Photograph: Graeme Robertson/the Observer
In early 2015, a couple of months after his mother died, David Baddiel wrote to his younger brother, Dan, a sometime taxi driver in New York, setting out his plans for “a warts-and-all stage show” about their parents’ lives, and asking if he had any objection to the idea. Dan sent him a one-line reply: “You’re not doing it.” The comedian’s elder brother, Ivor, maybe knew him a little better. When Baddiel explained what he had in mind, Ivor simply said: “We could talk about this for two hours, and go back and forth on it, but I may as well just ask you upfront, are you going to do this?” To which Baddiel said: “Yes”.
The show, My Family: Not the Sitcom, had a sold-out run in the West End and toured the world. All of his brothers’ misgivings were entirely justified. In a revival at the Royal Court, the official publicity called it “a massively disrespectful celebration of the lives of David Baddiel’s late mother, Sarah, and dementia-ridden father, Colin”. He liked to describe it as “a twisted love letter” to his parents, a two-hour monologue in which he detailed, with slides and documentary evidence, every sexual secret of Sarah – and Colin’s extreme mental decline. This is the book-length version of those revelations.
