Interviewing David Baddiel after reading his memoir, My Family: The Memoir, is a bit like walking into a living room where you’re already familiar with the tchotchkes on the mantelpiece and the cat scratches on the sofa. Or, in this case, the piles of golf memorabilia that come with a side of boundary issues. Hell, you even know who in his clan recorded letters to their lover on cassette tapes. It’s intimate, funny, slightly awkward, and completely one-sided. I mean, he’s never met me before!
When I sat down with Baddiel recently in Joburg, I immediately blurted: “My gran was also from Swansea.” Baddiel’s dad is from the Welsh town too, and it seems his writing triggers a weird sense of familiarity.
“That’s the deal when you write about your family,” he says, laughing. “People come up to you and say things like, ‘Your mum sounds mad – in a good way!’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah, thanks. That’s what I wanted on her gravestone.’”
British Baddiel, best known for his ground-breaking 1990s comedy and for co-writing the football anthem Three Lions, has in recent years become just as celebrated for his thoughtful books, plays and essays. In person, he is cheerful, sharp, and wonderfully self-deprecating – and as brilliantly acerbic about the world as fans might expect.
The zero judgment zone
His recent books – Jews Don’t Count and My Family: The Memoir among them – are part of a growing body of work, all rooted in a powerful commitment to truth-telling. In My Family, he recounts with painful precision moments like sitting for hours beside his father’s body after his death. It’s dark and tender, but also weirdly funny, because Baddiel has the rare gift of finding absurdity even in grief.
“It was so fucking weird,” he says now. “You’re just sitting there, with this corpse, thinking: is this … what you’re meant to do?”
What’s striking is how little judgment he carries. His mother, a complicated, scarred figure with a penchant for publicising a love affair via (among other ways) terrible poetry, is treated not with anger but with curiosity. “I think if you’re telling stories, you can’t be judging people,” he explains. “Judgment shuts things down. Storytelling opens them up.”
That instinct – the urge to open up rather than close off – runs through everything Baddiel does. He is, of course, aware that touching on his Jewish identity and anti-Semitism has become a lightning rod online, especially in the chaos of Twitter (or X, as it’s now called). Baddiel has mostly retreated from the platform these days. “It constantly tries to suck you back in,” he says. “But it’ll drive you crazy. It makes you mad.”
Instead, he focuses on creating and writing, albeit in a somewhat chaotic fashion. He watches a lot of cat videos on Instagram, apparently. “My partner [fellow writer Morwenna Banks] says she doesn’t know how I get anything done,” he admits. “She goes into her study and works for eight hours straight. I just sort of … waft about. Go downstairs. Watch TV. Procrastinate. And then – two months later – somehow there’s a book.”
Keeping it real
Books aside, he also somehow finished his latest project: a soon to be released psychological thriller for the BBC’s Channel 4 based around the strange phenomenon of women being falsely accused of being Maxine Carr, the infamous real-life figure connected to the murders of two young girls in Soham, England. “It’s new for me,” he says. “I don’t usually do thrillers. But if I have an idea, I find it almost impossible not to follow it.”
Baddiel’s openness about uncomfortable subjects is, perhaps, part of why My Family resonates so strongly. It’s full of bizarre, hilarious specifics (golf-themed trinkets included), but it strikes universal chords.
“When I was doing the stand-up show,” he says, “people would come up to me afterwards and say: ‘My mum was exactly like your mum.’ Not in the same way, but they’d had something similar. That’s why you have to be specific: the more specific you are, the more people connect.”
Talking to Baddiel is a reminder of what good storytelling does: it draws a map of what it means to be human, flaws and all. He doesn’t romanticise his childhood, but he doesn’t dramatise it either. It’s just life: messy, funny, painful and absurd.
And maybe, in a world obsessed with polished narratives and photoshopped influencers, that radical honesty is Baddiel’s real superpower, and a hugely refreshing one at that. He’s not trying to be perfect. He’s just trying to tell the truth – parental deaths, bad poetry, broken dreams and all.
‘My Family: The Memoir’ is published in South Africa by Jonathan Ball.
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