How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S2, Ep8 How to Fail: David Baddiel

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

For the season two finale of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, I speak to David Baddiel: comedian, author and co-writer of the best unofficial football anthem of all time (Three Lions, people). It was an interview that almost didn't happen because of his FAILURE to find a parking space near my flat. But we ended up piling into his Audi and driving to his house instead, so it all worked out in the end.We discuss a horrendous corporate gig that almost put Baddiel off comedy altogether [warning: contains big swearing], his self-perceived failure to be taken seriously as a literary novelist, his overwhelming compunction to tell the truth, how he deals with internet trolls and hecklers and his failure to score a penalty in a Comic Relief charity football match.Along the way, we talk about depression, anxiety, his father's dementia, Baddiel's ambiguous relationship with fame and why he might have been a premiership player, if only his childhood trainers had had velcro fastenings.How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and sponsored by 4th Estate Books Head Kid by David Baddiel is out now published by Harper Collins Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayDavid Baddiel @baddielChris Sharp @chrissharpaudio4th Estate Books @4thEstateBooks  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better.

I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. My guest this week is the comedian and writer David Baddiel. As a comedian, he's known for his work with Rob Newman in The Mary Whitehouse Experience and his partnership with Frank Skinner, which spawned Fantasy Football League, the song Three Lions, and, according to some, the entire concept of laddism. But Baddiel has also been writing for over 20 years, publishing four critically acclaimed novels, and more recently a series of commercially successful children's books. His one-man stage show, My Family, Not the Sitcom, was an unexpectedly comic romp through his father's dementia and his late mother's sexual

exploits. It had two West End runs and was nominated for an Olivier. This is a man who finds the funny in topics other people shy away from, a man unafraid of the big truths that lie behind some of his best jokes. I live by one moral principle, he has said, to live as honestly as possible. I have a physical discomfort for any kind of untruth. So David Baddiel. Hello. Hello, thank you for coming on. That's all right. It's been quite a journey to get here, hasn't it? I mean, I say a journey,

I'm at my house, so you wouldn't have thought that's all right. It's been quite a journey to get here, hasn't it? I mean, I say a journey, I'm at my house. So you wouldn't have thought that's a journey, but I went to your house, which was lovely from the outside, but I couldn't park in your house. You were confident, I have to say, in email exchanges that I would be able to park, which was a weird confidence because you don't drive. I mean, you can drive, but you don't.

I can drive. No, I don't think I was confident. I think I said, there is parking, which is true, technically true. Technically that's true, although not actually in a radius of about eight miles from your house, as far as I can make out. And it's that I failed when I moved in to get residence parking. Yeah, well, this is why I wanted to bring it up, because I've got some failures that we're going to talk about,

but there's a specific failure to actually record the podcast at your house as planned or park in your area. I completely failed to do that. As I thought would be all right as well, because Kentish Town is quite near where I live. I think, yeah, I've seen parking there. I've driven through it. It's fine.

But no, I was driving around for ages. I got an email from you saying, where are you? All that. That's all right. So it was very... But now we've come back to my house and I can park outside my house. In a way, many of the best journeys begin and end at home.

That's beautifully put. Well done. Well, I am now worried how you're going to get home. Don't worry about that. I'm just going to get an Uber. Okay, good. The lazy Londoner's choice. And your home is very lovely.

Thank you for having us in it. Talk to me about that physical discomfort you feel for any kind of untruth. Is that something you've grown into or have you always had it? well I've always had it I'm not sure because I'm sure as a kid I lied about stuff I became aware of it partly through performing because I noticed that I didn't tend to make stuff up I mean I would go on flights of fancy based on reality so I would talk about things that happened in my life and then elaborate on them comically, but they would always start from truths. And even if I was telling a joke and the joke was not benefited by absolute truth, I would find myself very uncomfortable about not telling

that truth. So for example, I remember telling a joke about my son. It was something he did. I can't remember exactly what it was now. The joke itself. But what I can remember is when I started telling the joke, he was eight. And I carried on telling it for a few months. And then he became nine, right? And for some reason, I would start saying, so blah, blah. Ezra was looking at my shoulder.

