David Baddiel

Speaker 20:00

This is the B B C.

Presenter0:02

Hi, I'm Kirsty Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury item that they'd want with them if they were cast away on a desert island. Today I'm joined by David Bedil, and this is an extended version of the interview, broadcast on Radio 4, though the tracks have been shortened for rights reasons. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:45

My castaway today is the comic and writer David Bedeal. For many performers who stay the course, their public persona is a carefully contrived construct, but the work he does seems intimately entwined with all that's real and important in his life. Most recently, that's been an autobiographical stand-up show exposing the complexities of his late mother's love life and his father's dementia. As the author of five children's books, the inspiration for his very first was born out of a conversation he'd had with his young son, and the long-running Fantasy Football League TV show he co-hosted came from a deep personal obsession with the beautiful game. Indeed, his earliest memory is aged six, watching the 1970 FA Cup final replay. His determination to devote his life to the sport was only subverted when, a few years later, his big brother played him some Derek and Clive sketches, an experience apparently so liberating it set him on a lifelong path in pursuit of laughs. In 1993, Newman and Bedeal was the first ever comedy act to sell out Wembley Arena. He says, I still believe that comedy is the only way to combat death. I love that quote. Tell me more. What do you mean by that?

David Baddiel1:58

Well, I've always talked about, as a comedian, things in my life. I have a sort of truth urge. I find it very difficult to inhibit or censor myself in any way. And luckily, I kind of monetise that because I just talk about things that have happened to me without stopping really on stage. I don't stop and think about it in the hope that just that sort of sheer confessional honesty will get laughs. To answer your question, finally, as you get older, your life gets darker. You know, you suddenly are faced with mortality, either your own or the people around you or your family or whatever. And it never occurred to me to stop using comedy as a way of talking about those things. You know, just because they are sad or difficult or complex, it seems to me that's my process is let's find the funny in these things.

Presenter2:49

And the funny then does what? It softens the blow of death, or it allows you to not think so much about death. What is it it's doing?

David Baddiel2:56

No, I don't think it is a denial, actually. I mean, I think it is a bulwark to some extent. I think if you can laugh about illness and death or whatever it might be, then you are, to some extent, putting up the only weapon against it. And I do think that laughter is a way of mocking something that has no other way of undercutting it. But I do also think it is a way of talking about it. You know, it's a way of processing and engaging with these things, which is what else can we do? I mean, dementia is a good example, I guess. One of the reasons that I ended up talking about my father's dementia was obviously it was a big deal in my life. But I also thought, I've noticed people don't really talk about this. So one way of talking about it is to talk about what's happening very truthfully and specifically to my dad, which is he's got a kind of dementia that is a ridiculous cartoon version of what he was always like.

Presenter3:46

You call it his punk dementia.

David Baddiel3:47

Yeah, his punk dementia, because he has Pick's disease, which is a d disease that involves people being sweary and obscene and impatient and apathetic. That's those are the symptoms. And my dad was always like that. That is my dad. He's basically got Colin Bediel's disease, right? So I thought, well, that's funny. But it also is a way of properly engaging with it.

Presenter4:04

Will you be truthful no matter what? Because there's a great danger in that rawness, isn't there? That there's a bit of you that that's not protected. We know people often in your game, in the comedy business, you know, use their life in order to generate humour and it can be the seeds, but they don't quite they don't cut to the bone of their life because in that way it's almost too dangerous a a game to play. You're really out there and if people really don't like it then it means they really don't like you.

David Baddiel4:17

In order to

David Baddiel4:29

Yeah, well, some people really don't like me. I mean, that's definitely the case. And I'm clearer about that than ever because of social media. I mean, I'm on social media slightly too much. That's okay. I think part of doing comedy is heckling. I should say, by the way, because it can sound very arrogant, I think, to go on about how honest and truthful you are. To some extent, for me, it was because of my own limitations as a performer. I'm with Morwenna Banks. Moreenna Banks is my partner.

Presenter4:54

A brilliant performer who can occupy character at the on the turn of the hair.

David Baddiel4:57

Exactly. In terms of versatility and range, she is the opposite of me. She's also a deeply private person who almost never talks about herself publicly. So we're a strange match in those terms. But it's partly that I look at someone like her, or people that I grew up performing with, like Steve Coogan, and I think, oh my God, they're incomparably brilliant at occupying someone else on stage or on TV or whatever. I can't do that. I can't even do an accent. I can't move an iota away from myself. And so I have done that on stage and to some extent in my work, in my writing as well.

Speaker 25:16

Uh

Presenter5:27

Let's go to the music, David Bedeal. Tell me about this first one. What are we going to hear? Why is it on your list?

David Baddiel5:33

Well, this first one, I really like musicals. And after wanting to be a footballer and realizing that really wasn't going to happen, I was in a band for quite some time and really wanted to be a pop star. And I was very obsessed with Jesus Christ Superstar and indeed Godspell, which is strange for an atheist Jew. So, this is from the Book of Mormon, which is also about religion in a very different way. But the other reason I chose this is I wanted to have something on the desert island that was comedy. If I worship anything, I guess it is comedy. And you mentioned Ivor, my brother, playing me Derek and Clive when I was 14. And that was an incredibly liberating moment in my life. It filmed my comic sky. And I can't put in Derek and Clive because all the funny spits are too obscene to play on this program. Thank you for thinking of it. Yeah, I thought of you. So I chose this. It's a song that is sung by the Ugandan young woman who is being proselytised to by the Mormon missionaries. And what I love about it is it's a song in which she is mistaken about what Salt Lake City is. But the song somehow manages, I think, not to laugh at her. I think that you can do comedy about terrible things, including in her case, poverty, starvation, global inequity, which is essentially what she's singing about, and yet somehow or other not laugh at the victims. You can make the comedy absolutely hilarious in this case, and yet I still hear only kind of dignity in her when she sings this song.

