Colin

My father’s dementia, as it remained until mid-to-late 2017, was dominated by Pick’s disease. But as time went on, I have no doubt he also had vascular, Alzheimer’s, aphasia – a whole dark rainbow of dementias.

And so, things changed. In My Family: Not the Sitcom, I chronicled his dementia mainly in terms of Pick’s, which was lucky, from a storytelling point of view, as that’s where most of the comedy was.[fn1] But there was something else. I came to understand how much of a mono-view we have of dementia, one repeated often in films and TV, which is based on the people who have turned their faces to the wall – the ancient man or woman staring comatose into space while care home workers change their blankets. Pick’s creates a wildly different state, almost the opposite, from that image, a mad, antic condition, whirling and crazed and disinhibited, in which those with it take their clothes off in public and shout obscenities and try to have sex with people who are not their husbands or wives.

I wrote about this in a Sunday Times piece at the time:

For some, of course, this is entirely distressing. For the relatives of the many who have lived their lives in unfailing politeness and propriety, to see them suddenly acting like sex-crazed hooligans is upsetting in the extreme. To be embarrassed by the behaviour of someone you love is just a terrible add-on to their memory loss.

But not, quite, for me. And in this I am my father’s son: I am a comedian, and one reason I am a comedian is that from a very early age, I was taught that there is very little that cannot be said, that swearing is perfectly normal, and that saying extreme things to shock may be gratuitous but can also be very funny. So that’s why I have chosen not to be silent about my dad’s dementia. Why I have chosen, in a strange way, in this new show, to celebrate it. It’s a nightmare, obviously, and painful, obviously, and pitiful, obviously – and does indeed create massive awkwardness and anxiety and social embarrassment on any occasion my dad meets anyone – but it is, at least, life, of a sort. It is at least, him: this behaviour is very … the word me and my brothers use is Colin-ish. At my mother’s funeral, two weeks after she died, my dad asked seven different women, all of whom were coming up to shake hands and comfort him with the kindly Jewish expression ‘I wish you long life’, to have sex with him (‘fancy a shag?’ is his preferred way of asking this). This is awful; it is hurtful; it is of course inappropriate in a thousand ways; but it is also, I would contend, funny, in the blackest way (virtually the dictionary definition of Nabokov’s idea of ‘laughter in the dark’). And: it is better than the alternative.

By which I don’t mean death – that thing that people chucklingly say about growing old, ‘It’s better than the alternative.’ I mean the living death, the present absence, the men and women who sit and sit and sit among the ruins: the gone girls and boys who indeed are no longer inside themselves. I would rather my dad is asking women to shag him at my mother’s funeral than that.

Because, sadly – and I mean, with real aching sadness – I can see that happening. He is not quite as sweary and shouty and abusive as he used to be: not quite as Colin-ish. He is becoming quieter and more withdrawn and less manic. His face, I think, is turning to the wall.

It was. This was charted in a documentary for Channel 4, entitled The Trouble with Dad. It may surprise you, given that I had already started doing an extremely revealing one-man show about him and my mother, that I wasn’t certain about this project when Ivor first suggested it. The difference being that I was totally in control of the one-man show and knew that whatever other interpretations could be made of it by audiences and critics, it was in intention an act of love. I also knew the portrait I was going to paint of my father was going to be true. Television, especially emotive television, is often not very interested in truth.

In the end, I agreed. While we’re here, it’s worth bringing up the issue of consent. My dad could not in any real way consent to this programme. But of course, by now my father could not really consent to most things that happened to him. He didn’t want to have that hip operation I referred to earlier, for example.

But you – that is, the people around the person with dementia, sometimes the children of that person, who may in their deep self still feel this is the person who makes decisions for them – must decide for him. There are many ways in which people try to put a positive spin on dementia, and one of those is that people with the disease are living, according to the modern mantra, in the moment. Well, yes, in a sense. They have no choice, as all that exists for them is the moment. They live in the extreme present. How much this is a positive is debatable – the sense I get is that living in the moment is a dizzying, anxious and confusing place once it is not bounded by memories of past or an intimation of future moments – but it has a practical advantage for those entrusted with keeping some of a person with dementia’s quality of life going.

