David Baddiel chats about his family show ahead of tour in Birmingham, Dudley and Stafford

We talk a little about football, of course. After all, David Baddiel’s relationship with Black Country legend Frank Skinner – and, indeed, the nation – was built almost exclusively around their love of The Beautiful Game. They were the poster boys of Euro ‘96. When laddism was at a peak and football was our shared currency, Baddiel and Skinner were emblems of a glorious failure in the summer of 1996 when Gareth Southgate’s missed penalty – after Stuart Pearce’s valedictory strike – sent us packing from the semi-finals against Germany.

David and Frank met backstage at a comedy club, Jongleurs, at Battersea. They were both up-and-coming, both making a name for themselves. They couldn’t, however, have been more different. David was the Cambridge intellectual who’d scored a double first at King’s College and had dropped out of a PhD at University College, London. The atheist and alumnus of Cambridge Footlights became one of the great rock‘n’roll comedians after teaming up with Rob Newman in 1988 and selling out Wembley Arena, the first-ever comedy act to do so.

Frank, in contrast, was the West Bromwich Albion supporting, Oldbury council house-dwelling rough-around-the-edges-but-nonetheless-loveable rogue who’d graduated from Birmingham Poly and spent three and a half years unemployed before getting a job at Halesowen College. His Catholic beliefs were at odds with his love of the booze and failure to keep his marriage on track. Together, they made the odd couple that the nation adored. The two men remain the closest of friends, more than 20 years after their original version of Three Lions.

David says: “We’re an odd couple, Frank and I. I saw him yesterday, we communed about the death of Mark E Smith. He was such a big fan of the fall. I knew he’d be upset so I went to see him, he lives in my road, which is a me-and-Frank thing. We used to live together and when he moved out he bought a house two doors down. He’s now bought a house 100 doors down. It’s a very expensive form of stalking. He likes the idea that we exist in a form of village and can drop in on each other.”

Football is a hugely important part of their relationship. “I think with him, football is a very important part of it. I’d never met him before and we were both backstage at Jongleurs in Battersea. It was the World Cup of 1990 and the only match on was the Republic of Ireland versus Egypt.

“We had an argument about it. He thought I was poncey by saying they were too defensive. But we liked each other. That was a good marker for each other. A couple of weeks later I bumped into him. I said ‘always a pleasure to see you’. At that point, he’d split up from his wife and didn’t have a house, so he’d come to London but also broken up with his girlfriend so had nowhere to live. I offered him a room, having met him twice – he lived with me for six years.

“He became a big TV star during that time and he was on rent of £40 a week. Six years later he was on telly, earning a lot. But the rent always stayed the same. We became very close friends. He’s slightly older than me but we’re kindred spirits. We both have a kind of muscular sense of humour. That’s it. That honesty is the key.”

Honesty is integral to the bond between David and Frank – and is also the key ingredient in David’s new show, the brilliant stand-up show, My Family: Not The Sitcom. It will feature at Birmingham’s New Alexandra Theatre on February 28; Dudley Town Hall on April 19, and Stafford Gatehouse on May 19.

The show is part stand-up, part story-telling. It also uses little bits of footage, particularly of his parents.

David explains: “It’s a comedy that is also true autobiography. A lot of people think it will be a show about my dad, but he’s the supporting player. It’s principally about my mom. When I went to my mum’s funeral, in early 2015, I noticed a lot of people I didn’t really know. They were all telling me that she was wonderful. For me, that sort of language erases a person out of existence. If that’s all you have to say, they’re already gone.

“My manifesto is that if you are going to preserve their memory, you have to call up their weirdness and madness and flaws because that makes them a human being. So the show is a celebration of the craziness.”

In My Family: Not The Sitcom David, takes the convention that you’re not supposed to wash your dirty linen in public and nails it to the cross. Then he sets fire to the cross and aims a Kim Jong Un-sized nuclear warhead at the flaming structure and obliterates it while rubbing his hands gleefully.

“My mum had a very long and very passionate affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman, which she was very proud of. She turned our life over to golf. So the show includes that and also my mother’s erotic poetry, which I discovered after she died. She had a crazy and mad affair. The other half of the show is about my dad and his dementia. We tend to treat people who have dementia with kid gloves. But you can’t treat my dad that way. He’s very inappropriate and curmudgeonly. The dementia has made him more disinhibited. It’s made him even more unacceptable. He has no inhibitions so he says terrible things. There is comedy in that and the show challenges the audience because I choose to laugh about it and therefore they should too. There is poignancy and complexity. There is the question of whether it’s OK to laugh. So, at the end of the day, the show is about the power of laughter to deal with death and dementia and things like that.”

