Footnotes

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Sarah

fn1. Yiddish for Important person. Sorry if you knew that.

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fn2. I’m aware this is an out-of-date reference that will only connect with a particular demographic. I have already, this early in the book, assumed you, dear reader, are part of that demographic.

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fn3. Who Do You Think You Are? is a BBC documentary series in which celebrities (yes, I’ve used that word, which means I’m including myself in that subset – I’m aware this is not a de rigueur thing to acknowledge) trace their genealogical roots. They always like to have a Jew in these series, as a Jew tracing his or her roots means: Nazis, who are of course serious documentary box-office gold. I was the Jew on the first series.

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fn4. Not a word, I’m aware. But felt right.

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Sarah

fn1. My truth gene is sounding the alarm, so I’m going to have to state what I actually asked my gran, which was: ‘Do you have any other brothers and sisters, apart from Joe?’ My great-uncle Joe Radbil was Otti’s other brother, who managed to make it out of Germany with her and lived in Wembley for most of his life. Also, if I don’t mention this, I will get into trouble with Michael, our one remaining cousin on that side, who will definitely at some point be reading this book. Hello, Michael.

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fn2. I should emphasize that my grandmother did actually say Mr Hitler here, which made it that much more confusing to a kid brought up on Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s masterpiece.

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fn3. She was also a big fan of the expressions ‘dovetail’ and ‘touch base’.

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My Family

fn1. Apart from the room Ivor is standing in – called the breakfast room – which had lino.

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fn2. There’s a later chapter that explains why she was called this. In a whole chapter about cats. I know that sounds attractive but I would advise not jumping right to it now.

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fn3. I’m not sure how you feel about footnotes. As a reader, I’m never sure about them myself. But as a writer, stuff occurs to me a lot while I’m writing, and I often want to add or contextualize or qualify, and it’s sometimes better not to do that in the main text, as it breaks up the flow, which frankly I’m doing enough already. But I’m very wedded to the idea that the truth is always complex, which means overarching theories, like the one I just put forward about why I don’t have Jewish shame, are let down by a factual discrepancy. In this case that in amongst the list of my parents’ friends present at my mum’s funeral were Bill and Ruth Mulligan, who were not Jewish. Ruth in particular. In her childhood she had been an active member of the Hitler Youth.

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fn4. Many years later, I told my then eight-year-old daughter about this while on the school run. I remember her saying, ‘Poor Daddy had to have the blue custard’, and felt that in some ways this summed up a section of my life.

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Sarah

fn1. Reflected pride/glory.

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fn2. Hysterically go on about their children’s achievements in order to generate reflected pride/glory.

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Fame

fn1. Obviously, the screen portal most young people in 2024 feel they can step into, correctly, because they can, is the computer screen.

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fn2. Arguably should’ve been a footnote. But I love that story.

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fn3. In a chapter on fame, it’s worth mentioning that my wife is, certainly in one respect, much more famous than me, due to being one of the main voices in the most successful pre-school animation of all time, Peppa Pig. She is Mummy Pig. Which has always been complicated for a Jewish bloke.

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fn4. For further info, see my book The God Desire.

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Sarah, Otti, Ernst

fn1. Matzo ball dumplings.

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Golf

fn1. Maybe there was a cost per letter for this engraving?

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Sarah

fn1. My mum’s stall was opposite my dad’s stall (he sold Dinky Toys: more about that later). Meaning that every day at work, my dad was faced with the name Golfiana, which was also, as we know, the name of David White’s business.

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Sarah and Colin

fn1. The woman on his right, facing the camera, is Ruth Mulligan.

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fn2. Note two other things here: the pipe. And the single glove. The single glove is not, I think, a Michael Jackson thing. It’s a golf thing.

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The Masters

fn1. I’m not entirely sure she had any non-golfing cards and stationery.

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fn2. This could only have gone badly. This could only have gone, for example, like:

DAVID: I think … um … it’s a reference to my time at school … when I had some teachers who I called Masters …

COLIN: Right. OK. But why is she calling you her master?

DAVID: Well, when I was at school, I wasn’t a Mr, was I? I was young. So I was … Master David Baddiel.

COLIN: Right. But why is she writing you a card in memory of … that?