That advantage is that if the person with dementia is exhibiting clear signs of enjoying themselves, maybe just go with it. It’s hard to make decisions for someone who lacks decision-making capability, but if they are smiling and joking and having a laugh, well, you may as well accept that the decision you’ve made on their behalf is OK (even if you harbour misgivings that the same person, before dementia, may have had a completely different response). And my dad loved The Trouble with Dad. By which I mean he loved being filmed, he loved the opportunity to take the piss out of my brothers and me on camera, he loved the attention: he loved, for want of a better word, being a star.

Actually, that is the best word. My dad is the star of that film. Not just in the sense that it is centred on him, but because, in most of the scenes he’s in, he dominates the room. He’s funny and sparky and wild; putting everyone else down and winding everyone up, and the viewer, I would suggest, just wants to see more of him. I don’t know if he fits the old Hollywood male formula of ‘women want to sleep with him, men want to be him’ – probably not quite – but he is the star.

Watching it now, I notice I begin the documentary by asking his consent. At my first meeting with Colin– after I shout, ‘Hello, how are you?’ from the porch and hear him say, ‘I’m dead’ – I tell him who the director is and that we’re making a film he’s going to be in and is he all right with that, and he says: ‘I don’t give a rusty damn.’ I realize that this does not constitute informed consent. It may not constitute consent at all, as it isn’t the word ‘yes’. But it demonstrates from the word go who my father is, and frankly – to go a bit Rhett Butler with it – I believe he indeed didn’t give a rusty damn.

Within the first few minutes he’s called me a fucking idiot, a total tit, a pain in the arse, a big shit and a lump of turd. I say I’d like to have some proper emotional connection with him before he dies, and he burps and laughs. I talk lyrically, much as I have in this book, about how the abusive way he expresses himself might be difficult to take but it proves he’s still my dad. He says, ‘What are you going on about? Keep babbling.’

Which means he’s not the empty object of pity that documentaries and movies about people with dementia can sometimes make them out to be. He’s not just sitting in a wheelchair covered in a tartan blanket staring into space. He’s not only vulnerable. Just the opposite, for much of the time. He’s dictating everything, making the conversation entirely about him and his bantz. He is what people schooled in improvisation technically call high status. He is anarchically powerful: a whirling dervish, a bull in the china shop of our usual politeness.

At least, for about two-thirds of the film he is. Then he gets a UTI.

UTIs were a recurrent problem for my dad. He, like all old men, had prostate problems – probably cancer, although it was never diagnosed – and being of an age when sorting it out wasn’t viable, in his eighties he was fitted with a catheter. I won’t describe in detail the terrible business of its regular changes – not that I, I should be clear, ever did that, but many nurses did, for which I continue to be ever thankful to the NHS – but it meant that latterly the most precarious element of caring for Colin Baddiel was that his catheter would get blocked, an infection would build up, and he would get kidney failure and/or a UTI. He would then be rushed to Northwick Park Hospital, the place where he remained unaware that his wife had died.

The peculiar thing about UTIs is you imagine them to be what they sound: a urinary tract infection. It doesn’t sound nice, obviously, but it sounds, to the uninitiated, like not a big deal – like something you take some antibiotics for and it clears up with no lasting effects. But that isn’t the case when you’re old, or you have dementia. This became apparent during the filming of The Trouble with Dad, and so we have a record of how much it’s not just a slight case of cock flu. Despite the infection being self-evidently an issue affecting him downstairs, the main impact seemed to be upstairs. Although before this, my dad was already, objectively, confused – in that he didn’t, for example, know where he lived or how old he was, or that his wife was dead – he didn’t act confused. He acted confidently and, as ever given his default personality plus Pick’s, like you were the twat who had no idea of anything.

