There’s a telling exchange towards the end of The Trouble with Dad (Channel 4). David Baddiel and his older brother Ivor are at their father Colin’s place. Was Colin good at telling them he loved them, asks Charlie Russell, the film-maker, from behind the camera? No, he never told them that, says David. “I think mainly because he didn’t,” he adds, laughing. Meaning didn’t love them.
“Your son’s just said that you never loved them,” Charlie says to Colin.
“That’s a load of bollocks,” says Colin. “Arr, that’s good ...” says David, for once a little lost for words, perhaps at the shock of hearing from his father, albeit in a roundabout way, that he loved him.
David recognises the significance of the exchange, and highlights it later. “There’s a moment that’s unexpected, when you turned the camera on him and said, ‘You know, your son’s saying you never loved him’,” he says to Charlie. “And he said, ‘that’s absolute fucking bollocks’. It’s a way – perhaps the only way, in his entire life, Pick’s disease or no Pick’s disease – of him saying that he does love us. And it would only ever happen like that.”
It’s like a microcosm of the whole film boiled down into a minute or so. Colin has Pick’s disease, a type of frontotemporal dementia whose symptoms can include inappropriate behaviour, irritation, mood swings, apathy, impatience and uncontrolled swearing. It doesn’t erase a person as dementia usually does, but instead turns them into a cruel caricature of who they were, more intense, less controlled but recognisable as the same person underneath. One of the reasons David did the documentary, he says, is to show that dementia doesn’t always mean what people think it means. But this brutal, brave, awkwardly personal film is more than just about raising Pick’s awareness.
It’s (possibly) interesting that David remembers his dad saying, “that’s absolute fucking bollocks”, when actually Colin said, “that’s a load of bollocks”. Is he – typically for a son, and unfairly – seeing the worst in his father and being more embarrassed than he needs to be? Not that Colin doesn’t display a healthy amount of that symptom, the sweary one – there’s probably nothing in it, Sigmund. But anyway, David misremembering says a lot about who Colin is and was, and who David is. And who Colin was and is to David – a hell of a lot, David admits, even if it hasn’t always been the easiest of relationships. And it’s interesting to see how much more like their father David seems to be than his two brothers, Ivor and Dan. Not just in the bants and the comedy rants, but an inherited emotional toughness too; David’s not exactly getting all huggy and lovey with Daddy before it’s too late. He’s more likely to make a joke about it instead.
The comedy is important. David says he uses his standup as a way of announcing things publicly about who he is and what he’s done that he can no longer get across to his father because of the dementia. And possibly never could get across, pre-Pick’s. Hey, if you can’t talk to your father, how about trying it on a paying audience instead of an expensive shrink? I can see the logic.
But, also, the joking with his brothers, and with Colin, is important, because it is very funny, as well as awful and very sad. Siblings are clearly so crucial in a situation like this – to share it, and laugh about it, or cry, if that’s what you do. You wouldn’t want to do it alone. Quick, parents of single children: have at least one more, for their sake, later on.
David doesn’t make peace with his dad; he doesn’t want to, nor would Colin. “He’s not a man of peace, of contentment, my father,” he says, proudly. “He’s a man of aggravated pissed-offness, he’s a man who was shouty and irritated with life and ranty and funny about that.” But nor does he feel anger. “My dad’s incessant maleness and unemotionalness looking back on it, and the fact that he wasn’t able to show affection in any way, apart from swearing at us and playing football with us, obviously did create damage. But I sort of don’t mind the damage now.”
Nevertheless, David does want to make some kind of emotional connection with Colin before he dies. And that he does achieve, even in a roundabout, not obviously emotionally connecting way – when his father says: “That’s a load of bollocks.”