FRANK: OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, COLIN, IT’S NOT THIS DAVID, IT’S TO DAVID WHITE, THE GOLFING MEMORABILIA GUY SHE’S BEEN HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH FOR ABOUT TWENTY YEARS!

I’ve given that line to Frank because, in my memory, I could tell from his face he knew what the line meant. I think my mum had told him all about it.

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Colin

fn1. She also told me that my father’s penis was the first one she ever saw – don’t worry – she followed him into the toilet when she was four and he was five.

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fn2. This is what my mum called me most often. It wasn’t the Welsh pronunciation. I should probably have spelled it Day, but that looks to me like a surname. She called me this, and sometimes the Day of Days. She also sometimes called me the Jam in her sandwich, meaning that I was the middle son of three. Which does somewhat position the other two as the less exciting two bits of bread. I don’t know how they ever felt about that.

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fn3. We didn’t have a room specially given over to breakfast. We had a little kitchen with a room off it which would be for most people I guess called a dining room, but for some reason – I mean we did eat this meal in here as well – the breakfast room.

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fn4. In all the time his lab was doing this, and despite the many times he explained it to me, I still don’t really know what that is. As far as I can make out, it basically involves, like, putting a bit of the other product on a piece of … I dunno … I want to say blotting paper? And then looking at the layers it makes as it separates out really, really closely. Yeah. That’s it.

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fn5. They fell out at some point in the mid-eighties, when Lionel sold him an Austin Princess for three hundred quid which a month later turned out to have a crack in the engine. They had a big fight, Lionel refused to return the money, and my father didn’t speak to him for forty years; meanwhile, I’m still stuck with the terrible fucking middle name.

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Comedy

fn1. Latterly, when he would come to our house, he would always say, as soon as Morwenna or I or one of our kids opened the door, ‘Coffee, not instant’, but I’m not sure this quite qualifies, as it was more of a request than a catchphrase, although said repeatedly enough to be both.

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fn2. Having said that, my mum was briefly obsessed – in a somewhat erotic way – references to him turn up in a number of the letters to David White – with Neil Diamond, who is, after all, the Jewish Elvis. And my dad owned two singles, ‘Cry of the Wild Goose’ by Frankie Laine and ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ by Bobbie Gentry, which, once in a blue moon, he would play repeatedly. If you flicked through their record collection, you would find some terrifying-looking vinyl with photos of people like Otto Klemperer in artistic agonies conducting the Berlin Philharmonic but these were never actually played.

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fn3. Obviously, I had never heard of crack then, and would’ve been far too frightened to take it if I had.

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fn4. I had another Prince Edward-involved incident many years later. On Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, which initially went out live, an audience member asked a question that involved a reference to Edward being gay, a rumour at the time. I said – after pointing out that it would be fine if he was – that I knew he wasn’t, as I had been friendly with a woman who went out with him at Cambridge. Frank said: who? And I just said her name. This was very stupid, as the woman in question, who lived by then in America, had long-lens photographers squatting outside her house the very next day. I sent her flowers and apologies. It is a pertinent bad example of my squash-wall mind.

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fn5. On one of the nights I played there, the legendary compère Malcolm Hardee introduced another act by saying, ‘He’s a Welsh poet. Take aim.’

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Neglect

fn1. I got nine votes and remember being dumped, after the election, by some other members of the Salivation Army, with my election leaflets, in a bin. The winner, incidentally, pictured going into the ballot box, was Peter Bradshaw – who would go on to be a close friend of mine, and also the Guardian’s cinema critic – standing for the Satanist Party.

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fn2. I arrived at Haberdashers’ not realising that, in its attempt to brand itself as a posh school, rather than one mainly for the bourgeoisie, which is what it was, there was no school football team, only rugby and cricket. This really depressed me, as I was remarkably shit at rugby. It is also the other reason, in my heart, why I didn’t become a professional footballer.

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fn3. He is Sacha’s cousin. Sacha also, some years after me, went to my school. One of the odd things about Haberdashers’ is it was a breeding ground for Jewish British comedians and comic writers. Other alumni include Matt Lucas and Robert Popper, the writer of Friday Night Dinner.

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fn4. Mr Cohen, in case you’ve forgotten, is the teacher at my primary school who told us that wherever we went there would be someone who didn’t like Jews. Meanwhile, during the writing of the bit about the school revue, I contacted my co-writer Nick Golson, who told me something I never knew, which is that a teacher was led out during the performance, having had a meltdown. I was – even at a distance of forty years – not unpleased by this information, as the teacher in question was Mr T—. Hashtag karma. And all that.