But suddenly he didn’t. Suddenly, he was shaky and fragile and withdrawn and small. Weirdly, it felt like the UTI had given him self-awareness – awareness, that is, of his condition and how terrifying it was. I’m sure that is neurologically incorrect, but it felt like that.

However, the truth, as we know, is always complex. The story of my father’s dementia would be a simpler, if not a particularly inspiring one, if it were just two chapters – ‘Pick’s and How It Made Colin Baddiel Even More Colin Baddiel-ish Than Ever’, followed by ‘The Decline of Colin Into the Sad Quiet Personality-Removing Dementia That Most People Have’. It was more like a constant oscillation between the two. It is true that after the first UTI, my dad was never quite the same again, at least in terms of constantly being out there and crazy. It was like that part of him got buried under the other. But it was buried alive. And it resurfaced often, like Carrie’s hand.

In the film, The Trouble with Dad, even the latter half, when he is undoubtedly quieter, there are many examples of this. I find watching them now makes me cry and makes me laugh. What is particularly funny is how much the film, in its portrayal of us, the three brothers, around Colin, strains towards something nice, something serene, something that offers closure – like you might see in most films about dementia – and how he just shoots whatever attempt it is to do that down in curmudgeonly flames. We bring Lionel – previously mentioned as my dad’s best friend, who he didn’t speak to for years – down from Wales to see him. My father doesn’t recognize him: when Lionel introduces himself, Colin says, ‘You don’t look like him’, and Lionel, brilliantly, replies, ‘I really do – I really do look like him.’ And then Lionel, who has brought his clarinet, plays ‘Stranger on the Shore’. He’s a very good horn player and in any other documentary about dementia, particularly about a man meeting his best friend after not seeing him for years this would perhaps be the closing sequence, as music brings him back to his long-term home-town memories, connecting him for the course of the song to his old friend. But because the end of the clarinet is a bit too close to my dad’s ear, he just tuts a lot and looks very pissed off and raises his eyes to heaven, again and again.[fn2]

Similarly, for my father’s birthday – his eighty-second – since he loves cars, we rent a Rolls-Royce, something he once said he always fancied having a ride in. When it arrives, Ivor explains what we’ve done. My dad says, ‘So?’ In the car, Ivor asks what he thinks. He says, ‘I don’t think it’s any different from anything else.’ I say, ‘It’s your birthday treat – are you glad you came for the drive?’ ‘Yes,’ he says, flatly. ‘I’m not really feeling that,’ I reply. Since we begin to think, during the ride, that he may have forgotten where he is, we repeat the fact of it a few times. ‘Do you know what car you’re in?’ Ivor says. ‘Does it matter?’ says Colin. Ivor and I both agree that it does matter. But it turns out, only to us.

The most important moment – and the one that actually is a moment of closure, while still being my dad totally rejecting the niceties of all that – comes near the end. Sitting in my dad’s living room, the director, who is looking for these emotional beats, asks Ivor and me – in front of Colin – if our father has ever told us he loves us. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Of course not.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I think because …’ I reply, ‘he didn’t?’ This is a joke. Of sorts. But the director runs with it, turning the camera on my dad and saying, ‘Colin, your son is saying you never loved them.’ And my dad says, ‘That’s a load of bollocks.’

This affects me deeply – you can see it in the film – but I have since come to see it as an extraordinary moment. Because, of course, it was true that Colin Baddiel had never told me or Ivor or Dan that he loved us. I tell my children I love them all the fucking time. They are no doubt bored of it, or perhaps find it cringey. This is maybe because I’m making up for the lack of that statement in my childhood, but more likely because I come from a generation of parents for whom parenting is more of a defining thing in their lives, and make a point of expressing that to their children, a lot, through the words ‘I love you’. I’m not sure, in truth, that my generation’s parenting style is necessarily better than our parents’ was. I think it’s possible that as well as social media, the reason for the epidemic of mental health problems in teenagers and young people now may be something to do with how difficult we as parents have made it – with our over-closeness to them, our insistence on always, suffocatingly, being there for them – for children to separate from their parents.