Presenter6:15

Thank you for thinking of it.

Speaker 36:53

My mother once told me other place

Speaker 36:58

Waterfalls and unicorns fly

Speaker 37:02

Where there was no suffering, no pain Where there was laughter instead of dying I always thought she'd made it up To comfort me in times of pain But now I know that place is real

Speaker 37:22

Now I know its name Salt Lake A City Not just a story mama

David Baddiel7:22

All right.

Presenter7:32

Saltaleca City from the Book of Mormon performed there by Nikki M. James and the original Broadway cast. It was composed by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone. David Badil, you had a stand-up show last but one called Fame, Not the Musical, and in it you quoted Erika Jong, the writer. Sh she had said that fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are. What do you think the greatest misconception about you is among the public that know you?

Speaker 37:34

Yeah.

David Baddiel7:46

Nom

David Baddiel7:54

Uh

Speaker 27:54

But

David Baddiel7:54

Hmm.

David Baddiel8:00

Well, that I'm a smug, horrible, you know, sneering person. And obviously, I would say that because I wouldn't like to think of myself as that person, but I suppose I've got to bring up class now because that's the thing. And I think because I was truthful, I guess, about having gone to Cambridge and having come from a North London Jewish background, that there was an assumption that I was from a sort of privileged background. And I'm not from an underprivileged background, I'm from an incredibly mundane background, what I would consider to be a sort of lower to mid middle-class background. My dad was from a poor area of Swansea and from a working-class background, but ended up, you know, being a middle manager for Unilever because he was a biochemist. Then he got made redundant and ended up selling dinky toys in a place called Crazy Antique Market in London for the rest of his life, making no money whatsoever. And my mum's a refugee from Nazism from a very, very, very wealthy family who lost everything and was then living in one room in Cambridge for most of her early life. And we lived in Dollis Hill in London, and it was very, very mundane. And the thing that was miles away, I think, was fame. I remember I got an electric guitar for my Bermitzva, just a rubbishy Columbus Stratocaster, right? It cost about 40 quid. And I remember telling a friend of mine at school that I had an electric guitar, and he didn't believe me because electric guitar was such a symbol of the other world behind the screen. And we were so much not part of that world that he just thought, you haven't. I don't believe you've got an electric guitar.

Presenter9:30

All of the photographs that I look at of you as a little boy, you always tend to be with your two brothers. You're in the middle.

David Baddiel9:35

In the middle.

Presenter9:37

Middle brother

David Baddiel9:37

I bring down.

Presenter9:38

Yeah, Ivor and Dan, Ivor the Big Brother.

Presenter9:41

They're very sort of muscular. You're also doing poses in them. They're kind of grimacing or grinning at the camera. It seems like quite a frenetic atmosphere among the brothers.

David Baddiel9:46

It seems

David Baddiel9:49

Among the brothers. It's male, and also there was a lot going on in our house. My mum had a very public, in terms of her house and in terms of her friends and in terms of us, affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman, and that led to her turning our house over into a shrine to golf. I mean, golf, for goodness sake. A friend of mine, Josh Opignonese, once said to me that about my mother's affair with the golfing memorabilia salesman that he thinks it is a Jewish thing, that because Jews were not allowed in golf clubs in the 1970s and she was a refugee from Nazism at some level. This was a big victory for Jewish immigrants that she had this affair and became obsessed. She became, by the way, quite a big player in the golfing memorabilia world. She wrote five books about golfing memorabilia and had a business called Golfiana.

Speaker 210:16

Yes

Speaker 210:19

Yeah.

Presenter10:34

Did she start the business after she finished the affair, or was it while the affair was going on?

David Baddiel10:37

Well, as far as my mother was concerned, the affair went on her whole life. It was her great grand passion in a kind of Mils and Boone way. That I don't think is true.

Presenter10:41

A great

Presenter10:45

When you were young, what sort of mother was your mother? Put putting the affair to one side, when you were

David Baddiel10:50

Quite hard to do that, but because it's quite hard to forget about the affair when there's a statue of Lee Trevino, like in your eye line. But nonetheless, she was a good mother in lots of ways. She was very devoted to us. I've always thought that her favourite was Dan. And I think that's one reason why I'm a comedian, is I think part of what I do as a comedian is, look at me, look at, here's my life. Let me tell you my story. And I think that's partly me calling out to my mother to be less interested in Dan. I mean, don't get me wrong, I was very close to my mother. There's something beautiful about a person whose life was nearly taken away. She was three months old when the war broke out. She was in Nazi Germany. You know, there's a swastika stamped on her birth certificate. And she just got out with her parents. The rest of her family were murdered. And she, as best she could in Dollis Hill in 1975, lived a glamorous, exciting life, which involved golf. She did her best to live life to the full.

Presenter11:42

Fascinating. Tell us about your second one.

David Baddiel11:44

It's a song by David Bowie, and David Bowie is probably my overall hero. And he also, in a typical way for me, has a couple of personal elements to it. When I was about seven or eight, I was in Gladstone Park opposite the house that we lived in, which was this very rough park. And in fact, my brother Ivor, who is, by the way, probably the nearest thing I actually have to a parent. My parents were terrible parents, and my older brother Ivor is a very responsible, sensible man. But he parented me, I would say. But this was not a good bit of parenting because some hard blokes came up to him and said, Can we throw your younger brother into those bushes? Hollybushes, they were. And he said, Yes. So it was a hard park. But I remember Eddie, who was a very hard kid, came up to me and I was frightened and he said, Who's your favourite pop star? And I thought, I'm going to get this wrong. And I think I said Cliff Richard, which was wrong. But he didn't beat me up. He said it should be David Bowie. David Bowie's great. So I went and listened on the radio and thought, oh, yeah, oh, he's amazing. But one more story about this, which is another personal story. It's a song called Conversation Piece. It's the B-side of The Prettiest Star, came out in 1970. He re-recorded it on an album he never released called Toy in 2002. I do a podcast about Bowie, if you're wondering. But here's the story I want to tell. My daughter, Dolly, who is very, very musical, one of the reasons I knew she was musical is that she became obsessed with Bowie when she was about 11. When he died, she was devastated. And so I had to sort of mask my own sadness to sort of comfort her. And what we did, with my son also and Morwenna, we went to Brixton to see the mural of David Bowie that's up on the wall in Brixton near the station. And lots of people had left flowers and stuff on this shrine. And I remember saying to Dolly, what should we leave? And we'd both got into this song, Conversation Piece, recently. And there's a line in that, which is, I can't see the road for the rain in my eyes. And I said, let's write that up there. I took this one to his mother.

