There he is. Walking towards the exclusive little restaurant on Holland Street in Kensington. Cream mac flapping in the wind, poppy in the lapel, hair - silvery now - a bit wild, glasses. A little shorter than you might think for a comic giant. He comes in, smiles, shakes hands, neatly arranges his two pairs of glasses on the table, settles down and starts to talk about how things have changed in Ireland.
We're on Dave Allen's home territory. The enormously successful Irish humorist who revolutionised the way comedians in Britain presented their material in the 1960s and 1970s, now approaching pensionable age, lives in the leafy opulence of Kensington, on a street of beautiful three-story Victorian townhouses. Divorced from the English actress Judith Stott in 1983, their four grown-up children are often around. His life is comfortable - Kensington Gardens and Holland Park are nearby and there's a good range of facilities, he says, including a nice cheese shop and an excellent butcher. There's a Cypriot food store, too, where he gently teases the owner about Turkish figs. You wonder if this is about as controversial as he gets these days.
Yet this is the man who was banned from Australian television for a year for telling his producer on a live show to go away and masturbate and leave him in peace to continue an interview instead of going to the adverts, who scandalised countless people in the 1970s with a sketch which involved the Pope doing a striptease, which led to RTE placing a de facto ban on his shows in 1977, who upset Mary Whitehouse in 1984 with a humorous account of a post-coital conversation, whose use of the word "lavatory" on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s was objected to (innocent days indeed), for whom the BBC apologised when, in 1990, he used the F-word in the punchline to a joke - an incident about which questions were even asked in the House of Commons. A Goliath in terms of controversy, ratings and influence, he opened comedy up from the traditional gag-set-up-gag structure by introducing a more laid-back, satirical, personal, storytelling style, in Australia, and later on British TV shows such as chat show Tonight with Dave Allen and the hugely successful Dave Allen at Large - a mixture of sketches and sit-down comedy. And behind that calm facade, as he paused to sip his whiskey, or flick cigarette ash off his immaculate suit, he was angry - quietly and humorously furious on the subject of political hypocrisy, or church domination or, in fact, all forms of authoritarianism. His uncompromising stance has earned him the role of godfather of comedy, a cult status of sorts, and the admiration of today's generation of young stand-ups.
In Dave Allen on Life, the video he has just released, he introduces his set - standing up, but with a chair on stage, in contrast to his trademark seated-with-whiskey-and-cigarette style for his earlier TV comedy shows - by explaining that he has retired, but that every so often he has to do a bit of work to keep himself in the style to which he has become accustomed - "a bit of an Irish retirement, actually". But lest you think he has gently subsided into village life in the city, Allen hasn't quite retired - that was just a gag, he insists. But in recent years he has certainly cut down his workload; he does the occasional TV special, and he won a Lifetime Comedy Award in 1996. There are programmes he plans to make, that are different to his acerbic one-man shows - for instance, a sort of storytelling series he has planned where all the tales have a weird or funny or supernatural twist at the end. But he doesn't want to tour. "I spent all my life travelling. After a while you just think: what am I doing? And you're working for something, and you're well paid, and you invest it in a nice house and you're never there. And I've reached that point where I really don't want to travel."
But he keeps his hand in: this video is of some brilliantly funny observational material he recorded for a BBC series but didn't use. "It's a kind of reflective thing. The longer you live the more you understand yourself, you understand your emotions, and your dishonesty or your hypocrisy. You're continually changing. Between 20 and 30 you don't really notice any changes and between 30 and 35 you probably notice one or two, then at 40 . . . There were all kinds of things I was becoming aware of: My eyebrows, which are getting quite, quite long. If I leave them there they'll take off. So you begin to look at yourself like that. And then you kind of ruminate about what you were like when you were young, so there's a material, not necessarily self-engrossed, but you begin to look at yourself - or at least I begin to look at myself - and you become aware of things." The video is very much a wry portrait of a comedian at this stage of his life, with skin sagging, tufty hair springing from various unexpected areas of the face, forgetting where he's left his glasses, being annoyed by younger people, rueful, occasionally even mildly cantankerous. Always the most truthful of comedians, his public utterances have always been his personal preoccupations, and that is why Allen is still relevant, on the rare occasions we are lucky enough to catch him.
He's a hard man to keep on track - you think he's rambling off the point, but then you remember that this is a man who has built a career on chat, and you realise that he's showing by example, rather than feeding you an easy quote. If he doesn't have much to say on the subject of comedy itself, it's perhaps because he is a little like the reporter he once wanted to be: he simply tells people about funny things he has seen, putting the spin of a natural story-teller on them. "I don't know if there's somebody out there, some god of comedy, dropping out little bits saying `here, use that, that's for you, that's to keep you going'." He says that comedy takes an irreverent look at the world, and indeed his take on life has always been irreverent. He remarks early on about the huge changes that have taken place in Ireland since he left at the age of 20, how the church is not nearly so powerful, the political scandals - "I was actually thinking the other day about Haughey; what's happened to that? Because that's suddenly gone quiet." And you realise as you talk, that Allen is still angry - in a slightly bemused way sometimes - but still angry in the same sense that has always driven his comedy.