He was eight at the time. Well, actually, he's nine now. But he was eight when this happened. And that completely holds up the joke. That totally unnecessary and just holds up the joke. But even I said he was eight I felt like well I have to he's not eight anymore and it feels to me uncomfortable to pretend that he was for some reason and small details like that really I'm slightly on the spectrum with it that I like feel deeply uncomfortable about misleading people in any way and I don't quite know where it comes from although I think it's something to do with my mother who was very extremely giving of herself and her life but what

she gave was never entirely true and I think as a child that probably left some discomfort with that because it was my mum was always trying to tell you about principally this sort of big affair that she'd had with a golfing memorabilia salesman but as time went on it became clear to me that she was self-dramatizing and fantasizing about a lot of that and that I think was led to in me at least a reaction which was I don't know where I am unless the absolute truth is constantly available to me well I guess also because your father has dementia so that's also possibly part of it although like it would have come before that and my dad actually he's a scientist and sort of an intellectual sort of in a very kind of like very working class kind of welsh way but he yeah he would have been very straightforward so in a way he was the opposite

of my mum in that respect but he at some level was never interested in my mother's florid self dramatizing he kind of tuned it out most of the time. But yeah, he was very direct and straightforward and wasn't interested in the finer nuances of life. I mean, actually, dementia is part of it in a way in that I think that my own anxiety about getting dementia, which perpetuates as I grow older, worries me not just in terms, obviously obviously of the hideousness of getting

that but also memory is very crucial to truth and if you are telling a story or you hear something or whatever that someone's saying that you're involved in you remember you're doing that as well and then they tell a different version of it usually I would be able to say no no this is what happened and be very certain about that but obviously if your memory starts to fail you then you don't know that and then that's very worrying for a truth teller and also the internet of course is very worrying now for a truth teller yeah an interesting thing happened recently which is coming back to my son my son is very funny and he says really funny things all the time all the time i mean and not kind of like all the things they say funny like properly funny and sometimes i put those on twitter and i've

noticed recently that there's this thing on twitter called Didn't Happen. I don't know if you've seen it. Hashtag Didn't Happen. And it's a very aggressive thing. Apparently all men who do it, where they just, you tell a story and they just say, Ah, it didn't happen. And now there's a thing called the Didn't Happen of the Year Awards. And I've noticed that there's something slightly misogynistic about it. Because it's often women telling stories, quite often sweet stories about their children.

And they're just smashed down by Didn't Happen of the Year awards. Anyway, I get a lot of trolling and my process is to deal with it with comedy, but I find that the Didn't Happen of the Year thing and the Didn't Happen thing makes me more furious than anything else in the world. And that happened recently with Ezra. I told a story about Ezra and then all these blokes started saying, Didn't Happen, And I found myself... It's like gaslighting on Twitter.

Yeah, it is like gaslighting. And extreme injection of joylessness, I think, from these people. But also, it wasn't exactly my extreme discomfort with the idea of lying. Because I'll tell you what it was. I mean, it was actually not his funniest thing. It was a slightly weird thing. We just drove here in my car. I've got another car, Volvo, which is really old and knackered.

And we drove here in the Audi. We drove here in the Audi. Thank you, David. Exactly car volvo which is really old and knackered and we drove here in the ad we drove in the audi exactly yeah volvo is old and knackered so we were in cornwall and i said to ezra i might try and sell that volvo and he said for that volvo you'll get a couple of thumbtacks and a shilling right i thought what a strange thing to say a strange 19th century thing to say so i put it on twitter right and that for some reason got retweeted a lot people thought it was really weird but kind of funny and then i got the didn't happen thing and then what i thought is what is weird about that is i've said that word for word a couple of thumbtacks and a shilling like it's exactly what he said and why would i make that up like what a weird thing to make up but if you react to it the didn't happeners and they just start reiterating that you're getting really angry because you've been caught out in a lie or

whatever um so anyway i don't know where this tells us oh yeah i get very very uncomfortable physically uncomfortable with lying i'm glad you brought up gender dynamics so early on because one of the things that i found doing this podcast is that there are certain men who approach the idea of failure with the response i don't really think I failed at anything right and you were diametrically opposed to that and in your email said to me I've had a lot of failures there are so many to choose from and you found it difficult to whittle it down to three yeah which I appreciate thank you well no I think that's really interesting another word in a way for failure is regret and I've noticed that I think we live in a

