David Baddiel

What do you think the greatest misconception about you is among the public that know you?

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.

You said in the past that your childhood was populated by your father's terrifying rages. What made him angry?

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.

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

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. … Well, they've both seen it now. 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.