David Baddiel13:39

Find out what's knowing at me.

David Baddiel13:43

One thing to look at me.

David Baddiel13:50

Then I spent a lot of time in educational

David Baddiel13:55

All seemed so long ago.

David Baddiel14:02

I'm a thinker, not a talker.

David Baddiel14:08

No one to talk to anyway I can't see the glow

David Baddiel14:14

For the rain in my eyes

Presenter14:19

David Buddy, conversation piece. David Buddil, you said in the past that um your childhood was populated by your father's terrifying rages. Wh what made him angry?

David Baddiel14:30

Well, one thing I should say straight away about my father's terrifying rages is that there was no physical violence involved in my father's terrifying rages. He was a frightening man, and he is still quite a frightening man in some respects. I would say he was defined by irritation virtually every tiny little thing was aggravation for him. And he was a man who needed to be kind of fed. And I remember the phone ringing. Almost every time the phone rang between 1970 and 1979, my father would say, oh, Jesus Christ. I just get furious about that. I didn't even know who it was. And he was also, you know, he was made redundant in the mid 70s and was very, I think, anxious about that. But he's very male.

Presenter15:14

You use I've I've written a little note here. I was watching a documentary that you authored where you s you talked about your dad's incessant maleness. What a brilliant phrase that is. So there was this sense of sort of relentless testosterone pounding

David Baddiel15:20

Maleness.

David Baddiel15:26

Pounding through the house. And three brothers as well. I mean, my poor mum to some extent, who is and they rowed all the time, my parents.

Presenter15:30

Believe.

Presenter15:33

Now, of course one might reasonably wonder that whether your father was furious about the fact that your mother was having this very open affair.

David Baddiel15:39

It's possible. Despite my mother's very extreme broadcasting of this affair, she used to write love letters and then copy them on carbon paper and leave the copies all over the house and just tell everyone about it when she could. Somehow my father managed not to notice it. I mean obviously there would have been an element of denial, but at some level my dad was so male, is so male, that he was just never interested in the life of the emotions. He just isn't. But having said that about my dad.

David Baddiel16:10

In that documentary, there's a bit where we're talking about how it's all just essentially affectionate insults. That's how my dad shows affection, through insulting you. And then the director asks whether he ever said, I love you. And I said, Of course not. And the director says, Why not? And I said, Well, because he didn't. And then I laugh at that. And then I say, That's a joke. And then he turns the camera on my dad and says, Your son is saying that you never loved him. And he says, That's bollocks. And I was so moved by that because I thought, oh, he does. And this is the only way he can say it through a swear word, through male banter, and through aggression.

Speaker 216:20

Through insulting you.

Speaker 216:30

They're going to say that's a joke.

Presenter16:33

This.

Presenter16:49

Did he do things with you? Did he take you to football? Did he play with you in the park? Yes.

David Baddiel16:52

Yeah, yes. Yeah, he took us to football, not to Chelsea, which is my team. Ivor took me there, but to Swansea. We used to go on holiday every year to Swansea. We didn't even go to the nice parts of South Wales, right? We just used to go to his mum and dad's house and to Swansea Bay. And so he took us to Swansea City at the Vetchfield then and played all the time football with us in the park.

Presenter17:17

It sounds as though these were two enormous characters in this small household.

David Baddiel17:22

Yeah.

Presenter17:22

Uh

David Baddiel17:22

Yeah.

Presenter17:22

Was there space for you to express yourself? Were they interested in what you were doing? Did you talk about your ambitions? I'm talking about as a little kid.

David Baddiel17:30

Yeah, not sure is the answer to that. That's a really good question. You know, my mum.

David Baddiel17:36

Was very, very keen on me being famous. My mum would turn up at every premiere or TV show. She's always in the audience. She would often heckle, but I never, I would say, the whole time that my mum would turn up these things, ever heard her say, Oh, I like that bit, that bit's really funny. She didn't actually think much about the work. But I should make absolutely clear: the two main figures in me being a comedian are my older brother and my dad, who is a really funny bloke, still is a funny bloke.

Speaker 217:55

No.

Presenter18:06

We've got to fit it in the music, David Bedeel. So tell me then about uh this third disc that we're going to hear.

David Baddiel18:11

Well, the other

David Baddiel18:13

Almost total constant in my musical life is Genesis, and I am very out about being a Genesis fan. And I think that's important for me to say because when I was about 16, I was genuinely very into punk rock, listening to John Peel. I tried to backcomb my hair very badly, didn't really know how to do it. And then Dave Gavrin, who's an important figure in my life as well, and is in a band called The Sundays, and who I was in a band with, played me Wind and Wuthering by Genesis. And I remember listening to it and thinking, oh no, this is really beautiful and I really like this. But the last thing I can be in 1976 in London is a Genesis fan. But if you look through the sort of slightly over-the-top production and instrumentation, loads of their songs are incredibly beautiful, intensely beautiful. And actually, I've chosen deliberately almost a song that is not from the Peter Gabriel era. And this song with Mad, Mad Moon is one of the most beautiful songs.

Presenter19:11

In the standard Saul and Ammon B.