"The hierarchy of everything in my life has always bothered me - to this day I'm bothered by power, people, whoever they might be, whether it's the government or the policeman in the uniform or the man on the door - they still irk me a bit. From school, from the first nun that belted me. People used to think, of the nice sweet little ladies . . . they used to knock the fuck out of you, in the most cruel manner that they could. They'd find bits of your body that were vulnerable to intense pain - grabbing you by the ear, or by the nose, and lift you, and say `don't cry!' It's very hard not to cry. I mean not from emotion but pain. The priests were the same. I sit and watch politicians with great cynicism, total cynicism. If it was you or I we'd be in the nick, and Haughey is out and Clinton can lie under oath."
Allen has always had a reputation for laying into Catholicism, which was one of the reasons he caused so many storms. Being brought up a Catholic, and educated by nuns and priests during an extraordinarily closed era obviously had an effect. "Dublin has been fairly secular for years. There's always been a kind of fighting objection to the church, priests coming around telling women who've had 15 children to have another six. There's always been an angriness with the economic poverty of people in Dublin, and the church's attitude towards money itself. I remember going to mass as a child and being absolutely astounded when they used to read out the donations, the collections that were made, from - I was going to say the dock, but from the pulpit. And the woman who had no means and who probably gave up 90 per cent of her money, was subjected to the most bizarre cruelty - `Mrs O'Toole has given 10 shillings' - and people would go `10 shillings, a holy lady,' and all that. And it whittled down, and some gave fourpence, and the poor person in the corner of the church being ostracised by fourpence - `hope you can do better next week'. Jesus." (His voice has got lower here, with the horror of it.)
"The institution you never laughed at in Irish society as a kid, was the church, whether it be the Catholic Church or the Church of Ireland. It was alright to snigger at the Church of Ireland but certainly not to laugh at the Church of Rome. And you couldn't take the piss out of the police. You couldn't talk about judges, they were all kind of respectable people and I've used that ever since."
Dave Allen was born David Tynan O'Mahony, the youngest of three boys, in Firhouse, Dublin, in 1936. It was a very different place when he was growing up - for a start their house was surrounded by fields. "There was one shop and one pub. The family grave is out in Tallaght. I remember Tallaght with the two churches, the Dominican church and the church of Ireland, which is where my dad is buried, and there was a pub and there was a hall where we used to go and see shows, travelling shows. You'd have a variety show to start with and then there'd be a melodrama. And every kid in the district would come and we'd all travel three or four miles to get to this place. The nearest neighbour we had was, I don't know, half a mile away."
His was a reasonably prosperous, middle-class upbringing. His grandmother was Norah Tynan who edited the Freeman's Journal, his aunt Kathleen Tynan was a poet. His father, Cullen "Pussy" O'Mahony, who died when David was 12, was the general manager of The Irish Times. He fondly remembers going into the offices as a child with his father. "It was always an adventure for me to go up to the office. They had this wonderful kind of desk which was a deep red mahogany of some sort. And all the lights had green shades, so it was very kind of - night-time, even in the middle of the day. And some of the people there used to wear the old green eye-shades."
He remembers the legendary editor Bertie Smyllie. "He was a very good friend of my dad's. He and Daddy were great drinking partners. My memory as a child was of Smyllie giving me two half crowns on Christmas eve, which was a fortune." His brother Peter later worked in the Times, as a sub-editor. Allen started work as a clerk in the Irish Independent front office. "The idea was to get into newspapers and then once you were in the building you'd kind of find which way you wanted to go." He pauses and laughs. "I wanted to go out, actually." After a short period on the Drogheda Argus, he moved to London with Fleet Street in mind. That didn't take and he worked in a variety of jobs, in factories and a stint in Butlins, and from there on a career in entertainment beckoned. He says: "There were two ladies in my life." And you wonder what kind of racy story is coming. But the first turns out to be Sophie Tucker, the great vaudeville star who was always billed as "The Last of the Red Hot Mommas", who worked with him when he was a young man and suggested to him that he go to Australia, which is where he first hit the big time. "An absolutely wonderful lady. Great act, great performer, as big hearted as you could ever get. What was I? A baby comic of 22, 23 years of age and this woman takes me in, and continues a friendship. She was very helpful."
The second woman also had a huge effect on his career, later, when he moved to Australia. "I worked with another lady called Helen Traubel, who was the great Wagnerian star of the New York Met. Then she did a radio show with Jimmy Durante in which he sang, and she started a nightclub career. She was a huge Scandinavian, big bones. She had a self-knocking sense of humour, she had the best laugh in the world. And I was working with her in Sydney and again, we used to go out. And I used to talk about Ireland and just being a kid, and she said to me one night, `why don't you talk about that on stage? Why go out and try and tell funny one-liners; why don't you introduce some of this, because it's not only funny, it's good to listen to and it's factual'."
So a style was born, 40 years ago, halfway around the world, a style that made people think a little differently about comedy, about the power of words, about authority, about the world around them. And now, in Kensington, Allen has finished his lunch and has to go for a steam and a swim. He potters off in his bemused and somewhat absent-minded way, hailing a neighbour: "How are your dogs these days?"
"They're dead."
"Oh."
Dave Allen could build a whole routine around the exchange.
Dave Allen on Life is on general release from Polygram