‘To Mum, having an affair seemed very glamorous’
AS A comedian who has made millions from his own brand of laddish humour, David Baddiel knows how to shock. He has spent more than a quarter of a century regaling us with jokes about Judaism, football and (in graphic detail) sex.
But one extraordinary story the Cambridge-educated comic has never fully told is that of his own family life. It is a tale of infidelity, pornography, and sexual obsession — not Baddiel’s, but his mother’s.
Now, however, this troubling story has made it onto the stage — courtesy of Baddiel himself. This week, he opened his one-man show, My Family: Not The Sitcom, which lays bare in eye-popping detail every twist and turn of his mother’s voracious sex life, which often did not involve her husband.
Perhaps it’s just as well Sarah Fabian Baddiel died two years ago so she is not here to see her son read out her adulterous emails to a hooting London theatre audience.
Then again, as we’ll see, she might actually have revelled in the limelight.
It is hardly the first time a comedian has turned out to have had an unconventional upbringing. Stretching back to Chaplin and Tony Hancock, it’s common enough for comics to have family skeletons clanking around in the closet which provide a psychological motivation to seek applause on stage as a means to drown out unhappiness.
In Baddiel’s case, he is still picking his way through the emotional minefield he first encountered during his deeply dysfunctional childhood. And rarely has a high-profile performer publicly laid bare such a shocking story — a story, readers should be aware, that can’t be addressed without including some unsettling detail.
His father, Colin Baddiel, 82, has Pick’s disease, a kind of dementia which makes him prone to incessant and obscene swearing, sexual disinhibition and extreme rudeness.
Not that he was all that different before he got it, according to Baddiel. As the comic said to the doctor who diagnosed his father: ‘Sorry, does he have a disease, or have you just met him?’
Baddiel’s mother was more than a match for her husband’s outrageous behaviour, being incredibly uninhibited when it came to sex.
She loved discussing every detail of her sex life in front of her children, and kept a lover right up until her death aged 75. Baddiel believes she inherited her sexual appetite from her own father, who was quite open about his addiction to visiting prostitutes in Soho.
‘For her, sex was how you outflanked other people’s expectations,’ says Baddiel in his show. ‘The idea of having an affair was very glamorous to her.
‘She was a product of the sexual revolution of the Sixties. She liked people to know there was more to her than the suburban North London housewife that she was.’
Her exhibitionist behaviour took its toll on her son. Baddiel has suffered from chronic insomnia and depression for most of his adult life, and spent a lot of time in therapy.
For years, he would only ever get three hours’ sleep, and has tried all kinds of antidepressants and antianxiety pills.
Until now, he has never spoken publicly about his feelings for his parents, which are complex to say the least.
They clearly did the best for him, sending him to private school Haberdashers’ Aske’s in Hertfordshire. From there, he went on to study at King’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a double first in English.
But they also — unintentionally or otherwise — humiliated him throughout his formative years.
He found his mother’s unashamed openness about her sex life excruciating as a teenager, and even as an adult would dread what she might come out with.
His father’s coldness was almost worse — if David would ever show any sign of affection, like resting his head on his father’s shoulder while watching TV, his father would tease for him for being ‘gay’.
The question now is why David Baddiel has decided to put all this out in the open.
His two brothers, Ivor and Daniel — one older, one younger — had not seen the show until the opening night on Tuesday, but have now given their approval.
This week, I went along and found an audience at once horrified, fascinated and ultimately moved by the frankness with which Baddiel shares his family’s most intimate secrets. He seemed constantly to be gauging the audience’s reaction, and at times it was hard to tell if they were laughing because the material was funny, or because they were so shocked that they didn’t know what else to do.
Baddiel is now 51, but clearly still has a bucketload of unresolved feelings: he admits to crying every time a short clip of his father appears on a screen at the back of the stage, because it’s one of the few occasions his dad ever gave him a hug.
The truth is that the show comes across as an extended therapy session. Some might see it as a way for Baddiel to get some measure of revenge on his parents by turning their excesses into money-making material; equally, his unresolved hunger for their love and approval is plain.
So just how outrageous were Colin and Sarah Baddiel? On the face of it, they led an ordinary middle-class lifestyle. When David was born in 1964, the family was living in upstate New York, where Colin had a job as a research scientist for Unilever.
He and Sarah had met in London, at a student dance, and married in 1960. They moved back to Britain when David was four months old, and settled in Dollis Hill, NorthWest London.
So far, so ordinary. But Sarah’s early life had been full of drama.
Her parents had fled the Nazis in 1939, months after her birth, leaving behind a successful brick factory.
They had nothing but the clothes they arrived in, and were forced to live in a single room in Cambridge. Sarah’s father, Ernst, was then interned as an alien for 18 months in a prisoner-of-war camp on Jersey, and never quite recovered his zest for life.
Over the years, Sarah became increasingly convinced that Ernst and his wife Otti weren’t her real parents: she believed her mother’s brother and his wife were her actual parents, who entrusted their baby daughter to Ernst and Otti when they fled Germany, being unable themselves to leave.
