Dan Snow's History Hit - In Conversation with David Baddiel

Episode Date: February 21, 2021

In this episode taken from our archive, David Baddiel talks to Dan about the Second World War, Trump's Mussolini-isms, and why Jim Callaghan makes comedy difficult.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Once a week we dive back through the memory banks, through the archive. That's what Team History Hit do. We week, we dive back through the memory banks, through the archive.

That's what Team History Hit do. We're all history graduates. We love going into archives. We blow the dust off the filing cabinet. We root through it. God, most of the team that worked for me wouldn't even know what a filing cabinet was. There's a thought. Anyway, we do that, and we pull out a back episode of the podcast. And this week, we thought we'd go for an interview with a very brilliant David Baddiel. He's a national treasure here in the UK. Everyone knows who he is. Comedian, author, broadcaster. He's had a number one hit when I was young. The hot summer of 96, who can forget? England's run to the semi-final of Euro 96 on home territory in our own stadia. on home territory, in our own stadia. And David Baddiel's song, Three Lions, was the soundtrack of that summer.

I was young. My whole life was ahead of me. The weather was warm. It was an innocent time where we could enjoy warm summers before it was obvious that those warm summers were a product of a climate crisis that threatened to extinguish life on Earth. And I was looking forward to years of excitement and opportunity. And I was looking forward to years of excitement and opportunity. Here I am, age 42, years later, talking into my phone in a strange way, an empty room. Anyway, David Baddiel came on the podcast a couple of years back. He was absolutely brilliant.

He is on everybody's lips at the moment. He's in everyone's thoughts because David Baddiel has just published a new book. It is called Jews Don't Count, and it's a remarkable contribution to the debate around anti-Semitism identity here in the UK at the moment. The reason I put this podcast in is you can see a lot of his thinking. You could see he was ruminating on these subjects a couple of years ago when we talked and he ended up writing a book, and it's very brilliant. So well done him. If you want to go and listen to other back episodes of this podcast, you can do so at historyhit.tv. A lot of people ask me what historyhit.tv is, and I tell them it's like Netflix for history. It is a digital history channel where you get the world's best

history documentaries. We're making new ones all the time, but there's also ones that we've licensed, showcasing the best of the past. And you also get all podcasts, my podcast, other podcasts that we produce, all without ads on them. And you also get all podcasts, my podcast, other podcasts that we produce, all without ads on them. It's a very exciting proposition, the old history hit.tv. We are in the moment in the middle of producing a couple of new documentaries. The people are going to like them. They're big. They're exciting. And there's lots of new and interesting material about well-known subjects. I think you're going to really fire up the old history subscribers. So thank you very much to everyone subscribing.

If you're not subscribing, please go and check it out, history.tv. And don't forget, everyone, if you want to come and watch me talking to people and recording episodes of this podcast in the flesh, live, for real, you go to history.com slash tour. Please go and check that out. In the meantime, everyone, it was great to have David Baddiel on the podcast. Enjoy. David Baddiel, as ever, when two people meet in this age, we start talking about Trump.

So let's do the podcast in a minute, but let's keep the conversation going. It's history. It's happening now, but it is history. And we were just chatting before the microphones were turned on about Donald, as one has to. And well, because it was you, I started positing my theory that if you're in the discussion, is Donald Trump a fascist? is or what fascism means now and how, you know, there is a cult of leader around him, if not a coherent political agenda. You think, which fascist?

And he's not really Hitler, is he? And he's not really Franco. And I personally think Stalin's basically a fascist just on the left. He doesn't sort of have the self-discipline of all that. But what he is like, I think, is Mussolini. From what I know about Mussolini, you'll know more about Mussolini. And I've noticed that when Trump does a speech or is any kind of public uh thing he's sort of resting face not his bitchy resting face i don't even know what that is i remember that being a thing about a year ago but his sort of face that he does in between saying stuff so he'll say

he's incredibly mussolini like he'll do a thing he'll say a thing and then he'll look around especially at the rallies with a kind of like grim, lip out, looking around sort of stern face. And Mussolini did that. And I wonder if he nicked it from Mussolini. I mean, one hardly knows with Donald whether he's ever read a book or watched any history or whatever. But it's really similar to Mussolini. And it's like a strange rhetorical, slightly comedy technique. I mean, that's the other thing about Donald, which makes him like Mussolini. Mussolini is without doubt the funniest fascist, isn't he? I mean, you know, they're all quite funny.

I think this is quite an important thing. I think until Donald Trump emerged, I was fairly convinced that the reason why we couldn't really have that kind of leader again in the Western world was because of comedy. Because I think that with modern comic sensibilities, you can't have Hitler, because he is ridiculous. I mean, he's totally absurd. It doesn't, I don't want to get into cliches

about the German sense of humour, but the truth is that almost everyone else then, including Charlie Chapman, and of course, the British cartoonist, realised that this bloke with this absurd moustache and absurd haircut and shoutiness was a clown at some level and there was something innately ridiculous about him uh as indeed that there is certainly about about Mussolini um but there is about Donald Trump as well I mean he's sort of like

without knowing it I think a brilliant comedian I don't know if you ever saw there was a gif going around about two years ago of him barging through at the g9 conference various leaders uh without sort of noticing that uh he had sort of like was upsetting other people's personal space but the brilliant moment for me was he barges through he gets to stand in front of them and then he looks around with the mussolini face and does up his jacket and if that was oliver hardy i would think well once again a brilliant example of the pompous man embodied in a cloudish way but of course donald isn't doing that but he is it anyway but you're but you're right about the funny thing

but actually at the time the new york times famously wrote hitler off because this man's clearly absurd and i always think that oh no it's a big problem not spotting that yes not spotting that but the absurd is not noticed by quite a lot of people but also, I think it's like religion and it's like baby talk. You know, stuff that's very intimate and special to us. But the minute you see it in somebody else, you think it's absurd. You go, I'm Christian. It makes absolute sense. But those Sikhs are completely insane. All the stuff they believe.

