YOU will know Alan Davies from his teasing by clever-clogs Stephen Fry, undermining his team captaincy for 12 years on BBC2's QI.

Then there is Jonathan Creek, the television mystery-drama role that first had Creek cracking unsolvable crimes when Davies was 29, but he originally made his name as a stand-up comic, joining the circuit at 22.

Pursuing TV and acting ambitions kept Davies away from live comedy for 12 years, until he returned to taking the mic with Life Is Pain in 2012, and now he is touring once more in Little Victories, playing the Grand Opera House in York on November 4.

“People are really confused now about me," says the 49-year-old comedian, actor, panellist and writer. "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’m 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 pay cheque and stay schtum."

QI has been good to Davies, he says. "John Lloyd, who created the show, used me after we’d made Abbey National commercials in the 1990s," he recalls. "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’.”

Oh well, Davies must be thankful for Little Victories, a show based loosely on his childhood attempts to prove his eccentric father wrong about 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's quite a funny anecdote about that in the second half, but my Australian producer didn’t know who might turn up if I used that title," says Davies. "So I had to come up with a title where 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." Hey presto, Little Victories.

“The Little Victories routine is about me trying to get my dad to eat blackcurrant jam. He has a limited palate. He also thinks that Indian food would make him ill. It would drive us mad as children; it’s almost pathological," says Davies.

“He has just decided that he doesn’t like certain things. We had plenty of jam at home – strawberry, raspberry, apricot – it was jam a-go-go. But he would refuse to eat jam made of blackcurrant, the finest of all the currants. So we set him a trap …It’s a classic Little Victory.”

Life as a parent is a major talking point in the show too. "There’s a lot about me being a dad and having kids,” says Davies, who is married to  Katie Maskell, from Northumberland, with two small children.

"I’m nearly 50 now and there’s a fair amount of distance between the weird things that happened in my childhood 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.”

Davies admits to being at full stretch all day with his children. "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,” he says.

When in doubt, he reaches for the Mumsnet website. "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," he says.

"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.”

Alan Davies: Little Victories, Grand Opera House, York, November 4, 8pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york