This theory was explored by Baddiel and his mother during a TV episode of the genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?, though it was never proved.
After Colin was made redundant from his job at Unilever, he found
work selling Dinky toys on a market stall. Sarah initially found employment as a dental receptionist, then set up a business selling children’s books. But her energies were channelled into more than just tea-dances.
In the Seventies, when David was still at school, she fell in love with another man, David White, and embarked on an affair that would last for decades.
Far from being coy about it, she would openly boast about her lover to the family, delighting in the Elizabeth-Taylor-style glamour she imagined the affair conferred on her.
She would leave transcripts of her love letters to White lying around the house, and deliberately recorded their phone conversations on the answering machine, much to the teenage Baddiel’s embarrassment.
In later life, she even copied her sons into intimate emails with her lover. Bizarrely, despite the obvious signs, her husband pretended not to notice.
Looking back at his mother now, in the show Baddiel describes her as ‘idiosyncratic’ and ‘wild and whirling, but not in an aristocratic way’. He goes on to disclose the truth about her vigorous love life, and is surprisingly frank about her love of masturbation and pornography, a hobby she shared with her husband.
They each kept their own stash of pornographic magazines in their bedside tables. And because they were both hoarders, the magazines remained in the family home until their sons decided to clear them out after their mother’s death.
In the show, Baddiel describes how he was kept awake at night by the sound of his parents having sex. His father was particularly noisy, he says, making a sound like Chewbacca, the hairy creature from the Star Wars films.
On one occasion, Baddiel recalls how he had a friend to stay and warned him he might hear his parents having sex in the night. Sure enough, at 2.30am, the friend rushed into David’s room, terrified by the noises he was hearing, ‘which sounded like a dying walrus’.
On another occasion, he heard his mother pleasuring herself and groaning her lover’s name ‘David’. It was, of course, all the more excruciating because this was also her son’s name.
For all that, Sarah Baddiel undoubtedly had enormous chutzpah, as well as considerable self-regard. She came across on that genealogy programme as a winningly charismatic woman, loud, forthright and constantly hogging the attention for herself.
She was, says Baddiel, a typical Jewish mother: caring, outspoken, and determined to do the best for her three sons.
Throughout his adult life, she would come to every one of David’s shows. But she also loved being the centre of attention.
At the premiere of Baddiel’s film The Infidel, she burst onto the red carpet to take a picture of him. Afterwards, however, the framed picture she had hanging in her home was not the one she took, but one taken of her on the red carpet photographing her son.
Though Baddiel’s father is still alive, his blushes are not spared in the stage show either. The comic describes him as a very blokey bloke, who called his sons ‘w **** rs’ as a term of endearment.
When Baddiel first introduced him to his partner, the comedienne Morwenna Banks, his father’s opening words were ‘You couple of c***s are late’. Throughout Baddiel’s childhood, Colin was a remote figure, who would come home from work, then go straight to the pub.
He had grown up in a tiny terrace house in the slums of Swansea, and went to the same school as Dylan Thomas. Like the poet, he drank and smoked and occasionally spent a night in prison, though there was never any danger of him writing any poetry.
He did, however, manage to leave Swansea and get himself a degree, ending up with a PhD in biochemistry.
He was involved in the manufacture of LSD (initially developed in laboratories for medicinal uses), and at one point took four times the recommended dose, which, Baddiel jokes, could explain a lot.
Now, in old age, he has suffered from a terrible form of dementia for eight years. It has, says Baddiel, turned him into a ‘Spitting Image puppet of himself’, in which his worst qualities are magnified.
So he is nightmarishly rude, swears obscenely, and even makes hideous sexual advances to complete strangers. Even as he was going under a general anaesthetic for a hospital operation, he was flicking V-signs at the nurses. When Baddiel said goodbye to him in the hospital, he replied: ‘Well, f*** off then.’
Worst of all, he was recently banned from a genteel North London day care centre for getting into a fight with a fellow patient. For most people, these memories and experiences would be deeply personal, humiliating perhaps, and not for a moment to be aired as a source of public amusement.
For Baddiel, they are things to be dealt with in the only way he knows how — through humour. ‘Why shouldn’t we laugh at these things?’ he asks the audience. And laugh they do, at first uncomfortably, but finally with joy and affection.
At the start of the show, Baddiel says he is bad at lying, and that all the revelations that will follow are true. It’s little wonder, then, that he has endured years of therapy and depression.
At his mother’s funeral two years ago, countless people told him how ‘wonderful’ she had been.
He knew the truth was more complicated than that, which is why he decided to write this ‘twisted love-letter to his parents’ celebrating ‘their weirdnesses, their madnesses and their flaws’.
They may not have the right to reply, but his mother, at least, would surely have loved the attention. ‘It brings her back to life,’ says Baddiel. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’
His parents kept porn in their bedside tables