And I think our politicians, other people's politicians are so absurd. I mean, and yet to us, you know, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. No, they are absurd. Well, I agree, but the people in Britain obviously don't. There are people who clearly don't think it. Whereas most Americans who see Nigel Farage, they see a sort of. Here's an interesting thing I hadn't thought before. I think for a long time politicians were pretty grey and not absurd.

And I think that they were during the 30s and obviously those people during the war, there was a ridiculousness to them. But part of ridiculousness is largeness, is cartoonishness, is grotesqueness. And that has a very wide reach. And if you are cartoonish and grotesque, then some people will not spot that. All they will notice is the largeness of it. See what I'm saying?

It's very memorable to be like Hitler. It's not so memorable to be like hitler it's not so memorable to be like neville chamberlain or john major so there is a sense in which just what i'm calling ridiculousness for other people will just translate as very big in your imagination and your memory and your ability to apprehend who this person is so what i would say is that after the war that sort of went away for a bit when people were perhaps frightened of those kind of people but then i think that now that we have a 24-hour media and people can be on it all the time and you can see politicians all

the time and hear them the ones who we remember and the ones who rise to the top are the ones who could snag your imagination so therefore the ridiculous ones do you see what i'm saying yeah i do it's much easier to remember boris johnson or nigel farage what they talk like what they look like than it is i can't even remember but i don't know someone you know david milliband david milliband exactly i think you're i mean i if i look back at the 90s which is my sort of formative years when of course the hot summer of 1996 when your songs at number one it was just the best thing ever this is the kind of history i wanted yeah but i mean this is i mean that's that's you know it's such a but the politicians,

it was clear, you've got Bob Dole and Tony Blair and John Major and these people on both sides. And I remember feeling as a young person, this system was ripe

for disruption. I mean, it was so absurd. Do you remember the soundbites? They never said anything. And clearly, we are now just in another... That wheel has turned,

as you say, there was a bit in the 30s, then everyone got a bit worried about larger-than-life charismatic leadership. So we went for quite, you know that there's that sort of line of british prime ministers for example and actually the american presidents were quite low-key and pretty low-key gerald ford yeah i mean unbelievably kind of bland type of

person and eisenhower all those guys so and then and then changes with reagan and thatcher yeah yes you're right i suppose it does with them i mean they're quite a good example if you i think the example is spitting image. The reason that spitting image can exist, I mean, it doesn't exist anymore, it actually should do, obviously, now, but the more a politician can be made into that kind of puppet, the more we're in that world.

So spitting image was impossible without Margaret Thatcher? Yes, to some extent, I would agree, and Reagan and all the rest of it. So it's not true, of course, that it's been just all bland and then all bland and then there's trump and blah blah because we had reagan and thatcher thatcher in particular i think is a very good example of someone who at one level is totally absurd and for other people is just incredibly clear and memorable and you know easy to process you know what i mean we know what she is because you know she's much easier to remember than jim callahan at some level but where is where is this getting us where's it getting us well i mean it's getting us you know just we're talking about i mean one of the things i think you know you're you're uh you've got a great passion for second world war for for your own reasons and family reasons all sorts of reasons i i think it's

fascinating at the moment that the people with an interest in the second world war divide into two kind of camps that there are those historians go don, don't be so stupid people, you know, the Godwin's Law, everyone's saying it's like the rise of the fire. Honestly, it's nothing like the 1930s, put yourself together.

And then there's people saying, well, hang on, the whole point of the 1930s is the vigilance thing. We all spent our childhood going, vigilance, never again, remember, remember.

Well then, when these alarm bells start to ring, albeit absolutely on a smaller, hopefully at the moment, quite quieter scale, we're not seeing

the march of dictatorship like we did in the 30s. But we should be quite alert to those things, those trends. I mean, where do you come down on that? Well, it's complicated, I think. I have a complicated attitude to all that because I agree with Godwin's law that there's an incredible ease in argument

to invoking the Nazis as a way of crushing all arguments and over-exaggerating things. However, I've noticed that when, as I do more and more, and this slightly turns the argument towards what you're saying, when I find myself more and more attacking anti-Semites or responding to anti-Semites on Twitter, I will sometimes invoke the Nazis in doing that and then be accused of using Godwiz law. And I have to say have to say no no when I'm talking about anti-semitism yeah when I'm talking about people who think that Jews should be you know eradicated from culture or uh you know exodus whatever the word is exodized uh or forced to emigrate from Europe or whatever then I'm not it's not Godwin's law anymore this is Nazi belief so it's okay to talk about where this leads to you

know it's when you're talking about i don't know uh arguing about the rules of squash and next you know you're saying you're like a nazi that's goldwyn's law you know what i mean um so but in terms of that particular vigilance which is a particular aspect of what you're talking about there is no question that the technology really that we live with now has uh changed the discourse so that if the i know i'm going to have to do something visual now i'm sorry about the systems but if the parameters of political discourse were this and i'm holding my arms up uh and my hands up my palms fairly close together with this in the recent in the recent past they're now this and i'm moving my hands further apart and so things that you would not really hear of at all in normal discourse, like, say, Holocaust denial, now you hear that all the time.