David doesn’t have a script, as such. The stories he tells in My Family: Not The Sitcom are ones that he’s lived through. He knows every nuance and detail. He has had a front row seat in the drama of his parents’ lives. The normal painful trawl through the darker recesses of the soul didn’t take place. The opposite was true. In many ways, the show came bursting out of him.

The show rejects the idea that things shouldn’t be said. “I’ve never been one to do that. I’m keen that if things are in your head and heart they should come out. After the show, people come up to me and tell me their family secrets. What was difficult was my first performance. I found there were bits that made me feel very emotional. I still do. I have ended up in tears a couple of times, not to the point that I can’t go on, I’m a trouper. But there have been a couple of times.”

He used to bookend the show with a Q&A, but doesn’t do that now. He tended to get the same questions and there were also moments of high emotion. On one occasion, a man stood up and read a letter that he’d written to his mother when he was a student. He described the people he was lodging with and it turned out he was lodging with David’s grandparents. “It was the most emotional moment in a theatre ever,” the star recalls.

There have been other stand-out moments. David and his wife, the fellow comedian Morwenna Banks, initially disagreed over whether their daughter, Dolly, 17, should be allowed to see it. They were unsure whether it was too extreme. Eventually, Dolly was allowed in and witnessed her father’s rawest emotions, live on stage. “That’s sort of difficult, I mean emotional.”

The beauty of My Family: Not The Sitcom, is that people connect. “They connect because of their own family. The point about family is that no one has exactly the same experience. No one else has had a mum who has had a brazen affair with a golfing salesman. But everyone has a family and so people connect. One person said to me his mum and dad used to go on holiday with them every year but each year there was another bloke who joined them and was described as an uncle. It turned out there was a ménage a trios.”

For David, the show is not simply a way to make a living – though it does that too. It’s also a way of processing the deepest emotions that the middle-ages face; those surrounding the death of a parent. He was in therapy for quite a long time after the death of his mother and as his father’s health declined. However, he found comedy a better way of dealing with things.

“It’s better to laugh. I think really, if we’re going to talk about the deep psychology of it, the key element is that my mum died very suddenly. So I had to make sense of her absence. One way of doing that is by recreating her on stage so that she’s sort of still there. I don’t do that in the idealised way that people do at funerals.”

David’s brother avoided the show for a while. Then he went to see it in London, before it transferred to the West End. David asked him what he thought. And his brother said he loved it because he felt as though his mother was still in the room. The point is that I want – without it being too morbid – to feel like she’s alive. And I want to feel as though my dad hasn’t been claimed by dementia. These people who you might think of as dead and gone still were people. This show reclaims their memory.”

David’s career has been built on honesty. While most comedians distort the truth – or just plain avoid it – in pursuit of a killer punchline or sensational story, David is its disciple. And his relationship with the audience remains as close as it’s possible to be. Just as he and Frank Skinner used to perform as though the audience were their mates in a pub, rather than punters who were buying tickets and were there to be entertained, so David welcomes them in. There is no ‘fourth wall’, no space between David and the audience, no corners in which he hides.

“It’s true. That’s the way we went about things on Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. Most performers have a persona when they’re on stage or on TV. It’s hard not to have a persona. Some of them work: Steve Coogan doing Alan Partridge is a good example. But I’ve never been that. I’ve always been interested in how I can be myself. Frank and I didn’t have a script or a format. You just had us two on stage and talking. And this show is the same thing. You come away with me and a real sense of my parents and my life. I talk about my tendency to be obsessive about the truth. I have no moral code beyond trying to be as honest as possible to life as much as you can. I’m not a religious person and so truth is all that’s left. I just try to be as honest as possible and the show I’ve developed is inherently true.

“I’m not assuming any character or disguise, as you would in a play. People have referred to this show as a play. I always say, it’s not a play. I’m talking to the audience.”

When Baddiel and Skinner were appearing nightly on our TV screens, they connected with millions for one simple reason – they were being themselves. And, in so doing, they were articulating the hopes and fears of millions. They captured the highs and lows because they lived through them, the same as us. Football’s still just as important to David as it was back in ’96. But life has moved on and there are other things to discuss. The beauty of My Family: Not The Sitcom is that he discusses the issues facing a 50-something man in just the same way that a 30-something discussed football all those years ago.

My Family: Not the Sitcom is at Birmingham New Alexandra Theatre on February 28; Dudley Town Hall on April 19 and Stafford Gatehouse on May 19.

My mum lived life with gusto – as a punch in the face to the Nazis

He was born in New York. However, David Lionel Baddiel moved from Troy to England with his parents, Sarah and Colin, at just four months old.

His mum had also experienced a similarly unsettled start to life at the beginning of the Second World War. She was brought to the UK in 1939 when her parents fled Nazi Germany, where her father, Ernst, had been stripped of his assets. And that remarkable, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God attitude – or, in David’s case, skip the God bit – has shaped his life.