Presenter19:17

Don't tell me.

David Baddiel19:18

We won't become

David Baddiel19:23

Ready

David Baddiel19:25

That must have been another of your dreams.

Speaker 219:30

Uh

David Baddiel19:30

A dream of the

Presenter19:37

That was Genesis and Madman Moon. David Badil, in terms of the flowering of your comedy, you you went to an independent school on a direct grant. Clever boy, obviously. You did a sixth form review that got you into a lot of trouble. Tell me a little bit about the sixth form review.

David Baddiel19:49

Got you into law

David Baddiel19:50

Tell me a little bit about the Sixth Form Review. Well I was asked to co-write with a guy called Nick Goldson the Six S Review. And for whatever reason, we did sketches about teachers that we did not like. Particularly I remember one sketch in which the very, very Christian librarian ends up having sex with a blow-up naked doll on the photocopier. And every sketch, essentially, was a sketch taking the piss out of another teacher.

Speaker 220:02

Right.

Presenter20:18

Crowd go wide.

David Baddiel20:19

Honestly, I think it's still one of the biggest, best reactions I've ever got, one of the best gigs I've ever done. I'd never done comedy before. I'd never been on stage with an audience. I can remember going on stage as the head of the music department, actually, not a terrible bloke at all, but he used to come on in assembly and try and g us all up to sing the hymns, the Christian hymns, I should say, like with a bit more verve. I came on stage and swore at the audience. And God, it went, it stormed it. I absolutely stormed it. And here's the key thing. I wasn't a big figure at Meisk. I wasn't like, oh yeah, we all want to be cool like David Bedeal. No. But suddenly I was. I was really cool and also nearly expelled. I remember I had to go see the headmaster and the headmaster said, right, we should expel you, but you're going to Cambridge and so you can stay.

Presenter20:19

Yeah.

Presenter21:06

Um you went to Cambridge then, as you say, you read English. Did you have an idea of what you wanted to do with this already pretty well trained and clearly very capable brain?

David Baddiel21:16

I wanted to be a comedian by then. I'd given up footballer and I'd given up pop star, both of which were not really suited to my talents.

Presenter21:19

That was it.

Presenter21:25

What did your dad say when you got a double first?

David Baddiel21:29

I don't remember my parents saying anything. In fact, my dad didn't come to my graduation ceremony.

Presenter21:36

David, I'm slightly hot with anger around my neck about that.

David Baddiel21:39

Are you?

Presenter21:40

Well, I just find it absolutely remarkable.

David Baddiel21:42

Uh

Presenter21:42

Your son gets a double first in English at Cambridge.

David Baddiel21:46

Okay, well let me tell you something else, which I've should bring up, I guess.

David Baddiel21:50

I dearly love my dad, but he was a difficult man in lots of ways. And one of the things was he was a scientist. And as a scientist, he had no respect really for the arts. And the only thing that was of intellectual worth really was science. And when I was about sort of 15 and about to choose my A levels, or possibly 16, I went and saw my dad and said to him, Look, I'm not going to do science, I'm going to do English and that kind of stuff. And he said, it's a waste of a brain.

David Baddiel22:17

Now that's not good parenting. I I may not know that much about parenting, but that's not good parenting. But hey, that's the point about how I've come to think about family, is families are not perfect and there is damage involved. And in a way, that's what makes you what you are, and you have to celebrate that somehow.

Presenter22:35

Yes, and good for you, but some families are less perfect than others. And I think if your child is, you know, capable enough to to excel in such a way, then it might be a moment when the parents would say, Well done, mate.

David Baddiel22:38

Think if

David Baddiel22:47

Yeah, well, I agree with that. And from my own children, you know, both of my children, I'm immensely proud, absurdly, ridiculously, tearfully proud of both of my children. And I sort of find it hard to imagine, in a way, now you mention it, why my parents weren't. I tell you, at heart, both of them were unbelievably themselves. They were both only children. They were both very solipsistic. And they both did not stop their lives for their children. That's a very 70s thing. Parenting then was not a word. They just carried on being their very large, very eccentric, idiosyncratic selves, despite having three children. And that kind of carried on through.

Speaker 223:13

Turkish.

Speaker 223:15

Yeah.

Presenter23:15

They'd just

Presenter23:23

Let's have some more music, David Badile. Tell me about this. We're going to hear your fourth.

David Baddiel23:26

This is a song by The Sundays. Now, I've mentioned David Gavrin. He's my oldest friend, and he is the guitarist in The Sundays. And the reason I've chosen them is to do with fame, actually. Dave Gavrin and Harriet Wheeler, who are the main people in The Sundays, they started doing stuff. And I was on the comedy circuit at the time, doing pretty well, but not. You know, I didn't come out of Cambridge and be famous. I was on the Cambri Circuit for four or five years doing that stuff. And I remember I went on holiday and then I came back and there's music papers all over the house. And then I'm reading it. I'm opening it. Why has he got these? I shut it, and Dave and Harriet are on the front cover of Melody Maker. These friends of mine, who two weeks ago were not famous, right? The point being that I thought, oh, it's not on the other side of the screen. And I am trying at the time to break into all this. I mean, it'd go pretty well. In fact, we're doing Mary Watcher experience on the radio or whatever. But yes, you can touch it. It's real for you.

Speaker 324:17

Uh

Presenter24:18

Uh

Speaker 324:18

It's four in the morning, July 69.

Speaker 324:25

Me and my sister, we crept down like shadows.

Speaker 324:36

We bring all right down to our sitting-room.

Speaker 324:43

Static and silence in the chromosome.

Presenter24:51

Monochrome, the Sundays. David Bedila. The comedy partnership that you had with your friend Rob Newman, it became of course very successful for those of us of that generation. You know, you were you were the biggest thing in town. You had lots of T V shows, sell out tours, and as I said in the introduction, you sold out Wembley Arena, the first comedy act to ever do that.