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More Neglect

fn1. Which, by the way, it is. I went to my daughter Dolly’s graduation. Apart from the three-second moment when she, in her gown and mortar board, picked up her scroll, most of the ceremony, from my POV, was very dull. But the idea of me being a no-show at that event is unimaginable.

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fn2. There were many, many comedians in the eighties who did jokes about police brutality. I would say that I, the Cambridge graduate, was the only one who had actually experienced it.

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fn3. My favourite episode following this claim was a moment in our kitchen when he insisted a friend of ours think of something and he would know what it was. She refused, saying she was concerned about his mental health and would prefer not to go along with this madness. But Ivor persisted, saying he would prove, if she would do this, that it was not madness. Finally, after about an hour, she gave in. After a moment’s pause, and shutting of Ivor’s eyes, he said, ‘What were you thinking of?’ She said, ‘Orange.’ Ivor said: ‘Oh. I thought it was cat bowl.’ There was a cat bowl in the kitchen. Come to think of it, I believe there were some oranges too.

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Zulaka

fn1. My mum also felt that the day of our second child, Ezra’s birth was a good one to hand me this press cutting from the Daily Mail:

Who knows whether she’d read it first. I pointed out that it wasn’t necessarily something I would have wanted to see, and she just looked blank. It was one of those times when I saw what my dad meant when he described my mother as ‘like a blancmange’.

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fn2. I don’t know if it is or not. If you google ‘Dolly Jewish’, you get a story about Dolly Parton doing some Jewish charity event, and that’s it. Which might suggest my mum was right. Except if I think about an old Jewish lady called Auntie Dolly – if I hear those words said with a hefty Jewish accent – it sounds fairly right to me.

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fn3. This seems a bit cruel to me now, although it was true. Pound was a terrible antisemite – worse than his mentee, T.S. Eliot – but I have always thought that Ezra Pound, just from a sonic point of view, is a very cool name.

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Dementia

fn1. Had some trouble remembering Colin. But didn’t google. Phew.

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Colin

fn1. This health and safety issue was not improved by my mother’s attitude to cooking chips. She would do this in a chip pan that, once upon a time, had been blue, but over time, an extremely long time, had turned very black indeed. It was possible the oil in it had not been changed since it was blue. As far as I could make out, my mother saw no reason ever to change chip oil.

This is another way in which she didn’t conform to the Jewish mother stereotype. Jewish mothers are supposed to be obsessively good with food. My mother’s idea of cooking was to put an enormous vat of water on the stove for two or three days, occasionally throwing in some giblets and the odd claw: this she then scooped out into bowls and called chicken soup.

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fn2. In later years, it’s possible the trace memory of this event is why I’ve always turned down I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!

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fn3. Second reference: apologies to the occasional younger reader.

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Sarah

fn1. I asked my children for more examples of my mother’s gifting tendencies. Dolly said, ‘Teddy bears with yarmulkes on.’ Ezra said, ‘Expired credit cards.’ These, of course, are not toys. But yes, I remember her giving them to my children anyway.

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Colin

fn1. I’m aware you’re not supposed to say this.

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fn2. I often, from my time around people with the disease, think this. It feels to me like the reason people with dementia sometimes ask the same question again and again is not only that they’ve forgotten that they’ve already asked it – although they have – but also that they retain some amorphous memory of the question they wanted to ask.

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Dan and Colin and Dolly

fn1. Which itself involved some lying. Because my dad, despite being in obvious pain every time he took a step, refused to accept that he needed a hip operation, and so we had to lie and tell him he was going into hospital just for a check-up. I’m using the continuous past there because we had to tell him it over and over again, particularly when he was in hospital and pissed off about it. Thank Christ, really, that he couldn’t walk more than a few steps without being in pain, as otherwise he would’ve left the hospital in his gown.

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Colin

fn1. I’ve noticed this is my fourth reference to Alan Partridge. This may betray a subconscious anxiety that writing a book like this, which I would say is cross-generic, but one of those genres could be considered to be celebrity memoir, overlaps with many books written by Alan. The other possibility is that I just really like, and have a tendency to watch and rewatch, the entire Partridge canon.