It's like, you know, something which is normalized by the fact that we have a technology, which means that those people who believe that can be mobilized and can have their own beliefs confirmed by other people. And it can be reified. It can become a real proper thing, whereas before it was just something you didn't really hear about so i think there is there is definitely a truth in the fact that i mean i mean i just that just happens to me i don't know how much these people actually present a threat in the way that they would in the 1930s but i do spend a lot of my time and only yes and today in the times hugo rifkin who i know he's a journalist he writes a piece about how he got into a long long long long long discussion with a uh a sort of one of these people who i said in my last stand-up show the conspiracy theory which is very prevalent now is how idiots

get to feel like intellectuals uh and so there are two types really of sort of nazi for want of a better word online or which are the idiot one i I mean, the complete idiot ones, the ones who are just, you know, shouting and screaming, whatever. And then these people who consider themselves the philosophers and thinkers of that ideology. And one of them was a guy called, I think he's called Evan McLaren. And he runs something called, I think it's called something like some posh name, like the National Policy Institute in America, something like that. And he has a belief called identitarianism.

Have you heard of this? I did see it on Twitter during the Spanish. Yeah, something like that. And he has a belief called identitarianism. Have you heard of this? I did see it on Twitter during the Spanish. Yeah, identitarianism. And he uses phrases like ethno-nationalism. And therefore, this language is the same thing, really. It's how idiots get to feel like intellectuals. But Hugo ended up in a very, very long, in his own, restrained as he could be,

discussion with this guy about his beliefs. And specifically about how are you different from the nazis and this guy was sort of saying well we're very different because we don't believe in the repossession of danzig it was stuff like that you know uh and i i don't know what your parameters are for swearing but after about really what would be considered 10 pages of discussion between these two guys uh i said uh hugo have you tried this fuck off evan you idiotic nazi cunt and that got retweeted about 3 000 times uh and obviously some complaints and all the rest of it uh but i do think that what it proves is is that there is a similarity to the 30s

in the sense that there's clearly those people out there they are able to reach each other and mobilize in ways that they couldn't do before which is also true of the far left of course uh and now we're seeing what also happened in the 30s which is a sort of intellectual intelligentsia coalescence around it so that of course Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are sort of intellectuals of the far right in the 20s and 30s um Wyndham Lewis you know people like that and there's a sort of element of that with people like, not quite the same, but people like Evan McLaren. Does that resonate?

Are you particularly aware of that because of your family's history? Well, there's no... I mean, again, if you actually read the thing with Hugo, the emotional thing that's actually going on is he's doing his best. He's made a decision. Go and have a look at it if you can see it. If it if you google hugo rifkin's twitter account you'll see

you'll see this and it went viral um he brings up every so often members of his family who have been murdered um i think his family actually came to britain in 1896 but nonetheless they had relatives in europe who were murdered and actually he also brings up uh other relatives who were murdered by stalin because this guy in a veiled actually, he also brings up other relatives who were murdered by Stalin, because this guy, in a veiled way, which he immediately picks up on, accuses Jews of being Bolsheviks and therefore responsible for the war, I think is what he's saying.

Yeah, all the old classics. And he points out, well, I'm not on that team either, because this other relative was killed by Stalin, of course, because Jews are always killed by either side. So it's always there when you're having these arguments there's always a sense in which this is an argument but for me it's a very clear emotional narrative involving people in my family in my particular case it's not 1896 my grandparents came here in 1939 three weeks before the war broke out, with my mother. My mother is a refugee, or was a refugee.

She died two years ago. And she was brought here as a three-month-old baby. And they just got out. I mean, you know, really. Where from? Well, originally they were from Königsberg, which is now called Kaliningrad. I did Who Do You Think You Are in the first series. And I was the Jew.

They always have one. On Who Do You Think you are in the first series and i was the jew they always have one on who do you think you are in the first series uh and kaliningrad is now part of russia putin's mother's from there or something oh is she yeah that's why he wants to what is such a weird place you know because in 1945 after the beautiful emmanuel kant town university town of konigsberg had been raz raised to the ground once by the germans and then by the americans uh it was rebuilt as a kind of weird little province by soviet union and they bust in all these russians so that and tried to eradicate any german sort of culture that was there at all even in the 60s they were still blowing up

german churches in in kaliningrad and so it's a very horrible place to be honest and it's also here's a really weird thing is when i was there a few years ago filming this quite a while ago now i became aware that there's a kind of nationalist movement a separatist movement within kaliningrad because it's sort of it's in a weird part of russia connected to the rest of russia it's to the baltic sea uh and it's strategically very important over the years. But I thought, it's a separatist movement for essentially a place that began in

