Tom Allen: Wealthier people can wait for the right job - I couldn’t

Tom Allen, along with his immaculate tailoring and arched eyebrow, might be a Palladium-filling stand-up, panel-show regular, TV star (The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice), bestselling memoirist (Too Much; No Shame), and host of not one but two chart-topping podcasts (Pottering,Like Minded Friends) – but he also has a visceral feeling that he could be “turfed out at any time”. “There’s always somebody else coming along, always this sense of you don’t know how long you have,” the 42-year-old says. “I suppose growing up feeling quite threatened, I do feel that I should make hay while the sun shines.” In practice, this means he has a hard time taking his “foot off the gas”. “I’ve always felt I’ve had to work to prove my presence,” he says, “to prove that I’m allowed to be here. It doesn’t help that it is difficult to be taken seriously as a gay man – even now. “So I still find I’m in my mind a lot, having to tell the inner critic to shut up. People often say, ‘Why does he shout so much on stage? Why does he talk so fast?’ It’s because I’m trying to drown out the voices in my head.” Allen laughs and takes a sip of coffee.

We are sitting in the sunshine of his garden in London’s southeast suburbia, drinking from a fuchsia set of china cups and saucers, delivered to us on a tray by his partner, Alfie. Allen is dressed in a suit (naturally), but has gone sans tie and paired it with green crocs, which is about as casual as he can seem to go. In this little green oasis – lined with an array of plants I’ve been given a tour of – the only sounds come from the bells ringing in the church at the end of the road and the twittering of the birds darting in and out of a nesting box beside us. It feels as if I have stepped directly into the setting of Allen’s debut novel, Common Decency – a charming comedy of manners about a suburban community and quieter lives often overlooked.

Allen has been thinking about the novel since he moved back to suburbia from central London more than half a decade ago. “There was something about it that felt very creative to me,” he says. “Suburbia is a place that’s ignored; you often talk down about it, people sort of hate it. But actually, I think you get better value when you move to suburbia, and it is much more diverse than people think. “Even though it can seem quite boring, quite mundane, often it is where the most dramatic things happen. That felt quite inspiring to me.” He describes his move into fiction-writing as breathtakingly daunting. “The world of literature can be quite lofty, and I’m somebody who didn’t go to university.” Practically, too: novel-writing is not easy. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “You can’t phone it in on a novel – it takes all of you. You have to mine your soul quite deeply to find those details to bring it to life.

And that is a very vulnerable thing to do.” One of the novel’s characters is an absent father inspired partly by Allen’s paternal grandfather. Another, one half of a gay couple newly arrived in the neighbourhood bringing a certain cool city vibe, is someone in whom Allen recognises a little of himself. More broadly, the book is preoccupied with the lives people lead behind closed doors – the gap between who we are and what we present to the world. It is, for Allen, familiar territory. “I grew up feeling a great discrepancy between how I was able to present myself and how I actually felt,” he says. “Not to bring everything to the foot of being gay, but I think that did account for a lot of that feeling of not feeling like I was right. “I think a lot of people of my generation had that experience, that you couldn’t even discuss it with anybody.

So that inward and outward discrepancy was huge.” Allen grew up in Bromley, not far from where he lives now. His father was a coach driver; his mother worked in House of Fraser – two “very normal Londoners” who were faintly delighted, if slightly baffled, when their son began speaking as if he had wandered in from a much grander household. “When I started talking, I had this posh voice, which my parents were thrilled about,” he says. “I think they thought, ‘Oh look, we’ve got this posh kid we can show off to people,’ I don’t think they realised the world was changing and even boarding school kids were dropping their t’s.” As a child, Allen was lonely, bullied and prone to living in imagined worlds inside his head, so it was only natural that he would decide to go into acting. His mother liked the idea of him being on stage, but his father took longer to adjust. “My dad wanted me to go to university, which was an opportunity he himself had never had. He was very confused and frustrated by me just going, ‘I want to do my own thing’.

But I wanted to be an actor because I thought it would afford me the space to be eccentric.” Only it did not quite turn out like that. He started out in theatre, which was not, he discovered, crying out for a young man with a then-balding head and fantasies of aristocratic grandeur. “I was quite freakish-looking, really, so I was never going to be a juvenile lead,” he says. “And I think in the audition rooms they were faintly horrified by me, in that I was trying to be the absolute opposite of everything they were striving for. I was running towards this idea of fancying myself as an aristocrat, and they were like, ‘We want to take all that down – we’re revolutionaries.’” A friend suggested he try stand-up. “When I first started doing gigs, I would play to silence, and people would have a kind of revulsion on their faces,” he recalls. “Comedy was all still very blokey, audiences included. It didn’t help that the 90s were quite a judgy, spiteful, sneering time.

There wasn’t really room for flamboyance. I just didn’t fit in.” When did he feel as though that shifted? “I’ve never been part of the cool gang,” he responds, “so I still don’t in that sense.

But it took at least 12 or 13 years before I found my voice, and some confidence.” It was around this time – 2016 – when Sarah Millican, a friend he had met on the comedy circuit, asked him to support her sold-out national tour, which helped him to find an audience. It also paved the way for guest spots on shows including Mock the Week and Eight out of 10 Cats – as well as his role of doling out comedic commentary and critiques on Bake Off: Extra Slice, which he has held since 2018 and which has given him both a larger following and “the space to be myself”. Looking back, he wishes he had owned who he was sooner. “What I regret about my twenties and early thirties is I wish I’d just gone, ‘If you don’t like it, you don’t like it, but I’m going to be me.’ Instead, I was constantly paralysed by trying to please different people, by being something else. That’s the stuff I cringe about looking back.

I didn’t even give myself enough space to go, ‘You’re young, be bad at something’. I wish I had calmly allowed myself to fail.” Not that he had much room to. Unless you come from money, the creative industries are notoriously hard to make work – it takes a lot of scraping by until, if you are lucky, you are suddenly paid a lot.What were his own experiences? “My parents drilled into me that you have to earn your own living,” he says. “I never asked them for money, I always made sure I could pay my way through. I also had a policy that I would say yes to every single gig that came in.

Whereas if you’re a wealthier person, you can go,” cue husky-voiced impersonation, “‘I’m just going to do what I feel is right for me.’” It is a lesson learnt from his father, who was always taking extra shifts. “He would work weekends and birthdays, and even though he would sometimes be quite resentful, he taught me that how hard you work is one of the few things you can control. “You can’t control what people think of you. You can’t control whether you fit with the current trend or the current tastemaker, or whatever gatekeeper. All you can control is how hard you work.” The danger, of course, is that it can be difficult to stop. Has his work ethic ever been to the detriment of anything else? “My partner would probably like me to have more space to enjoy life,” he admits. “But I’m working on it.” After being single until his late thirties, Allen has been with Alfie for five years and credits him with helping to loosen something in him. “He is teaching me to relax,” he says. “To say it’s OK to go on holiday, or let’s not look at our phones.

That has been a huge learning curve for me, to actually take a step back.” Perhaps age has helped, too. “Since my forties, accepting that maybe I’m all right is something I feel more in tune with now,” he says. “Realising that actually, I’ve done enough. Saying, ‘That’s enough work for today.’ That I’m enough. I’m slowly starting to get better at that.” ‘Common Decency’ (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) is out now