David believes his mother’s affair with a golf memorabilia salesman was probably down to her upbringing. She very nearly didn’t make it – and so she lived her life by blazing a trail, as though somehow proving the world wrong and making the most of every living second, however inappropriate that might have been and however much she might have cocked a snook at convention.

“One thing I do in the show is look at the fact that my mother, who was born in Nazi Germany, escaped from the regime by the skin of her teeth. The mad way she lived her life, in a very small way, might have been rooted in that. She wasn’t able to express that madness in a particularly glamorous way, so she ended up having an affair. And something about my mother speaks to me about a woman who knew she nearly didn’t have a life and so lived it as a punch in the face to the Nazis, at some level.”

David talks about her real name in the show, Sarah, which was different from the name she ought to have had; Jews were supposed to select a name from a Government-prescribed list but his mother refused to be on it.

“As I’ve got older – and I don’t want to overplay these things – I’ve become more and more aware of the incredible thing my grandparents and mum got out of. When I was born, it was 19 years after the end of the Second World War. I remember being 11 and hearing my grandparents talking about it. And to me, it didn’t seem like much. But if now look back on my life, it’s more than 19 years since Baddiel and Skinner. But it feels like only yesterday. So I’ve started to realise that those people grew up with that terror in their minds all of the time. The idea that those people grew up and lived with that in their minds, as though it were only yesterday, is incredible.”

One of the other significant aspects of David’s comedic development was his time at Cambridge University. Having attended primary school at the North West London Jewish Day School, in Brent, he studied at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, in Elstree, before earning his place at King’s College.

“I’m not really part of that generation that did well because I was part of Footlights, like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Back then, that’s how people got into comedy. It’s true that I went to Cambridge partly because I was interested in Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Derek and Clive. I knew they’d been in Footlights.

“But when I came out, it was a very bad place in terms of fashionability. I ended up on the London cabaret circuit and just started again. But I’m glad I had that background because it was a way of doing comedy. I wouldn’t have had it if I’d not gone elsewhere.

“I am one of the few to have carried on from my generation. More people came later on when it became OK again, like Mitchell and Webb and Mel and Sue, but they were all 10 years on from me.”

He was born in New York. However, David Lionel Baddiel moved from Troy to England with his parents, Sarah and Colin, at just four months old.

His mum had also experienced a similarly unsettled start to life at the beginning of the Second World War. She was brought to the UK in 1939 when her parents fled Nazi Germany, where her father, Ernst, had been stripped of his assets. And that remarkable, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God attitude – or, in David’s case, skip the God bit – has shaped his life.

David believes his mother’s affair with a golf memorabilia salesman was probably down to her upbringing. She very nearly didn’t make it – and so she lived her life by blazing a trail, as though somehow proving the world wrong and making the most of every living second, however inappropriate that might have been and however much she might have cocked a snook at convention.

“One thing I do in the show is look at the fact that my mother, who was born in Nazi Germany, escaped from the regime by the skin of her teeth. The mad way she lived her life, in a very small way, might have been rooted in that. She wasn’t able to express that madness in a particularly glamorous way, so she ended up having an affair. And something about my mother speaks to me about a woman who knew she nearly didn’t have a life and so lived it as a punch in the face to the Nazis, at some level.”

David talks about her real name in the show, Sarah, which was different from the name she ought to have had; Jews were supposed to select a name from a Government-prescribed list but his mother refused to be on it.

“As I’ve got older – and I don’t want to overplay these things – I’ve become more and more aware of the incredible thing my grandparents and mum got out of. When I was born, it was 19 years after the end of the Second World War. I remember being 11 and hearing my grandparents talking about it. And to me, it didn’t seem like much. But if now look back on my life, it’s more than 19 years since Baddiel and Skinner. But it feels like only yesterday. So I’ve started to realise that those people grew up with that terror in their minds all of the time. The idea that those people grew up and lived with that in their minds, as though it were only yesterday, is incredible.”

One of the other significant aspects of David’s comedic development was his time at Cambridge University. Having attended primary school at the North West London Jewish Day School, in Brent, he studied at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, in Elstree, before earning his place at King’s College.

“I’m not really part of that generation that did well because I was part of Footlights, like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Back then, that’s how people got into comedy. It’s true that I went to Cambridge partly because I was interested in Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Derek and Clive. I knew they’d been in Footlights.

“But when I came out, it was a very bad place in terms of fashionability. I ended up on the London cabaret circuit and just started again. But I’m glad I had that background because it was a way of doing comedy. I wouldn’t have had it if I’d not gone elsewhere.

“I am one of the few to have carried on from my generation. More people came later on when it became OK again, like Mitchell and Webb and Mel and Sue, but they were all 10 years on from me.”