1945. What history is that that you're clinging on to? But it's a strange place. Anyway, my grandparents were from there. My grandmother was actually from Danzig, was from Gdansk, but she married my grandfather ernst

fabian who lived in koenigsberg they were very very wealthy they owned a brick factory they were sort of jewish semi aristocratic family abraham i think abraham abramovsky abramovsky and fabian anyway they had a massive construction firm i have seen the brick factory as it is now i mean a few stumps in a terrible horrible field at the back end of the arse end of the soviet union it's still there um and they lost everything obviously it was all taken away by the nazis over quite a long period of time with different laws and different whatever's by the end they had none of this money and various members of their family were already in camps my great uncle was in the warsaw ghetto by you know uh and what actually happened

was was my grandfather um apparently the british government's not really known this if you weren't kinder transported or you weren't a person of note like a nobel prize winner or whatever what you had to do was show a thousand pounds in a british bank account to get any chance of residency in britain uh asylum or whatever and he didn't have any money so but he did have some friends uh who had already gone to britain and so they deposited little bits of money 20 quid 30 whatever and he managed to get a thousand pounds with three weeks to go before the war broke out he did have the papers although that came and went my grandfather was actually in a concentration camp a pre--war concentration camp after Kristallnacht,

got out of there and then said, we've really got to leave. And then they managed to get out and my mother was, she used to tell me, on the, whatever the bit, the train is where the baggage is. What do you call that? Luggage rack. Luggage rack, thank you. My mother was on the luggage rack on the train from Hamburg

or wherever, however they came. They came down to Hamburg and then up into, you know, through France and ended up, you know, with a bunch of people in wherever escaping Jews were kept. I think somewhere in Whitechapel. They ended up for a long time in a sort of hostel there and then settled in Cambridge. And then my grandfather was interned on the Isle of Man in June 1940. And I've written a novel about that, which, again, a secret part or not very well known part of British history, which is that in 1940, after the fall of Holland and France, there was great panic in this country, a little bit like there sometimes is now about migrants and, you know, about the sense that who are all these people doing here. But during the war,

there was a sense as far as I can make out that, well, the progress of the Germans through Europe can't just be about the blitzkrieg there must be fifth columnists in all these countries who are destabilizing the country and that's probably happening here and people looked around the daily express and the daily mail and said well I'll tell you who it probably is all these Germans that we seem to have taken in right because the government of course was suppressing information about atrocities already happening in eastern Europe the ministry of information was suppressing that because they didn't want the british people to think we're

only fighting this war on behalf of the jews this is what my novel is about uh part of it is set on the internment camps that were set up on the island man part of it is set in the ministry of information um and so under pressure from the tabloids in june 1940 churchill just said call of a lot quite a famous phrase it was a headline and by that he meant let's just arrest and intern every german presently in britain 98 of whom were jewish refugees and therefore not supporters of the current german state so that's how ridiculous it was anyway they were all interned on the island man how long for well my grandfather was there for 18 months here's the here's the brilliant thing he loved it there he absolutely loved it there as did most people

because this is what happened it's a combination of i think a very fantastic british trait and a very fantastic jewish trait which is that unlike similar places in japan or whatever um these internment camps all the british did there's a sort of laziness, which I sort of love, to Britain, I think. And that's one reason why we've never had, I think, a fascist culture or proper dictatorship in Britain, or even really a violent revolution. People sort of can't be bothered in this country. So these were not extreme camps. They requisitioned the seafront in Douglas, other places, chucked out anyone who was in the B&Bs at the time, which were not really running as businesses anyway because it was the war,

put barbed wire around the streets, and then just put the Jews in there and left them to their own devices. And, of course, the Jews, within seconds, have made it into Vienna. So within three weeks, there's a university on the Isle of Man. There are cafes. There are lectures. You know, and I have a quote at the top of The Secret Purpose is my novel about this from a historian whose name I tragically can't remember, but which says that the centre of European intellectual and social life in 1941 is Douglas.

And that's true because partly because, although there were people like my grandfather, there were also, and it was easier to get out of Germany in this case, there were, I think, six Nobel Prize winners on the Isle of Man. The Amadeus Quartet are on the Isle of Man. Kurt Schwitters, a great artist, is on the Isle of Man. Nicholas Pevner. I mean, these incredible people are all there, and they think, well, okay, let's have an intellectual, interesting time here. So my grandfather, I know, was sort of like, oh, it's brilliant. He was a little bit disappointed when he was released. Sent back to the hostel in the East End.

Well, no, he went back to Cambridge by then. I mean, there were other issues which were problematic because, you know, my mum was born, so he didn't see his baby for nearly two years. And I think just what really happened was that part of it wasn't too bad. What was bad, and my grandfather was in and out of a mental hospital after the second world war with clinical depression was his whole family had been murdered of course so uh apart from his immediate family uh but brothers and sisters and cousins and all that had all been murdered so that when that when that became clear to him after the war he became intensely depressed

when you've got pictures of people you know were killed when you hear a holocaust denial how does that feel it's very it's complicated i mean that novel i'm sorry to bang on about it i'm not trying to plug that novel make sure everyone knows the name of the novel what's the name of the secret purposes the secret and it's it is about the internment of jewish german refugees on the isle of man but it ends with the main character who's based on my grandfather, doing something he never did, which is going on a day trip to Auschwitz, which I did with the Holocaust Educational Trust some years before I wrote that novel. And it becomes, towards the end,

sort of about the incredulity of the fact that this thing, this extraordinary thing, of which there is an incredible amount of evidence is being denied and how even if you lived under a sort of shadow version of it so you were interned on the Isle of Man which was not being in Auschwitz nonetheless you know it's the thing that has to be done at all costs is resisting the idea that the thing itself did not happen. And I don't know, as I get older, I get more and more angry about it. It's the truth.

