David Baddiel’s one-man show includes both stories about his mother and stories about masturbation, but although it would be customary at this point to add the phrase “of course, not together”, that is not in this case possible. There is, indeed, a quite extraordinary “anecdote” – we’ll come on to mystifying quotation marks in due course – about his mother masturbating; we also hear about her belief that her father used to sally into Soho looking for prostitutes, her ability to terrify the teenage Baddiel’s friends with her loud enjoyment of the pleasures of the marriage bed, and – crucially – her lengthy and barely concealed affair with David White, a trader in golfing memorabilia.
But over the course of a couple of hours in an intimate south London studio theatre, in which he flits from swipes at the madness of Twitter to clips from the genealogical TV programme Who Do You Think You Are?, he also tells us about his mother’s sudden death, 18 months ago, and its shattering aftermath; about her escape from Nazi Germany, at the age of five months; about how, when he was around 12, she explained to him that she had another name apart from Sarah. It was Frommet, and it was imposed on her by the Third Reich as part of their naming laws for Jews. She always hated it. My Family: Not the Sitcom is, in various ways, a show about resisting the identity others seek to force on you – and about how Sarah Baddiel did that by living a life of exuberant and unfettered idiosyncrasy.
So popular has his recreation of his family life been that in September it will open in the West End. It’s a work of extremes, of louring darkness punctuated by sudden shafts of light, sombreness relieved by moments of absurdity. One minute, you are mourning the lost childhood of a child refugee, and the next laughing at her importunate use of punctuation (why, wonders Baddiel, in a round robin email about Thanksgiving dinner, a tradition she is trying to inaugurate, does she put the word “trimmings” in quotation marks, when she simply means roast potatoes? It appears to drive him absolutely mad).
It’s also an attempt to animate a woman with precious few boundaries via a show that has even fewer. If that sounds exaggerated, consider the fact that Baddiel reads out an email that his mother wrote to her lover in which she confides, “My clitoris is on fire!” Consider too, if you wonder how he might have come by it, that her two elder sons, Ivor and David, were copied into that email.
I meet Baddiel in a branch of Starbucks near where he lives in north London. It’s fairly early in the morning for a man who was on stage the night before, and then, as I know from Twitter, watched the football highlights. And already today he’s had to deal with a crisis in the guinea pig cage. But although he’ll admit to being a bit tired, he immediately engages in an intense, frank, and at times emotionally charged conversation. So, how, I ask him, can he stand up there and say all those things?
“It’s true what I say,” he replies, alluding to a moment in the show, “about having no gene for shame. What comes out of me when I feel an untruth happening close to me, like I felt when people were talking about my mother at her funeral, when I just saw this idea of who she actually was slipping away, I just want to tell people the truth. And that’s where it comes from. For me that doesn’t feel necessarily brave; it’s kind of an urgent thing that comes upon me when I see the world slipping out of what I perceive as the reality.”
Of course, I say, that’s a very common and probably inevitable part of bereavement: although grief is an overwhelmingly personal and sometimes isolating experience, death is far more communal, in the sense that everyone has a different view of the dead person, and different aspects of them they want to commemorate or preserve. Acknowledging the difficulty of that is one thing; turning it into a stage show – even if that is your day job – is quite another, surely?
The simple response, he says, is that he so enjoyed doing his last show – Fame: Not the Musical, about how celebrity culture reduces and constrains personality (his labels are, he thinks, football, Jew, lad) – that he decided to do another. Prior to Fame, he hadn’t done standup for around a decade, and when he came back to it, he wanted to do something different, a more meaningful form of storytelling; after Fame, he says, “I thought, what else do I have that feels close to me, a bank of stories? And my parents immediately came to mind. I knew they were unusual, and I knew that the stories were comic or poignant; I started thinking about that, and I didn’t really stop to think about the private-public thing that much.”
He did, though, have to consider his brothers. I find this particularly gripping because, by total chance, I had found myself sitting next to his brother, Ivor, during the show. When you are that close to someone whose mother’s sexual habits, eccentric parenting style and death are being discussed, it does make you a little self-conscious, particularly if you are laughing like a drain. “It’s all true!” Ivor said to me at the interval.
It was, says Baddiel, “complicated for them”, and remains “unresolved” because his younger brother Dan, who lives in the US and whom we see in a photograph in which Baddiel likens him to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s Mr Tumnus, has still not seen it. Ivor, too, resisted Baddiel’s entreaties to come to the warm-up shows, and first saw the performance on press night.
“It’s very important to me that the show remains authentic while I do it,” says Baddiel, “so it’s never been learned. I know what’s coming but I tell the stories slightly differently every night; they’re not word for word, and that’s because I don’t want it to be a performance, I want it to be me telling you the story. And thus it can catch me. I can find myself really feeling, now I’m going to cry. I felt that during press night a few times but most of all when Ivor said he loved it. I thought I’m going to go.” He pauses, and his eyes moisten, though he also laughs. “I’m going to go now.”
He has cried during the show, and once had to stop for a bit because his throat was closing up. But, he maintains, “I can’t do it in a way that feels artificial. Either I’m moved or I’m not, and some nights I’m less moved than others.” He tells me about the trauma of his mother’s sudden and painful death, the flashbacks he suffered for months afterwards, the nightmare of having to explain what had happened repeatedly to his father Colin, who has dementia, and whose illness also features heavily in the show. Even though Baddiel was 50, he says, he was struck by the shock of realising he no longer had the licence to behave as a child.