But meanwhile, for my generation, hearing I love you from your parents was and is a big deal. Especially from your father, especially for sons. It’s another cliché, but certainly in my case true, that many of us were not raised by men in touch with their feelings, indeed, by men who saw being overtly in touch with one’s feelings, and therefore freely able to express affection, as suspect. I didn’t know you cared.

Which is why my father saying ‘That’s a load of bollocks’ in this moment has this effect. It is the closest I will ever get – certainly now – to my dad telling me he loves me. And I’m not saying that, as some might, to prove that he was an emotionally stunted man. I’m saying it’s, at least in terms of everything I’ve said in this book, better than him saying I love you. Because truer. Because that is who my dad was: someone who did love me, and my brothers, but could only express that as himself, because he was so deeply himself, and to do that he had to do it argumentatively, aggressively and with a swearword. He had to say that the idea that he didn’t love me was a load of bollocks.

Colin Baddiel’s bantz never completely stopped. It became harder and harder for him to find words, but he would still make faces, or blow raspberries. His attitude outlasted language and remained defiantly puerile, shot through with fuck you and I-don’t-want-your-pity. In the final scene of The Trouble with Dad, we take him to the pub. We were not a regular pub-going family – not even my dad’s Welshness and fondness for a drink could break through our basic Jewishness in that respect – yet something genuine happens.

My brother and I were cueing him. We were cueing him, that is, to do one of his catchphrases. We used to do this a lot. The catchphrases were the last frontier, the nuggets of Colinishness that we relied on to be locked deep inside the Fort Knox of his dementia, and we often tried to draw them out with prompts. Catchphrases, after all, frequently have a call and answer structure, and we, at least, could remember all the calls.

You don’t see this in the film but in the pub on that night, we tried quite a few. We tried ‘hobble dee hi?’ to which the answer is ‘de hum di grum’; we tried the old stalwart ‘I’m off!’ but got no ‘you’ve been off for years’. He was blank. And then, finally, I tried an old one. ‘Have you got a match?’ I said. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, more heavily, more, to be honest, desperately, ‘Have you got a match?’ Something in him stirred – some deep-set cognitive machinery, rustily starting to turn – and he said: ‘Yes.’ I looked at him, my face pleading with And?

And he said: ‘Your face and my arse.’

I say, with joy, ‘He’s still in there!’ I was euphoric that we got that. That film, as much as anything else, was a keepsake, a way to chronicle my dad while he was indeed still in there. It was a holding-on. It speaks of something important therefore that my dad saying a phrase so low-brow and uncultured and unlyrical filled me with such joy. It speaks of the intense significance of context. Because undeniably ‘Yes, your face and my arse’ is no great shakes in the words of wisdom department. But in the context of my father, and the need for us to feel, to be shown, that he was still who he was, this was the best thing he could possibly have said. This is the store we put on selfhood.

Keats said, ‘Beauty is truth.’ A simplistic, no-doubt-not-what-the-poet-meant reading of that – that beauty and truth are aligned – would suggest it is wrong. The way we present physical beauty, for example, contains very little truth, contrived as it is with cosmetic trickery, lighting and all sorts of conventional pressures on both male and female gazes to attune ourselves to a fixed, oppressive to most people idea of what beauty is (little bit of politics there). But I would privilege Keats’ next line, ‘truth beauty’. Truth is beautiful even when it is ugly. Truth, unlike beauty, is beautiful when it is hard to see, when it must be dug out, when it reveals itself despite everything. Which is why I’m happy my father did not, at that point, say something about silken flanks with garlands drest, or even I love you, but your face and my arse.