Presenter25:10

In terms of a bit of the the sort of anarchy and transgression that you had enjoyed as a sixth former when you were on stage performing, what what was the sensation? And I'm not talking about necessarily Wembley Arena, I'm just talking about generally as you were doing stand up.

David Baddiel25:23

Um

David Baddiel25:24

Well, the main thing

David Baddiel25:27

I don't want to get too sort of technical here about being a comedian, but I'd done the comedy store for, you know, and places like that, the comedy circuit for about four or five years. And those were quite hard times to do the store. The first gig that I did at the store as a stand-up, I went on at three o'clock in the morning. It was an open spot. There'd been a fight in the audience before I went on. And I remember thinking, it's just like performing to dead people. I mean, there was no heckling. It was just like they were all zombies. I got nothing. It was always like combative. It was always like, I'm a gladiator. I have to convince these people I'm funny. Suddenly.

Speaker 225:44

Kingdom

David Baddiel25:59

This was a really big deal when you're on telly and you get people turning up to see you. It's not combative anymore. It's like you really have to be quite bad for them to boo you off because they've paid a lot of money to see you. And the good thing about that, obviously it can lead to complacency, but the good thing about it is you start to do more interesting work and you can expand what you say and you're safe enough. Comedy is never safe, but you're safe enough to try out things and to expand as a comedian.

Presenter26:25

You formed a partnership, of course, famously with Frank Skinner, hosting Fantasy Football League on T V for a good few years. And you're you know, timing is everything in comedy, and your timing was perfect. It was at the moment when that loaded generation of men were, you know, the should know better generation, badly behaved. And you became

David Baddiel26:41

Hmm.

Presenter26:44

I think you're gonna rail at this, but you were the poster boys for that generation.

David Baddiel26:47

Well, actually, me and Rob had that already in the um the first time I saw myself on the cover of a magazine, it was a magazine called City Limits in the sort of late eighties, early nineties. And there's a picture of me and Rob on that and it says, Here come the new lads and I'd never heard that expression before.

Presenter27:02

And i in this sort of Me Too moment, how comfortable are you with knowing that you were the poster boys for the lattice generation?

David Baddiel27:08

Well, I'm comfortable if you actually go and look at the work because truth is always in the detail. And I think Alexei Sale, who is a friend of mine, and I really like him and he's brilliant, he's the godfather of alternative comedy. But we didn't fall out really because I don't really fall out with people. But he did some interview a few years ago in which he referred to me and Frank, I think, as being misogynistic. And I said, Alexi, why have you said this? Can you show me any example of us actually being misogynistic? And he said, no, I can't. Sorry, I just said it. I don't know what I'm saying in interviews.

Presenter27:37

Well, he maybe hadn't seen that loaded cover in 1996 of Frank pulling the the football shirt off a very young woman and you both sort of looking pretty leery at her.

David Baddiel27:45

Well, I'm not looking Larry actually. Look, I'm not going to claim in any way that that loaded thing and lots of things are loaded was okay and great. But I'm going to claim that if you actually look at it, I'm covering my testicles in a terrified way, which obviously is a reference to being in the wall at football. But I would say it's also saying, you know, I'm not just, you know, here are my genitals, here am I proud of being a man in this situation. I'm being funny about it as best I can in a situation which I admit is kind of like, you know, not great.

Speaker 228:02

Yeah.

Presenter28:16

Tell me about this next piece of music. It's your fifth, David.

David Baddiel28:19

Well, I said to Frank Skinner when I told him I was doing the show, I believe you asked him about eight years ago, I said to him, did you put in Three Lions? And he said, no, no, I put in Back Home, which is a football song from the World Cup. And he said, I put that in because I didn't want to put in Three Lions. I was a bit embarrassed about putting in Three Lions because obviously it's our song. And I thought, oh, no, I'm not like that. I want to put in Three Lions because the singing of that at Wembley, that is an extraordinary, extraordinary moment in my life.

Presenter28:46

And this was at the England Scotland match during the Euro ninety six tournament.

David Baddiel28:49

Yeah, and I can't not have that to remind me of it on the desert island. I mean, it's still, as I'm speaking now with goose pimples rising on my flesh, I cannot believe that that happened.

Presenter28:49

Yeah.

Speaker 329:01

It's coming home, it's coming, football's coming home.

Presenter29:09

Everyone seems to know the score

Presenter29:14

They've seen it all.

Speaker 229:16

With all they just know

Speaker 229:19

This is show.

Speaker 229:22

The thing was gonna throw it away, gonna break

Speaker 329:25

Yeah.

Speaker 229:26

Hi everybody

Speaker 329:27

Oh, they can laugh.

Speaker 229:28

Cause

Presenter29:29

I remember three lights on the show.

Speaker 229:34

Jews remain still gleaming.

Presenter29:38

Bedeal and Skinner and the Lightning Seeds with three lines, bringing back memories for you, David Bedeel, of it being sung by the whole Wembley crowd after England beat Scotland at Euro ninety six. Um how do you think uh England are going to do in Russia?

David Baddiel29:52

I think you should listen to Three Lions and the answer is there. We'll say no, no, they're going to be terrible, it's not going to work out. And then about two weeks beforehand, we'll start convincing ourselves that this new squad have got something about them that's going to make a difference and then it won't.

Presenter30:05

Within just a few minutes of speaking to you today, you said I'm an atheist, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you have described yourself in the past as a fundamentalist atheist.

David Baddiel30:10

Yeah.

David Baddiel30:13

I am convinced in every possible way that God doesn't exist. I mean, I know it like I know that this table is made out of wood, that God doesn't exist.

Presenter30:22

You describe yourself on Twitter with just one word: Jew. Why?