It's an interesting, because there is the straightforward emotional reason to do with my family, but I'm very obsessed with the truth anyway. My show, my family, not the sitcom that I'm about to tour, is about my family and does have some stuff in it about my mum. For example, a very important feature of the show

is something not very well known and that I only had a sort of vague understanding of I understand more now which is that my mum's was called Sarah Baddiel and that I always knew her as Sarah Baddiel but I did also know this other thing about her which is that her real name real is a complicated word there was from it and the reason for that was she never used that name I say she never used it I'll come back to a caveat for that in a minute that that name is after 1935 in germany following the nuremberg laws all german jewish children uh born after then uh their parents had to choose the name of their child from a government prescribed list and all the names on that list were shit right i mean incredible one of the names means slut you know there were names like that on on the list so from it was the

best of a bad bunch really and that was my mum's name her full name is from it sarah baddiel sarah itself was also a prescribed name because all jewish daughters had to be called sarah or rachel all men moisture or i can't remember exactly what they are but you know jewishy names um and i talk in the show about um how in my own sense, in my mother's extraordinary rather mental life, it was perhaps at some subconscious level a way of refusing the fact that she should be dead, that she should have had no life, and that instead, within the confines of living where we are now,

by the way, this is being recorded in a place called Dollis Hill in London, I grew up about 300 yards over there, my mum lived a slightly amazing life involving a long affair with the golfing memorabilia salesman or whatever so within the confines of 1970s dollis hill she lived her life to the full and i think that's something to do with the fact that she nearly didn't have a life so in terms of sorry i know this is a very long answer to your question but the show is about truth the show is about about saying, actually, after people die, or indeed, in my dad's case, have dementia, don't idealise them.

Don't pretend that they were angels or whatever. The true act of memory is to describe them in all their idiosyncrasies and flaws and craziness. That's a pledged... I'm very obsessed with truth. I have a sort of almost, I think, on-the-spectrum pathology to need to be as honest as possible all the time. And therefore, and this is finally coming back to it, Holocaust denial represents a very extreme affront to the truth.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History It's. There's an old episode with David Baddiel. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

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Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. So social media is a difficult place for you these days with Donald Trump and the discourse. It's difficult and it isn't difficult because I quite like fighting the liars i mean and fighting the trolls my next show i think is going to be called how to deal with trolls uh because i think well partly because i've built up an enormous amount of material through insisting on fighting the trolls part of this pathology is that when people say things to me that aren't true or just you know abusive i can't ignore them that early

on there was an internet law for what a better word which is don't feed the trolls you're just giving them attention i and whether or not that's a good thing i can't do it if i get slagged off or if someone says something to me which is racist or fascist or whatever it might be i reflexively need to bring them to the light and then put them down. I mean, for some reason, for me, that's to do with being a comedian. That's to do with they are hecklers, in my opinion. And with a heckler, you don't ignore it. You repeat their heckle normally,

and then you put them down, and then you get a laugh from the rest of the audience. And that's very effective, I think. And that's what I'm doing on Twitter when I'm retweeting a fascist or whatever, making fun of them, and then my half a million followers or whatever all enjoy

that and join in can i ask about yeah let me ask about your show which remind me the title the show that i'm touring at the moment it's called my family not the sitcom it struck me i want to talk to you about it because i'm very struck my my love of history my interest in history comes from a kind of oral historic tradition of talking about members of my family my you know my grandmother is this extraordinary welsh sort of matriarchal figure, and she'd tell about her childhood. And for me, history and the past was always, people said, oh, is it relevant to young people?

I mean, it was always incredibly relevant because she made it clear that I only existed because she'd been trapped on the other side of the Atlantic by the Battle of the Atlantic. Therefore, she met a kind of jock called Robert Macmillan, who then became my grandfather. So my whole being was only possible because of these events that happened in my...

The most important day of my life was my mum and dad met in a press conference in Ottawa before I was ever born, right? Because otherwise I wouldn't exist. Yeah. So your show is about history as well. It is definitely about... Well, it's about immediate family history. And actually...

How far back do you go? Well, I go back as far as the Nuremberg Laws at one point. But it's really about the 1970s in those terms. That's history now, man. No, that is totally history. No, but there is a social element to it, a social history element to it, because a lot of what it's about is about parenting in the 1970s. Because I think that my parents didn't have the word parenting.

You know, that's a modern word. And they parented in the way, in quite an extreme version version the way that actually most parents did in the 1970s which is completely not to stop their lives for their children to just carry on living you know we have children that's just what you do and now we carry on having affairs or what in my dad's case drinking and swearing whatever and there's no sense in which we're monitoring our children to make sure they're not damaged or whatever and i kind of celebrate that, actually, in the show. I mean, in a complicated way where the damage is definitely acknowledged. But in general, it's a very feel-good show about that.

