THE REAL BADDIEL
It’s time to challenge misconceptions says the man whose Twitter profile is one word: ‘Jew’
DAVID BADDIEL is a complex character. And that’s a fact he’d like you to take on board. “If you’re famous, another version gets put out there,” he says earnestly. “But I’m a 360-degree person.”
It’s an interesting comment from a man the public might think they know. After all, his rise to fame — at least on paper — seems so predictable, with an upmarket school (Haberdasher’s Askes’) followed by Cambridge and the Footlights. He followed that up, apparently effortlessly, with the comedy sketch show The
Mary Whitehouse Experience, his partnership with Rob Newman, and then lad culture with Frank Skinner and Fantasy Football. The man even had a hit single with
Three Lions, before reinventing himself again as a writer of novels, for both adults and children.
The reality of course, is not quite as straightforward. It starts with his upbringing.
“We were much poorer than many families,” he explains. “We were lower-middle-class and only went on holiday to Swansea [Baddiel’s father, Colin, is Welsh]. Dad was hyper-furious about money all the time and we didn’t mix with high-flying or media families.”
On this topic, he mentions, in passing, the Corens and the Freuds, and is keen to dismiss any comparisons. He is similarly determined to point out that he attended Haberdasher’s only because it was a direct grant school and that his parents “hardly had to pay anything…
“I don’t think it helped me going to the school. I didn’t like the school,” he adds emphatically, explaining that the only thing which did “help” him was writing a controversial sixth-form revue which was subsequently banned.
“Suddenly I was cool,” he says. “That convinced me to be a comedian and I decided I wanted to go to Cambridge to join the Footlights.
“This is complexity,” Baddiel continues, adding simply: “I went to those places [the school and Cambridge] because I was clever.”
There’s more complexity in his relationship with Judaism — of which, more later — and his unusual family.
As far as stereotypes go, David Baddiel’s mother, Sarah, does not quite fit the bill. Aged five, she and her family fled Nazi Germany to settle in the UK, where she later married Colin and had three sons. More unusual was her lengthy affair with a golf enthusiast, and the sharing of intimate details of that affair with her three boys.
These, by the way, included leaving love letters around the house for her sons to read, and later copying them into private — and very explicit — emails. She even invited her lover to David’s barmitzvah. She wasn’t quite the overbearing, devoted Jewish mother of lore.
All this, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, was enough to send any child to therapy, which is where David ended up for 10 years. The sudden and painful death of his mother two years ago prompted more soul-searching culminating in a one-man show. My Family (Not
the TV Show) is an honest look at a childhood which was clearly dysfunctional.
“It was definitely a challenging upbringing,” Baddiel says, with severe understatement. “My parents were by no means perfect.”
However, the brutally frank show is also a kind of eulogy to his parents, despite the fact that Colin is still alive, although now in a care home and suffering from a form of dementia called Pick’s disease.
The confessional comedy follows on from Baddiel’s return to stand-up in 2013 with Fame: Not
the Musical and he sees that show and this as being a more adult and theatrical form of humour.
Although it’s painful, he says that writing and performing from such personal experiences are something he needs to do.
“I am a comedian,” he says. “I do feel I have to put my experience on a public stage. As an artist, that’s what I do. Even though that sounds poncey.
“When I returned to stand-up I thought that I wanted to do something different and personal,” he adds. “It felt to me more grown-up, more age-appropriate. I’m trying to move with who I am.”
Baddiel’s childhood sounds fascinating — but not at all as if it’s something most of us would want to experience. His mother’s affair clearly overshadowed it, and his parents’ laid-back
Dad was hyper-furious about money all the time’