David Baddiel is a bit worried that his new book could sound like misery lit. Called My Family: The Memoir, it tells the story of the 60-year-old comedian and author’s life through his relationship with his parents: Sarah and Colin Baddiel. There was no abuse – to be clear – but no shortage of identity-defining casual neglect. Colin was a scientist from Swansea who could be funny, but was emotionally stunted. “If Roger Mellie from Viz had been Welsh and a bit more aggressive – that was my father,” Baddiel writes. In later life, Colin had dementia and became even more sweary and profane, to the point where Baddiel stopped taking his own children to visit him.
Sarah was a more flamboyant personality and her three sons (David is the middle child) played second fiddle to a man named David White, with whom Sarah had a decades-long affair. Sarah was not embarrassed to have a lover; in fact, it may have been her proudest achievement. Once, when she was in the audience of her son’s ITV show Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, she was talking about her children and made the quip: “Are you quite sure they’re all from your father?” Forget, for a moment, that millions of people would have been at home watching. Colin was in the studio with her, smiling!
