Alan Davies

Alan Davies' CV is packed with brilliant achievements. Not the least of which is doing more for duffel coats than anyone since Paddington Bear.

For a man best known for sensible winter wear and a 70s Kevin Keegan haircut, Alan Davies hasn't done a bad job of becoming a sex symbol. A lot of that's down to Jonathan Creek, of course. Prior to that cult show, he was just another clever stand up comic with an Edinburgh Festival Critics Award (and who among us doesn't have one of them on our mantelpiece?).

But then, with Jonathan, Alan became the most desirable windmill-dwelling magician-detective on telly - the thinking woman's geek of choice. We hope Alan felt suitably smug about hitting the big time, because when he was a lad his deputy head assured him he'd never amount to much.

He started on his path to stardom in the late 80s by doing gigs in working men's clubs, which strikes us as an idea as weird as Jim Davidson doing performance art at the Edinburgh Festival. Since Jonathan Creek, Alan's done everything from poignant sitcoms (Bob and Rose) to highly unlikely supporting roles (a copper on Marple).

But it's for QI that most of us now know and adore him - his shambling, whimsical persona making him the ideal class clown to the kingly Stephen Fry. You've got to admire Alan for heroically losing just about every programme - his kamikaze gormlessness producing some of the show's greatest answers.

Contrary to popular belief, Alan's not a proper vegetarian, mercilessly consuming poor, helpless fish with heartless abandon. He's also shown a taste for human flesh, biting a homeless bloke's ear in a tussle in 2007.

When not impersonating Mike Tyson or being Stephen Fry's whipping boy, Alan is also a bit of a journalist and even wrote a broadsheet football column for a couple of years. And seeing as we're dealing with a QI star, here's some more useless trivia: the best man at his wedding was Bill Bailey, he's a passionate animal rights campaigner, and he's not altogether terrible at scuba diving. How's that for information that won't benefit anyone in the slightest?