But I also make it clear, because I talk about my own children, that there's been a sea change now. And that's the way that my parents parented, for want of a better word, is very a historical thing. I couldn't agree more. I am the most hands-on. I mean'm compared to previous generations of men in particular i mean i my whole life revolves around the kids i mean tomorrow i'm taking my daughter to joe jingles then i'm taking my little boy to tennis you know whereas that's unimaginable right you're down i mean what's that mean jerry seinfeld does this joke in his most recent stand-up set about how you know kids now

they're very very looked after when he was young uh he thought of his parents thought of him or their children in general as like a raccoon in the sense of like there's one around here somewhere but i don't really know where it is and that's very true of me i was out and about in london round here getting beaten up often or occasionally approached by weird men on the tube or whatever all sorts of things that were dodgy when I was 10 or 11 I was knocking about doing that now you know that I wouldn't let my kids do that and I do well this isn't a psychology podcast but I'm going to say something about a psychological which is that um part of my drive towards truth which I do see as something like as a pathology to some extent, is that I have a

rather relentless, no doubt wearisome, meanness in the sense that I, I've mentioned T.S. Eliot once already, so it seems pretentious to do so again, but I'm going to. T.S. Eliot says in the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that we all create a face to meet the faces that we meet. That's a misquote, but he essentially says that. And I think I don't, actually. I think I am always me in every situation. I find being not me very, very uncomfortable. So I think that I haven't changed at all since I was quite young, really. Not in a deep, visceral way, except because I've had children. The only thing that has changed me in any kind of really powerful, my own psychological foundations the way i see the world my understanding of empathy all that is because i've had children

uh and that didn't so happen to my parents at some level my parents who were both quite solipsistic characters only children dedicated at some level to themselves and their own desires that didn't really happen for them i mean not that they i mean i wasn't i didn't have a terrible that didn't really happen for them i mean not that they i mean i wasn't i didn't have a terrible childhood it wasn't deeply neglected but there is no way in which i was uh monitored for damage or for bad things or whatever in the way that uh i we we do uh to our children so how are your kids gonna be different to how are kids gonna be different to us given they're getting well i don't know i don't know that it's necessarily a good thing oh god no that's something i talk about is uh certainly i think there's a certain amount of damage in my case this is why the show is a sort of celebration of that that is good for me i mean

i mean it's very complicated nothing about as a 10 11 year old probably gave you extraordinary independence and well and also freedom and also because my parents you know they didn't ever try and interfere with my life at some level. So by the age of 13 or 14, I'm quite a self-possessed, you know, know what I want sort of individual. And actually, I think personally, some people have an idea of me who do know about me probably as they think, oh, you probably came from like a sort of bohemian sort of upper middle class Jewish background. No, not at all. I came from this area. My dad was made redundant

uh when he was 42 he worked for unilever he had no money he was unemployed for three or four years then he started selling dinky toys or whatever i only went to haberdasher's a public school because we had no money and they had a means-tested direct grant system at the time um so the point about damage i think is that and i think this is like sounds slightly glib but both by my parents sort of letting me do what i want and living their lives in the way they did there is undeniably that's why i'm a comedian is what i'm gonna say you know i might have in a more straightforward family i probably might have ended up in that jewish cliche of oh he's an accountant or a dentist or whatever he is uh so that's celebrated in my show and my general happiness with who i am is partly a result of

the way that my parents bizarrely failed to parent me you know i hope our kids aren't gonna be unhappy well you know this is a whole other other thing we can get into which is i don't think i don't think kids are going to be unhappy i'm suggesting in this conversation i suppose that they are slightly overprotected yeah and and you know there's a sort of self-consciousness and maybe anxiety that might be created in them by our suggestion that we need to watch them all the time or something terrible will happen but of course they have also particularly this generation a thing that we didn't have which is they are under the cosh all the time of social media

and i think you know again i don't want to say something unoriginal but i i know and i have a 16 year old and 13 year old uh and particularly with my girl my daughter who's 16 there is a deep concern that this hierarchy this sort of constant sense that you know how you are doing socially with your peers or out there in a wider sense blah blah and you can compare yourself and find yourself lacking whereas we grew up in a more nebulous thing like and you could tell yourself you were doing fine socially because you didn't have like a way of counting it and yeah exactly you know that this this very very powerful league tablizing of social life i think is dangerous well i'm gonna go home and lock my kids out of the house without their phones make them survive for a bit um can i let's let's finish just talking about um what

you know you're a comedian but you're also an activist in so many ways why i'm not an activist well you're you're you're pretty act where you take down trolls you're oh you're you're i suppose in that sense i'm an actor what's the word you're yeah you're uh but i think that's important sorry dan but i the reason i deny it is i I've noticed recently, because I'm on Twitter, that people are asking me on political shows. I was asked to do Unspun with Matt Ford the other day, and he said, oh, do eight minutes of political material. I don't have any political material, really.

And I have no political agenda. I think of myself as no wing, not left wing or right wing uh i think the truth is always complex uh and if the truth and i think that's the great fear is complexity is the casualty of modern discourse more than anything else um and if the truth is always complex you shouldn't impose a political model on the way you think uh so i think people assume that i'm left wing and i certainly was more left wing when I was younger. I was briefly flirted with being a communist. But I think that was a sort of pose. But now I'm not. What I am is someone who likes commenting on things and saying stuff about things

and having hopefully insight or witty takes on things. And the thing that's happening all the time, and you're now able to comment on it all the time, is the news. And the news is primarily political. So the fact is, I do make lots of jokes about, say, Donald Trump, and at the expense of Donald Trump. But it doesn't really come from an agenda of, even though I'd rather there was a Democrat in office, I possibly would. But at some level, I wouldn't for the material. It's a rich time to be a... Well, I mean, that's part of the dark, the Faustian pact, isn't it? I mean, it's a good time to be a well i mean it's that's part of the dark the faustian pact isn't it i mean it's a good good time to be a comedian is it now and i think so i mean it's

good time to be have a historical podcast because people are interested in history yeah well one thing one very good feature i think of social media is without being an activist i do like the idea that people are engaged i like the idea that people are thinking about what's happening and are not just seeing politics and turning it, or seeing the news and turning off. Because even without an agenda, I think that engagement and people thinking about things is a good thing.