If, as I suggest to him, the show is in part a way of continuing to talk to his mother, to keep her with him, it is the very opposite of a hagiography. The parts that deal with her relationship with the suave, mustachioed David White – “he does look like a classic 70s cad” – are often hilarious, particularly as Baddiel describes the way his mother developed an obsession with golf and golfing memorabilia – and indeed a business based on it – to mirror her lover’s interests. But she was, nonetheless, being unfaithful to his father, threatening the stability of the family unit, and bewildering her three sons. One of the most extraordinary moments comes when Baddiel tells the audience that despite his mother’s openness – or, at least, lack of covertness – about her affair, his father never knew. Can that really be true, I ask him; isn’t it just as likely that children don’t always know what their parents know?
“Obviously it’s all my refraction of it,” he says. “This was me swimming about in this strange circus of people. But I do think my dad didn’t know about it.” He describes his father – the Welsh descendant of Lithuanian Jews fleeing the pogroms – as an angry man, an immediate man, a scientist with limited interest in the life of the emotions; his parents, he insists, were not well matched. “In fact the most emotionally articulate thing my mother ever said to me, which really took me aback at the time – I was in my 20s – she said to me, it’s so tiring living without an emotional life. And I thought blimey, there’s a whole other woman in there.”
This is the show’s brilliance – and why, despite its specificity, it is so involving. For all his parents’ oddities and dysfunction, you are never in doubt that Baddiel loves them; you feel that his compassion towards them encompasses all their frailties (even when they object to he and his partner, comedian and actor Morwenna Banks, naming their first child Dolly. What about Shenandoah, they suggest). Somehow, Baddiel gives his audience permission to feel infuriated, embarrassed, exasperated with our parents, living or dead; to see the long passage of time in which they were also children with imperfect parents. It is, among other things, one of the most humanising pieces of work I can remember seeing.
Much of this, I think, comes down to Baddiel’s mother’s childhood; to the fact that her father was interned for 18 months on the Isle of Man, that he spent the rest of his life in and out of mental hospitals. “Fair enough, I always think,” says Baddiel. “His family had been murdered and he had lost his livelihood. It was so unbelievably terrible that it was amazing he wasn’t just howling on the heath every night.” In that context, why wouldn’t his mother resolve to live her life as she pleased? “She should be more nuts, or at least her nuts-ness should be much more dour, and awful, and it’s not – it’s kind of exuberant, life-affirming at some ridiculous level, and that’s the narrative I’m trying to create.”
We begin to talk about Jewishness. Baddiel’s Twitter biography is a single word, “Jew” – primarily, he says, because it’s funny, but also because “I’ve also always been very interested that that’s a swear word to some people.” He notes a preference for the phrase “Jewish people”, rather than “Jews”, which he thinks reflects a deep-seated feeling that to be a Jew is a bad thing. On the issue of antisemitism and the left, he thinks that some “buy the myth that Jews are powerful and privileged and moneyed and all the rest of it. As a result, they can’t quite extend the protections that they extend to other minorities to Jews; at some level they think they don’t really need them. And also, surely our job is to fight against the propertied and moneyed classes. All that is in there.”
In the show, he demonstrates how his tweets about his mother and grandparents elicit replies invoking Gaza; to one, he replied, “Just. Fuck. Off”, enraged by the constant demand that he state his position. (He elaborates a little for me: he thinks it’s perfectly possible to think that the state of Israel shouldn’t exist, but that as soon as you “attach to your tweet a meme of a Jewish-looking banker controlling the American economy, then it’s antisemitic. That’s the problem – it’s the very mixed-up overlap between that political position and very ancient antisemitic tropes.”
Our trip to Starbucks is nearly over, and I realise I’ve asked him nothing about all the other stuff. It is, after all, 20 years since he, Frank Skinner and the Lightning Seeds released the football song Three Lions, with its refrain “30 years of hurt / never stopped me dreaming”. People are always saying they should re-release it, he says, but all they could have done was dub 50 over 30, and “that’s a bit depressing”. He worries that the England team have a fear of failure that affects them at key moments, such as penalties; he’s also enjoyed the resurgence of the Welsh national team. He looks forward to Antonio Conte taking over as manager of Chelsea; like every other football fan, he would like his team to sign Gareth Bale.
But if I’m truthful, my heart isn’t in asking him these questions, and I don’t think he’s that interested either. I just want to sit and hear about Sarah, Colin and the extraordinary garden of stories that our parents’ lives gift us.
My Family: Not the Sitcom runs at Vaudeville theatre, London from 12 Sept to 15 Oct
Baddiel digested
1964 Born the second son of Colin and Sarah Baddiel, both of Jewish descent, in New York state. The family move back to England four months later, settling in northwest London.
1986 Graduates with a double first in English from King’s College, Cambridge. Abandons a PhD in English at UCL to become a full-time comedian on the London cabaret circuit.
1989 Begins working on BBC sketch show The Mary Whitehouse Experience with fellow Cambridge graduates Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis and Rob Newman.
1993 As a double act, he and Rob Newman become the first comedians to perform at Wembley Arena: a sell-out gig.
1994 Hosts Fantasy Football League on ITV with Frank Skinner.
1996 Co-writes and sings Three Lions for the English football team during the Euro tournament- the only song in British pop history to reach No 1 three times. His first novel, Time for Bed, is published.
2000 An improvised Edinburgh fringe Q&A show becomes Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, a live and unscripted comedy programme shown on ITV.
2001 Birth of Baddiel’s first child, Dolly, with partner and fellow comedian Morwenna Banks.
2002 Whatever Love Means, his second novel, is published.
2004 His son Ezra is born.
2010 Writes the screenplay for The Infidel, a British comedy about Muslim and Jewish identity.
2012 Appears in BBC2’s World’s Most Dangerous Roads, driving through Ethiopia from Addis Ababa to Aksum with Hugh Dennis.
2013 Performs Fame: Not the Musical, his first standup show in 15 years.
2016 My Family: Not the Sitcom opens at Menier Chocolate Factory in London.