David Baddiel30:26

Why? That seems confusing, doesn't it? What I've just said. It really does. There's a lot of reasons for that. You know, being an atheist Jew is something that only really Jews can be. I mean, that might be unfair to other religions, but, you know, for me and for lots of Jews, it's all about culture and heritage and tradition and, you know, comedy. You know, I don't believe in God, but I do believe in Larry David. Like, really. And I think, and I'm so proud of being a tiny, tiny footnote in this great tradition of Jewish comedy, which is mainly American, but there is to some extent a tradition here as well. And I also have been activated more in later years, but throughout my life, by anti-Semitism to call myself a Jew.

Presenter30:28

Well I've just said

Presenter31:07

I think it's also very interesting. It seems at least significant to me that it's Jew and not Jewish.

David Baddiel31:12

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter31:13

Because the word is a very, very interesting word.

David Baddiel31:15

Yeah, it's a word that politically correct people tend to say Jewish person. Why do you think that is? Well, because the word Jew has a lot of connotations. It is essentially an insult. It's a really fascinating thing, is that the word itself that defines my ethnicity can be used as an insult. And you hardly have to say you dirty or you stinking. You could just say you Jew and it sounds like an insult. And that's because we live in a culture, a Christian culture, where for many, many years the scapegoat, the great enemy, was the Jew.

Presenter31:19

Why do you think that is?

Presenter31:44

Let's have some more music, Definite Fatil. What are we gonna hear? Um we're on your sixth.

David Baddiel31:48

Right, so this was a complicated one, particularly because I'm slightly embarrassed about this. Three lions, the lyrics were written by me and Frank Skinner, and now I'm going to choose something else with lyrics written by me. I'm so sorry.

Presenter31:58

No, but you made it absolutely clear why you chose this.

David Baddiel32:00

Well, this is not because of the lyrics, which I think are fairly anodyne at some level, and they do speak, I guess, of something important. But I wrote a film called The Infidel, which is about Muslims and Jews, and is a comedy about the tensions between them. And the film did well enough, and I was really proud of it. But then a musical was mooted some years later, and I wrote a musical with Erin Barron Cohen, who's Sasha Barron Cohen's brother, who writes all the music in his films. And, you know, I really loved doing that, and I really loved that musical and was very proud of it. But the key reason I put this in is my mum died in December 2014. The show, I think, started in October. And I would say the last time I saw my mother deeply, deeply happy, was at the premiere of the Infidel musical. I've got pictures of her wearing a tiara, which she always liked to wear. Okay, and.

David Baddiel32:52

The fact that it was a premiere, Sasha Barrancoin and Jonathan Ross were there, and the comedy of it being all about Jews or whatever, she was so happy.

Presenter33:00

She is shining with happiness in the photograph I've seen.

David Baddiel33:01

Yeah, shining with happiness at that particular event. And then she died a couple of months later. And when we came to do her funeral, I was put in charge of the music. It was a bit like a funny version of this show. The fact that there is a song in that called Love Will Find A Way from a comedy musical that, as soon as she died and as soon as I thought about it, that feels like, how do we challenge this? How do we challenge this thing that she is dead? I'm going to do it by putting in a song from a musical that she loved and that I remember her being shining at. That's why I chose this song.

Speaker 233:33

Though you're far away face on the screen

Presenter33:39

Feels like you're here with me, nothing in between.

Presenter33:45

Even when we're far apart, I can hear your heartbeat

Presenter33:51

Skies and oceans in the way, but we stay complete.

Presenter33:57

Yeah.

Speaker 233:57

And love will find a way

Speaker 234:00

Love you are made of

David Baddiel34:03

Uh

Speaker 234:03

Let it go.

Presenter34:08

Love Will Find a Way, sung there by Erin Barron Cohen, composed by Erin and by you, David, from Infidel the Musical. You've described your most recent stand-up show, which was really well reviewed. You've described it yourself as a twisted love letter to your parents. And you talk at length in that show about your mother's affair and about your father's dementia and your mother's sort of sexual appetites. You're extremely open about everything.

David Baddiel34:23

Thank you.

Presenter34:32

How did your brothers react about you deciding to make all of this such public property?

David Baddiel34:37

Badly. My younger brother said, You're not doing it. And my older brother, he was more sanguine about it, but he came round and we were going to talk about it at great length. But he began the conversation by saying, Look, there's all sorts of things I have uncertainties about here and that we could sort of change a bit, whatever. But let's start by asking, Are you just going to do this? And I said, Yes. I just feel a huge need to do this show. And I think that is bad in a way. There's a bit of me thinking, I know I can make this into something. I feel the need to say it, and I know it might be complicated for people close to me.

Speaker 334:57

Right.

Presenter35:11

Because in watching it, and I've seen it on film, um, your affection and your deep love and connection with your parents is clear throughout. And yet, is that enough of a get out of jail free card if you like? Well, what is it?

David Baddiel35:23

Well, they've both seen it now. Both your brothers. Both my brothers. And actually, the show is based to some extent. The sort of central impetus was: I went to my mother's funeral, and a lot of people at my mother's funeral were telling me that my mother was wonderful. And the thing that bound all these people together was they didn't really know her. And I think that if all we're allowed to say about our dead relatives is that they were wonderful, we may as well say nothing because it erases them out of existence. And I felt that erasure. I'd already felt the awful erasure of her actually going, just saying she's wonderful. You know, that's another erasure. So I do the show, which absolutely celebrates the idiosyncrasies and the flaws and everything else because that's what makes someone alive and a human being. But then I'm doing the first night, and lots of critics and all sorts of important people are there. And at that point in time, I used to do a QA at the end of the show because I was still sort of working on it. And I came back on, and there's all these people in important people in the audience putting their hands up. And I said, I don't care. Sorry. I don't care what any of you think. I need to know what my older brother thought. So I go over and say, Ivor, what did you think? And he said, I loved it, which was great. But then he said, I loved it because it felt like she was in the room. And that did make me well up on stage and also made me think that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make her be still alive. You can only evoke someone really by talking about them as a whole person, which includes, particularly in my case, and my mother's case, and everyone's case, quite a lot of flaws.