no regret culture now that if people ask the question like it often gets asked in a sort of questionnaire that you do in general like do you have any regrets people tend to say no no i would do it all exactly the same way i think like what are you mental right like any thinking person is constantly assailed by regret but i think it's a thing like if you watch which i don't anymore but big brother or whatever if someone gets kicked out early they put their hands in the air and cheer as if that's what i always wanted which is like no you didn't you clearly went into this to win but people can't be seen to lose like this whole thing now with trump and whatever and pierce morgan or whatever is like people only talk in terms of winning and losing not in terms of right or wrong or in terms

of nuance they'd like that's it so i think there's people so frightened of being losers that they don't acknowledge the idea of regret or failure and actually regret and failure are incredibly intrinsic to who anyone is and certainly to personal growth and have you always felt like that have you always acknowledged your mistakes and learned from them I think so although I think if I can bring it back to the idea of truth I am very addicted for want of a better word to the truth I think it's not a bad way of expressing it I feel addicted to the truth but I've always felt the same time that the truth is always complex proper truth is always very complicated and and nuanced you know you have to think of it in terms of there's no real such thing as good and evil or right and wrong.

Straightforwardly, you have to look at the shades of grey within that. And therefore, failure, regret are always going to be things that you feel bad about but could learn from. And where you are now is also because of them as much as it is because of your successes. Are you an anxious person? No, not at all. I mean, I used to be, there was a period in my 30s when I was quite depressed and I think anxiety disorder kicked in with the depression, but I'm not now and I think this is my natural state and that was a clinical episode.

And so, no, I'm not. And when you say clinical episode, did you get clinical help for it? Yeah, yeah. Oh, God, yeah. I was in therapy and had loads of antidepressants and whatever and I don't know to be honest whether or not that was something that I cured with those things or time just made a difference to it it might it's a bit of both I think was that at a period in your life I'm just thinking where you must have been successful yeah yeah unquote. Yeah, massively. More so than I am now, I think.

Was that the Frank Skinner years? It was, yeah. Not the whole of it. I don't suggest Frank Skinner made me anxious, although he probably did at some level. But it wasn't all through that time. It was sort of in my 30s. I think it was a lot to do with stuff I probably don't want to go into,

relationship stuff and settling down and stuff like that, which I kind of couldn't handle at the time I don't know but also yes I was on TV all the time and specifically I was doing Dealing Skinner Unplanned which when it began was a live unscripted comedy show on three nights a week which was kind of ridiculous I mean like a ridiculous thing to do if you're not feeling mentally completely well. So I think that exacerbated it. Three nights a week. I had forgotten that it was three nights a week. Yeah, but The On Skin On Plan was on three nights a week initially,

which was sort of completely mad. And actually, by the time we got to the third series, it wasn't. It was on once a week and it was edited, which was a much better way of doing it. And let's come on to your first failure, as outlined in the email to me which is a corporate gig yes well that's sort of related in a way to that time because I'd done loads and loads of stand-up when I came out of university I did the London Cabaret Circuit for five years then I became well

known with Newman and Baddiel and I was touring all the time and then obviously and doing Wembley Arena and all the things that we did but then I did a solo tour in 1997 which wasn't a failure that was quite successful did well but I was sort of not entirely sure what I was doing as a stand-up then and probably without realizing it I was a bit burnt out really I sort of like hadn't written any new stand-up for a while probably needed to stop doing it but didn't really know what else to do was on telly and whatever but anyway my point is I was this is me already gearing up for why I think it was a big failure but a necessary failure because I think I was a bit lost as a stand-up at the time so anyway this is what happened I don't like corporate

gigs anyway and no stand-up does they're're really like a nightmare. Sometimes you sort of think like why has this company decided a comedian would be a good idea? I've virtually never done one that's felt like a proper gig. Anyway this particular one had nightmare written all over it because it was the alternative investment market Christmas do and it was soon after when was the crash well certainly it was around about the time that those people were destroying the world they either had destroyed the world or they were on their way to destroying the world so it's a room full of bankers I was their Christmas entertainment and I remember it was already going badly because Emily Maitlis god bless her had gone on before me and had done a long long thing about banking and the world and blah blah which had gone on before me and had done a long long thing about banking and the world and blah blah

which had gone on too long so I was going on late they were starting to get tired they were already a bit drunk and I went on and I did a few jokes that went okay but I remember thinking I haven't nailed this they're sort of still thinking do we like David Baddiel I'm not sure shouldn't have been Frank Skinner whatever and I'm not regularly doing stand-up now. I'm sort of like out of practice a bit. Anyway, when you do a corporate gig, you get given information about people in the room. So you can do jokes about Derek from Accounts. Isn't it hilarious the way he plays squash?