It's tough, isn't it? Because in the 1990s, history had finished. Cold War was over. The 1930s felt indescribably distant, I think. And now I think it feels quite alive. Well, that end of history thing, what's his name? Francis Fukuyama. Yeah, that end of history thing that was a conviction.

And I think I probably, without having read the end of history, I think when I was growing up or getting into my 30s or whatever, I think I was probably smugly convinced. We're in a general upward trajectory with social progress. The Berlin Wall's come down particularly. That's very important. And, you know, religion seems to be on a downwards stride. You know, no one believes those things anymore.

That will never be important. Global affairs again, religion. You know, and it all felt like progress. And then that was all wrong. And there's lots of reasons why it's wrong, economic, geopolitical. But I do think technology is really important in it. No one saw that. that was all wrong and there's lots of reasons why it's wrong economic geopolitical but i do think technology is really important in it no one saw that no one saw that the rise of a technology that would mobilize extreme opinion would have incredible impact i think so quickly so that

essentially an internet troll is president of the united States. Oh, God. Okay. Well, David, I'll let you go. Let's make sure we... Is that it? I think so, yeah. That's, you know, we've... Wow, I feel... I feel we've only just got started.

I know. I don't want to... Sorry, David. We could just keep going all day. Well, we could keep going all day. I just... I probably should ask you the boring question I have to ask everybody,

which is where did that love of history come from? the boring question I have to ask everybody, which is, where did that love of history come from? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams,

the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists,

entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. an artist i'm going to say they use the word artist and when you when you say that to me i'm immediately an 18 year old doing my a levels which is english history and economics and my primary subject was english i mean i was good at history actually did all right in economics even though i hated the subject but um i did english at university i wasn't going to do history no but here's the thing not so much of a traitor which you'll understand in a minute which is so i go there uh cambridge i went to and then i went to a lecture by a brilliant woman who uh then became a friend of mine later on uh called lisa jardine do you have this job and one thing you'll know about this jardine even though she taught english uh cambridge is that she

was basically a historian and i went to a lecture of hers on spencer's the fairy queen uh which is i can't recommend it very dull read but she said something in it she said that her basic belief in the fairy queen which is about elizabeth the first was that um it's a big poem really about chastity and her point was that poets and courtiers and people who wanted advancement and who were writing books at the time needed a way of framing the heroism of a female monarch different to the way they would have framed the heroism of previous monarchs or whatever and the way they would have framed the heroism previously was valor valor is the thing obviously that most poets and writers would have you know championed and eulogized in the past but when elizabeth the

first appears they can't quite do that because she's not really a warrior it's not she isn't really bodice here anyway and she herself put her virginity forward as you know that's the thing about me that's my brand you know so suddenly you get a poem like the fairy queen in which chastity is the heroic quality in that poem so the important point is whether that's right or wrong is i'm listening i think this is brilliant this isn't just leave a site fr leaves is or what can we make of this poem with our own heads this is truth about this poem feels like truth it feels like a way of thinking about literature and culture that has weight and ballast and truth so i became a historicist at that point.

And all, everything I wrote about literature whilst I was at Cambridge, it was always involved in some way with history. I always wanted to put it in a historical context. And in fact, I wrote a dissertation about Jane Austen, which is called Propriety and Property in Jane Austen, in which I discovered that the words propriety and property until, I think, the mid-19th century were the same word.

No, yeah, in Johnson's Dictionary, century with the same word no no yeah in johnson's dictionary they are the same word propriety and property so the notion of propriety of the rightness of things of goodness of manners whatever is in the same route linguistically as property as ownership and that that really explains something about why jane austen puts manners and the ownership of a house like pemberley sort of together in her ideal of what you should be looking for in a man or indeed in life. And anyway, I wrote this with a lot of other historical information about it. And then Tony Tanner, who at the time was the foremost scholar of Jane Austen, nicked it all and put it all in his last book about Jane Austen, although he did credit me on the last page. And so I've got some of this from this student,

David Baddiel. I remember he spelt my name wrong. But that was all historical. And so for me, to answer your question, it's still about art primarily at some level, but it's about how the production of art, how cultural production, which is a word used a lot of the time by people like thinkers like Louis Althusser or whatever, but cultural production is always about history.

It's generated by historical context, and that's what i became interested in but it strikes me there's lots of comedians are obsessed with history i mean not just because there's lots of comedians i know now are middle-aged blokes love history but but lots of you guys draw a lot of material from and are fascinated by the past yeah maybe i mean i'm not like al murray if that's what you mean al murray properly likes history, military history in particular. And actually, I'm not like that. I get a bit bored by maps that look a bit like the opening credits of Dad's Army. Do you know what I mean?

By those big arrows and, oh, the Western Front was here. And I can't really follow it, actually. I've never been very good at understanding that, you know, the way that... I mean, I remember starting to to read in fact um who wrote stalingrad and see you yeah so i wrote his book i read his book about berlin yeah no it's amazing book but the bits i missed out the best i'm always missed out it's when marshall zukov was going down the eastern front and then all his troops were stationed here i can't get my head around that at all i like people really and i guess and I guess, and art and whatever.