Presenter35:25

Both your brothers

Presenter36:42

You used an incredibly illuminating and powerful phrase in the documentary that you the television documentary you made about your father's um dementia. You called it the dark rainbow of dementia. The idea that that in the dementia you still can encounter something that is wondrous and extraordinary and is true of the person.

David Baddiel36:52

June.

David Baddiel37:03

Well, I suppose what I'm obsessed with most is identity. And my sense was death and dementia are pictured by most people as a complete loss of identity. And it's not, really, because it's how you talk about that person that loses or doesn't lose their identity. And my dad hasn't lost his identity. I mean, his dementia is getting worse. You know, my dad can hardly recognize me. But if you say to my dad, have you got a match? He will say, your face and my ass. Right? And that.

Presenter37:30

Still funny.

David Baddiel37:31

Still funny, and also still a sense that life is in there.

Presenter37:35

You say when you talk about your very unusual upbringing, I'll use just that single word to describe it um, obviously it did create damage.

David Baddiel37:44

Jing.

Presenter37:45

You sit in front of me, seeming quite together. So have it you've repaired the damage, or you live openly with the damage, or where is the damage?

David Baddiel37:47

Hmm.

David Baddiel37:52

Oh, the damage is there. I wouldn't be a comedian without the damage. You have to be quite damaged to want to go on stage and essentially say, like me, at some level, even though when you're doing quite edgy, difficult material, you're still saying, I want you to like me, I want you to engage with me, I want you to be part of my life to strangers. And that's a weird thing to do. You know, I mean, if you were to speak to Morwenna, I think she would say the damage to some extent is in the need to constantly tell people about your life.

Presenter38:16

Let's have some more music. Okay. Um we're gonna have your seventh.

David Baddiel38:19

Yes, I really can't sing and I really would love to be able to sing. And my daughter, Dolly, is intensely musical. Just playing the piano, which I can do for her, and hearing her sing, I find that massively kind of healing at some level. And when she was 10, she was part of some little group, it's a little drama group, and they had every self and a little talent show. And I remember thinking, you know, she doesn't have done very much, Dolly, at this stage. And she went on, and I could feel the audience thinking, oh, this is sweet, that'll be some babyish version of your song by Elton John. And then literally, she blew the audience away. And I'm filming it, and I cried so much. It's the wobbliest bit of film you will ever see. You could hardly see Dolly because I'm just shaking and I was so proud.

Speaker 339:09

If I was a super time

David Baddiel39:10

Ah

Speaker 339:13

But then again, no one will

Speaker 339:17

Who makes wars and

David Baddiel39:18

Uh

Speaker 339:20

Rather than show.

Speaker 339:24

I know it's my much, but it's the best I can do.

Speaker 339:32

My gift is my song and the song's beautiful

Presenter39:41

That was Elton John and Bernie Topin's Your Song sung by your daughter, Dolly. She was ten.

David Baddiel39:45

She was ten. Yeah, she's ten. She was ten.

Presenter39:46

She was ten.

David Baddiel39:47

Sorry, I'll recover myself.

Presenter39:48

I'll recover myself. You're allowed. What will your next show be about? Because you took a great, big, long break from Stand Up and you've come back to to success. So it's is has it given you an appetite to do more Stand Up?

David Baddiel39:54

Come on.

David Baddiel39:57

As a

David Baddiel39:58

Yeah, I mean intensely actually. I took a time off because I was exhausted. I'd been doing stand-up either live or on TV for sort of 15 years and I had children and I wanted to write other things. So I wrote a film and I started writing other novels and stuff, but also I just wanted to stop doing it. It burns you out a lot and particularly the type of stand-up that I do. And then interestingly when I came back to it, A, I was very nervous. Because really the only thing that inures you to doing stand-up is doing it. Only doing it every night can make you think this isn't the most terrifying thing in the world. And I was doing this much more revelatory, really confessional stuff. And I really am enjoying doing it again. And to be honest with you, critics have been, which is really a surprise for me. I mean, when I was in the 90s, I'm massively successful, and you know, they mainly hated us. But the next show I think is going to be about trolls and the way that, in my opinion, outrage confers identity on social media. So a lot of the time I do a joke on social media and someone will get furious about it. They're not really furious about the joke. They've spotted an opportunity to get angry and therefore to post a louder version of themselves. But the majority are people sharing a communal experience. I think that is what's good about social media.

Presenter41:09

Given that you love all of that and you love the stand up again and you like communication and you put yourself out there and you like what comes back in return, you'd be a disaster on a desert island, wouldn't you?

David Baddiel41:17

Mm.

David Baddiel41:19

Yeah. That's true actually. It's a good point. I would be. But nonetheless I've agreed to do it.

Presenter41:25

Are you a practical man?

David Baddiel41:26

No, awful. I mean, terrible. I'm quite good with technology, so I'm quite good if the computers go down, but any kind of.

Presenter41:32

Yeah.

David Baddiel41:33

Yeah, okay. But I'm not really imagining how I'm going to build a hut. You know, I am Jewish, let's not forget, and manual labor's not big with us. And you know, that thing that Tom Hanks does, spearing fish, I'm rubbish at that. So it's going to be quite bad. Is there not a shop somewhere?

Presenter41:47

Not as far as I'm aware.

David Baddiel41:48

Okay, well then, yeah, I'm going to die quite soon. Tell us about your eighth disc. Okay, so I am obsessed with music. I really love music, but it is poetry, and I really love poetry, in fact. And I think one of the reasons I love poetry is that I found a way of using language to be music. And, you know, any comedian will tell you the actual word order and the stress and the breath and everything like that is all really important. And to come back to my dad, one of the discs he did have, one of the very few vinyl discs he did have, was A Charles Christmas in Wales, which is Dylan Thomas, whose school he went to, Swansea Grammar School. Dylan Thomas reading his poems. It was a very scratchy vinyl record, I remember. It used to sort of as it went round. But I used to really love it. And do not go gentle into that good night.

