“It’s not a conventional family, David,” David McWilliams says politely.
“No,” says David Baddiel (60). And he wasn’t kidding.
The Irish Times columnist and founder of Dalkey Book Festival interviewed British author and comedian Baddiel on Friday evening at Dalkey’s Church of the Assumption. Baddiel once pioneered stadium comedy in Wembley Arena and opened up the taboo on anti-Semitism in the UK, but lately his focus has been even closer to home: getting to grips with his mother’s affair with a golf memorabilia collector.
Baddiel will soon publish My Family: The Memoir, which delves into his remarkable relationship with his parents before their passing. “The whole book in a way is about memory and the tricks that memory plays on you and the way you construct a version of yourself depending on how your memory makes sense of sometimes a very dysfunctional life.”
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His parents are Jewish: his father was Welsh-Jewish, while his mother fled Nazi Germany with her family as a baby. “It’s kind of terrifying that I’m here in the world at all,” he says. “They got out in August 1939.”
Baddiel’s 2021 polemic, Jews Don’t Count, famously took aim at the sidelining of Jews in contemporary notions of prejudice and racism. Though he attended a Jewish school, Baddiel is a devout atheist. At school he wore a yamaka, read Hebrew and ate kosher. “And all this is going on when my dad in the morning was making me bacon.” Things were complicated at home.
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In the 1970s, however, things started to get weird, he says. His mother took a sudden and deep interest in golf, writing golf-related poetry and collecting memorabilia about a sport she had never even played. It soon became apparent to David she was having an affair and was taking an interest in her paramour’s hobbies. She would often write love letters and leave them strewn all over the house, Baddiel says.
Much like his conversation on stage in Dalkey, his book is full of frank admissions about the immoral acts his parents got up to. Even in 2008, she once again contacted her old flame apparently looking for some action – and, naturally, CCed her sons in the email. Despite his erstwhile horror, Baddiel was good-humoured about the incident. “She wanted us to know,” he says. “My dad somehow never noticed it ... My dad was someone who loved food, football and shouting, ‘Who the f**k is this?’ every time the phone rang.”
Speaking about being arrested in 1984 for obstructing police at a Stop the City demonstration against the UK’s military-financial complex – Baddiel says his parents didn’t even turn up to the trial. “That was a shock for me,” he says. “If either of my children were arrested I would turn up, if only to wave them down.” Surprisingly, he doesn’t hold it against his parents.
In fact, focusing on the difficult is almost the goal with this book. “We used to go to Swansea every year for our family holidays,” he says, “but one year we went to Devon, and my father farted so badly in an antique shop we had to leave the shop. When we went back later in the afternoon, the shop was shut because the owner had been taken to hospital – that’s completely true.”
On a more serious note though, Baddiel seeks to justify airing his family’s dirty laundry. “This is not a self-help book, but if you want to remember – and want other people to remember and feel that they knew the people who are important to you and have gone – then you have to be honest about them. You have to talk about them as real people. And you know what real people are? Flawed.”
In an audience Q&A, Baddiel – a keen football pundit – was asked if “It’s coming home?” in reference to his hit 1990s football anthem. “It’s definitely not coming home to Ireland,” he says, laughing with the audience. “Irish audiences are generous about English football, but much less so about English history.”
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