Colin

As you’ll have noticed, I bang on a lot about truth. This book is supposed to be an expression of my commitment to truth, to telling the truth about my parents. I’m fighting here against various ways in which memory is corrupted, either by posthumous idealization or by dementia. But the trouble is that truth is still reliant on memory: my memory. And memory plays tricks.

In 1993 the BBC made a documentary called Newman and Baddiel: The Road to Wembley, which was mainly footage of us trying out material in small venues, then honing it in bigger ones, until we got to the UK tour that ended up at Wembley Arena. I never watched this documentary when it went out, because Rob and I were falling apart at the time, as a double-act and as friends, and I knew he had said things on it that would upset me. But in the process of sorting through my mother’s stuff after she died, I found that title scrawled on the side of one of her many VHS’s in one of her many boxes. And I thought, Oh Christ, it’s been twenty-two years, just watch it. So I did, in my parents’ bedroom, where they still had a VHS player – in fact, one of those TVs with a VHS player built in. And the things Rob Newman said – mainly about how he couldn’t understand why he was working with me at all – still upset me.

But not properly – not least because I was expecting him to say those things. It got under my skin enough to think about switching it off. But I didn’t, and then, right at the end of the documentary, I saw something I wasn’t expecting, had completely forgotten, and that properly upset me: it made me weep and weep. It’s a bit of footage of me going back into my dressing room just after the Wembley gig, and my dad comes in with a bottle of champagne and says, ‘You were absolutely superb.’ We hug, and in a terrible mockney voice, I turn to camera and say, ‘It’s me dad.’

And what made me weep was … it’s my dad undemented, of course, and strong and healthy and vital, but most of all – it’s him being nice. It’s him being empathetic, and complimentary. Which made me think – perhaps his dementia has, after all, in a way, given me dementia. Perhaps his dementia so isolated and exaggerated the abusive, insulting part of him I forgot that he sometimes was nice. That he sometimes was a good dad. That he sometimes made me want to say, proudly, to camera: it’s my dad.[fn1]