I like to hear about them. And great movements of troops and whatever I find quite difficult. But if there is an answer to your question, I don't know what it is. For me, it's because I am interested in people. I'm interested in how humanity interacts. I'm interested in how they create stuff. And as I say, from an early age, that became also about, well, what's the context in which that is done? And that always history you're a man of many interests I should probably ask you about

the football thing does that burn as bright now as it used to what do I like football yes uh I do like football whether England burns quite as bright for me is probably not the case in the sense that I used to really look forward to England games I used to really look forward to World Cups European Championships all the rest of it. And now I, it's not as exciting. That isn't as exciting as it was. I wrestle with that. It's that age.

Because obviously when I was a kid, you know, it was the glory. It was 90, it was 96. Obviously it was amazing how we didn't win that tournament. I have no idea. But is it, I'm just a bit old now and therefore I'm not interested in England as a franchise. Or is it that there is less interest in England as a franchise because it's been so rubbish now for the last

couple of big tournaments I mean England have been rubbish for a long time I mean Three Lions the historical point of Three Lions to some extent

was that we decided me and Frank Skinner to write a song which had never really been done before even though there'd been many England songs have been triumphalist

they'd been this time more than any other time back home they're all about we're going to win it and so when we sat down to write those lyrics, we thought, you know what, let's embody the actual experience, which is we're not going to win or we're very unlikely to win,

but we sort of hope against hope, against rationality, that we will win. So let's write it about that, which is what Three Lions is. It's quite a melancholy song about everyone saying we're shit, but you know what, never mind, we might still do it. That's the point of that song. And I think that worked. Obviously, it did work in 1996.

But I think as time has gone on and we've lost to Iceland and stuff like that, or just not made it in various other tournaments, it's become more difficult to have that magic moment where you think, well, never mind, we might still make it. But I think also it's age. And then one other thing, which is simply that the league football now, Premier League football, you know, when I was growing up, you never saw any great, you know, foreign players

until you were in the World Cup. And then it was really exciting that England and English players were playing against these incredible people. Now you see them every week. And so I think there has been a concomitant lack of excitement about saying, you know, I mean, when England play Belgium, which will be exciting, I'm actually doing a gig that night in Stoke. And we've put the opening time back to nine o'clock so that the audience and indeed me can watch England, Belgium. But the two people I'm interested in or worried about with that will be Eden Hazard and Kevin De Bruyne, who I do see.

Eden Hazard I see every week because I still go and see Chelsea, and obviously Kevin De Bruyne I see on the telly. So it's not like the old days when you never saw Pele, except at the World Cup, is my point. So it's slightly less exciting. But the 90s, 80s, 90s were full of, your song was so resonant

because they were full of all those just missed opportunities and penalty shootouts to get into semi-finals. You know, we were there and thereabouts. We had a brilliant side, I mean, certainly in 1990 and in 1996. We had a very, very good side, actually, and we should have won. But then there's a larger thing, a historical question,

or perhaps a psycho-historical question, which is I do think that the English psyche, especially in football, isn't quite suited to winning. But I think that when an Englishman goes up to take a penalty kick, there's a sort of self-consciousness and anxiety that comes into his head that isn't there for, obviously not for Germans, but for quite a lot of other nationalities. And that's to do, I think, with the weight of history. I'll give you an example. Shall we end this podcast with a brilliant example, I think, of history, but in a context that perhaps isn't thought of as history.

When England played Spain in 1996 and we beat them. On penalties. On penalties. And you will remember, I'm sure, that Stuart Pearce scored a penalty. Yes. Now, I was there and it was absolutely amazing. But in my, almost more importantly now, is something that happened away from the stadium,

which was on telly, Barry Davis, the commentator, as Stuart Pearce approaches that, says his chance to erase the memory of Turin. And the reason he's saying that, for anyone who doesn't know, is that in 1990, in Turin, against Germany, Stuart Pearce had missed a penalty and thus we hadn't got in to the 1990 World Cup but here's the important point what is Barry Davis doing with that turn of phrase he's making it history he doesn't say Stuart Pearce's chance to get back

and and make it okay that he missed that penalty in the semi-final a few years ago he says his chance to erase the memory of Turin that's's like Anthony Beaver, isn't it? He's a historian. He's making history alive and real. And I can't say that without getting goose pimples. That's why I like history. Oh, and it looked like Stuart Pearce was well aware of the weight of history.

Well, that's the point is, yeah, that's the point is that, yeah. I mean, he scored in that moment. He went berserk. And in going berserk, that's my point, is that there seems to be a greater weight, and on the occasions when it's sometimes released and we score, it's so enormous that, oh, God, we've got through. We've scored the penalty.

But that conversely means that it's very difficult to get to that point. It's more difficult than it should be. Basically, I've never seen a german react like stewart pierce did after he scored the penalty against spain because at some level we are a very emotional nation i think brilliant i mean we just could keep going for hours do we need to give any websites or anything well look can i just say so you can put it wherever you like i am touring with this show if you want to know more about my family and my family history in fact I'm doing the show My Family Not The Sitcom

on tour all over the UK details are on davidbedeal.com or you can follow me on Twitter on at Bedeal when I shall be certainly mentioning it

from time to time lovely thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much David Bedeal very enjoyable I've never had the history

of my heart broken I've never had the history of my heart broken I've never had the history of my heart broken I've never had the history of my heart broken I've never had the quick message at the end of this podcast. I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled.

Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. a satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. you