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fn2. This is another joke I am allowed to make.

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Sarah

fn1. I tried for a while to convince the publishers that this photo, which I took just before I left Harrow Recycling Centre, should be the front cover of this book. For me it symbolises everything about the comedy and tragedy and defiance and randomness of my mother’s journey. Particularly the idea that the thing that will raise her from the rubbish is golf. They disagreed.

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fn2. Although who knows? DW’s pipe does crop up a lot in my mother’s letters, and often in an ambiguous way:

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fn3. Possibly our home, although I think if anyone had tried to cook spare ribs using our grill, the whole kitchen would’ve gone up like a box of firecrackers.

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Sarah

fn1. The poetry book, in case anyone is confused. I don’t mean I found inner feelings I hadn’t had before. Although I did that too.

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Colin

fn1. People responded to this in a very liberated way. Dementia is a terrible condition but because it involves a shifted reality it also leads to many types of absurdity and it seemed as if in that show I was giving permission to the audience, many of whom were in the same situation, to laugh about it. I heard many stories afterwards from members of those audiences, keen to share. One man told me his mother had dementia and had recently had a fall. Despite it not being a life-threatening one, the care home had phoned him up and told him. He had said: ‘Well, of course, she’s recently had her leg amputated.’ They said: ‘Yes. She forgot that.’ Meanwhile a woman told me her mum had said to her that her late father had suddenly appeared on the doorstep. She continued: ‘I said what are you doing here, you’re meant to be in heaven?’ He said: ‘Yeah, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’ And my favourite, about a mother-in-law being given a cognitive assessment by a GP, who asked the usual type of questions: ‘Who is the prime minister?’, ‘Who is the reigning monarch?’, ‘What year is it?’, ‘What city are we in?’, and when she failed to answer any of them, the GP said, ‘Perhaps you can tell us what kind of care home you’d like us to find for you …?’ And she said, ‘I’d really like to go somewhere where they put on a lot of quizzes.’

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fn2. Sadly, Lionel died during the writing of this memoir. Ivor and I went to his funeral in Wales. While there, one of his children told a story about my parents’ honeymoon stay with Lionel and his wife Mim, in their house in Thornbury. There’s a reason of course why most people don’t honeymoon in other people’s houses. During the night, my mother and father were having sex so loudly that eventually Mim said to Lionel: ‘Go and ask them to fucking keep it down.’ Lionel did.

What most amazes me about this story is obviously not that my parents were loudly having sex in someone else’s house on their wedding night. It’s that they were apparently quieter after that. Because the one thing I would say that defined both my mother and father is they were not people who toned themselves down for the sake of others.

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Colin

fn1. As a postscript, something else about this bit of footage makes me cry now. Which is that as I walk into my dressing room, there’s a little moment between me and the other comedian who was in that show, Sean Lock. It’s a short exchange – he just pats me on the back and I say, ‘Well done, Sean’ – and then I go in to meet my dad. But it causes me a poignant stab of pain now to see him, so characteristically Sean-like with a fag on the go, now that’s he gone so young from cancer.

Rob and I had both found Sean hilarious when he was just doing the circuit, and so asked him to play various characters we’d written for him in Newman and Baddiel in Pieces. He was great at it, and we asked him to come on tour with us. An urban myth has since appeared that Newman and Baddiel are not in fact the first British comedians to play Wembley Arena, as that would have been Sean, but I need to correct this, not just because of my truth urge, or from a churlish need to confirm that it was us, but because Sean was not our support act. He didn’t come on first. He was folded into the show and appeared throughout, always smashing it. He was more of a featured player than a support act. Indeed, at Wembley, at one point, as we were changing costumes, something went wrong and he was left onstage in front of twelve thousand people, and just had to ad lib. And, of course, did so hilariously.

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Colin

fn1. Actually, it turns out that Jewish funerals and shivas discourage flowers as – I’m Mr Jew, I should know this stuff – flowers imply celebration, which would distract from mourning. So presumably the oft-heard funeral speech opening ‘We are here to celebrate X’s life, they would not want us to be sad’ would be anathema to Talmudic rabbis.

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Cats

fn1. P.S. Alan Coren, I believe, once said that publishing lore has it that the books that sell best are the ones about Nazis, golf and cats.

Well: #waterfrontcovered

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