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It’s important to keep going on dates once you’re married and have a kid, however much your body is telling you to stay at home and go to bed and never do anything again. I was feeling very tired and a little unwell, but we had tickets to see David Baddiel’s new show, “My Family (not the sitcom)” at the Menier Chocolate Factory. And we were fucking going, however much that hurt us.
I am very glad we made the effort, partly because it was a terrific show, but mainly because Phoebe suddenly started puking at around about 9pm and someone else had to deal with the problem. Double victory! The only worry was that I might be feeling low energy and nauseous because the same was about to happen to me. But I was only sick in the back of my throat during dinner, so I am the ultimate winner here.
I consider myself to be a painfully honest person and comedian, but Baddiel is a more pathological truth teller than I and this show is perhaps the ultimate expression of this as it’s about his parents’ sex life, his mother’s death and his father’s dementia. Which might not sound like a barrel of laughs, but it is more than a barrel. Maybe approaching two barrels.
I have strayed into these areas myself in my stand up shows. My routine about my grandma’s dementia is perhaps the favourite of all I have done and as David (and the audience it seemed) felt , laughing in the face of this horror is the only sensible option. And I’ve talked about repressed family feelings, both in my stand up and my largely ignored TV film “You Can Choose Your Friends”. But Baddiel’s show is on a whole new level. It crosses a line that I think most performers wouldn’t cross, but unusually for line-crossing comedy, finds something human and true and universal on the other side. Because whilst David’s family background is probably not like many other’s, it still resonates, because all our families are odd and secretive or inappropriate. Most of us keep the secrets, as much through shame as decency, but it’s interesting and cathartic to hear them expressed. And whilst dealing with these serious subjects, painting vivid portraits of his parents’ personalities, good and (mainly) bad David somehow manages to keep the show full of laughs and more importantly to make everyone involved sympathetic.
And almost incidentally and possibly accidentally it reveals an awful lot about him. He’s a comedian who seems to attract more negative feeling than many (and we all get a lot of criticism because generally speaking people think it’s OK to be furiously angry with someone for not having the same sense of humour as them). But you get an understanding of who is he and where he’s come from, in this show and obliquely how the strange behaviour of his parents might have moulded him (but more so how he has managed to come out of it all as a relatively normal person). But anyone of his generation can understand the odd relationships that existed between parents and kids and fathers and sons in the past.
It’s a beautiful constructed show and though it might make you question what rights we have to reveal the private details of our parents’ lives, it is also pretty clear that his mum would have loved this attention and had little shame about her behaviour in life and artistically speaking it’s fascinating and thrilling to step over this line. And the show is underpinned by love and respect anyway and accepting the madness of family.
All in all it’s one of the most complete stand up shows I have seen. It allows for humorous digressions, but as the Q and A session that follows it shows, intrigues and resonates. And it was made all the more special by the fact that I was avoiding being around for my own sick child as I watched it.
And unusually here's a Metro column which was never (really) a blog.
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