch all day with my two children now. My daughter was born when I was 43, so I was asking for trouble and that’s what I’ve got. I don’t know how I survive or how people have done this for thousands of years without dying out.”

The family tends to go on tour with Davies when he visits the North-East. “We’ve got a little cottage in Corbridge when my wife grew up and her parents still live there and her sister and one of her brothers live in Hexham. I’ll be up there at half-term. We’ve been together for ten years, so I’ve seen the North-East in all its glory. What used to happen when we first got together was that there was a time when Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough were all in the Premier League and we would travel up when Arsenal were playing away. Katie’s mum was devastated when Middlesbrough got relegated because that was one fewer opportunity for a visit. We need Middlesbrough to get promoted and Sunderland and Newcastle not to get relegated... although they both seem to be trying very hard to do that.”

Davies confesses to using the Mumsnet website when in doubt and says: “Never in human history have so many mothers converged in one place and shared every conceivable bit of information about parenting you could possibly come up with. It’s an amazing resource. There were times when our first baby was making noises and we spent the whole night worrying that she was dying, but on Mumsnet we discovered that all babies make monkey noises.”

n Alan Davies: Little Victories. Middlesbrough Town Hall. Friday, October 30. Box Office: 01642-729729 or middlesbroughtownhallonline.co.uk