Speaker 242:27

Yeah.

David Baddiel42:35

says so much to me about, I guess, what I think about life, what I think as an atheist, about how you have to use all the weapons at your disposal to not just sink into mortality. So I'm putting in Dylan Thomas reading Do Not Go Gentle into that good night. It'll keep me going on the desert island, I think.

David Baddiel42:53

Do not go gentle into that good night Old age should burn and rave at close of day Rage, rage against the dying

Presenter43:05

Of the light

Presenter43:08

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning, they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Presenter43:20

Dylan Thomas reading part of his poem Do Not Go Gentle into that good night.

Presenter43:26

Time now, uh David Bediel, for me to give you some books.

David Baddiel43:28

Mm.

David Baddiel43:29

You're gonna give me the Bible, which I don't really want.

Presenter43:32

Well, I'll give you it and then you can do what you want with or the Torah if you prefer.

David Baddiel43:34

Or there's

David Baddiel43:35

No, no, no, oh no, the Bible is the tornado, I'm not bothered about either of them.

Presenter43:39

I'm going to give you the complete works of Shakespeare, too. I give you them, it's up to you what you do. No, no, Shakespeare.

David Baddiel43:43

No no no Shakespeare Great.

Presenter43:45

What other book will you take?

David Baddiel43:47

I'm going to take my great literary hero is John Updike, the American novelist who died a few years ago. And I deeply love John Updike, who is, again, a bit like Thomas in a different way, not fashionable at the moment. There's part of the Me Too movement. Updike did sometimes write awkwardly. No, I don't write awkwardly about women. That's wrong. I mean, he wrote extremely microscopically about sex. And Updike always said.

David Baddiel44:10

Aware of this criticism towards the end of his life, you know, I am a man and I have to sing my own song in the end. And again, that element of truth is wildly important to me. But he was also an unbelievably brilliant writer. He wrote these books called Rabbit, and they are published, I believe, as one book, Rabbit.

Presenter44:26

Okay. You're allowed a luxury item too.

David Baddiel44:29

Yeah, I want a cat, but apparently I'm not allowed to have a cat. I want a live one. I don't want a dead cat. I could eat it, but otherwise it's no good to me, a dead cat. So I like my feet being rubbed. But I have various foot massaging electric devices, and none of them are very good. But if you can find me a sort of foot massaging device that really feels like a human hand rubbing and tickling your feet.

Presenter44:32

Yeah

Presenter44:50

Like almost a giant slipper that you could put your hands into.

David Baddiel44:52

A giant slipper. A giant reflexology slipper. That's what I like. I don't know where I'm going to plug it in.

Presenter44:57

Please

Presenter44:58

Which of these eight tracks would you pick to save if if I were to force you to pick to save?

David Baddiel45:04

Yeah, that's a that's a really obvious choice. It will be Dolly singing your song.

Presenter45:07

It's yours. David Badiel, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

David Baddiel45:11

Thank you, I've enjoyed it enormously.

Presenter45:23

Hi, I do hope you enjoyed that interview with David Bedeal. As he mentioned, his co-star, Frank Skinner, was castaway back in twenty ten. You yourself, of course, had this massive hit single in nineteen ninety six with uh the anthem then, which was Three Lines. It's not among your records to tell us

Speaker 245:40

I could tell as a Scottish person, you could barely get that sticking in the craw.

Presenter45:43

It's a massive

Speaker 245:47

I did write a Scottish World Cup song as well, to be fair.

Presenter45:50

Did you?

Speaker 245:50

Did you?

Presenter45:53

I fell right in the back.

Speaker 245:54

I think it's beautiful.

Presenter45:55

Uh

Speaker 245:55

Yeah.

Presenter45:55

I was kiffered. Um yeah, that so as a obviously I mean the one of Britain's most famous football enthusiasts, that must have been quite a moment doing the Three Lions thing and hearing every because everybody, every England fan, knew the words and sang along and sang it on the terraces.

Speaker 246:05

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 246:12

Yeah, I mean I remember lying in bed and hearing drunks going past, you know, singing it as they caroused at night. And it was the end, it was in the European Championship in 96, at the end of the England-Scotland game and we'd just won 2-1. I'm sorry to bring this up. But as they were exchanging shirts at the end, they played it over the loudspeakers and I thought, great. And then the crowd really, really sang it. And that was when I knew we'd got something special. And I was with David Badil and Ian Brody and we'd written it together. And I was saying that this is our magical summer. We have to savor every second of this. We'll never have anything like this again. Because, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a footballer, as many kids do. And, you know, I was awful at it. I wasn't even borderline. But this was as close as I was ever going to get to be really...

David Baddiel46:29

Yeah.

Speaker 247:03

To be part of an England World Cup squad, to have the official song.

Presenter47:07

And what was it that captivated you as a little boy? What did you love about it?

Speaker 247:11

Football was so different in those days as well. It you know, the smell of woodbines and meat pies when you went and it was all terraces. As a kid, you know, I probably saw about six goals in about ten years because you couldn't see a thing on the terraces. Kids used to take milk crates and stand on and stuff like that. It felt very much like you were part of something.

Presenter47:32

Frank Skinner.

Presenter47:33

You can also hear a whole range of brilliant comedians in the treasure trove of previous Desert Island Discs interviews online, and you can download them all, including Sarah Millican, John Bishop, Jack Whitehall, Miranda Hart, Jackie Mason, and Jimmy Carr.

Presenter47:48

Next week, my guest is the veteran radio critic Gillian Reynolds. Do join us.

David Baddiel48:08

This is the B B C.