I mean, I'm really not suggesting it's any good at all, but you do get these, that's sort of what they want. They sort of just want jokes about them and their, hey, hey, he's mentioned by name, someone we know. And so I hadn't really mugged up on this with this particular place. And they literally gave me a bit of paper when I arrived and said, here's some information about the people in the room

and maybe you can do some jokes about them. And I'd again failed to read it during the whole evening. So I on with it doing these jokes that have gone to reasonably okay but it's a bit of a tightrope and I opened the piece of paper and this is just the words that came out my mouth I wasn't planning on it the words that came out my mouth is I've got a bit of paper here that tells me what you people are and then I felt on about really just to open it and go cunts and then shut it again right and it got literally no laughs whatsoever I mean I thought it might get you know a bit of a shocked laugh a bit of a you know ah but literally nothing I mean like tumbleweed but also hateful aggressive

tumbleweed so then I do another joke nothing now now it's dying another joke nothing and then a man in a dinner suit much older than me stood up and said why don't you just piss off and again i'm pretty good with hecklers normally but a combination of the fact that i knew i wasn't going to win now but they all hated me and also i think in a more larger sense a sense of like maybe i should be like not doing this for a bit this this thing made me think i don't know so i just said you're right i'm gonna go good night and thanks for the 14 grand which is what i was being paid to do it and absolute hell i walked out walked off and absolute hell broke loose like people like really shouting and screaming and

furious and angry and the woman who'd booked me chased after me as I went back to the room that had been booked at the hotel. Blah, blah, blah. And she said, no, no, you've got to go back on. And I said, no, really. That gig is dead. It's dead. I should say straight away, I gave that money to charity. Although they did try to sue me, I think, at the old tenement market,

but they made it difficult for them by me giving the money to charity. I quite like the fact that it was 14 grand. That another very interesting thing is that I think another person would have said 20 grand or whatever but that was the amount and again the truth-telling thing makes me want to say it anyway it was hideous and I sort of decided to give up stand-up or at least it felt like in the moment I'm never doing that again even though I'd had some difficult gigs in the past and years and years of doing the comedy store and all the rest of it I thought why am I doing this this is awful so I gave it up and the good thing about it because I'm going to find a good thing about it which is not a way of in a male way saying it wasn't a failure it's a way of saying it was fucking awful a terrible

failure but I think I did learn something from it which was when I came back to doing stand-up, which was a show I did called Fame, not the musical, which was before My Family, not the sitcom. For whatever reason, and whether or not that was in my mind or not, I thought I'm not going to do exactly what I did before, which is just kind of, here's an observation, here's another observation. You know, essentially banter, essentially interesting, funny banter. I'm going to try and say something with what I'm doing here. And so I did a show about fame, which is interesting, funny banter. I'm going to try and say something with what I'm doing here. And so I did a show about fame, which is interesting because the show was sort of

about the everyday humility. In fact, I told that story in the show because it was about the everyday humiliations and absurdities and sense that people think they know who you are, but they don't know who you are when you're well known. It was a success and it was a critical success in a way that I'd never had in stand up and led to my family, not the sitcom. And so what I do now are kind of long form storytelling shows that are hopefully really, really funny. I've never gone away from comedy, but they also have a theme and they try and take the audience somewhere and all the rest of it. And whether or not I would have got there without being humiliated and abused

and walking off stage at the alternate investment market in 2000 and wherever it was, I don't know. But I think probably, I mean, as I say, it just occurs to me now, I did tell that story right at the top of Fame, not the musical. I began by saying, I haven't done stand-up for ages, and this is why. And it's kind of very typical of me, actually, that in doing that, I would immediately up front a really horrible failure in order to try and make the audience understand something about how being on stage being in show business being famous is sometimes really shit which is what that show was to some extent about well which sort of leads me on to something that

I'm always curious about because you say there that your stand-up comedy was observational and so much of it was rooted in the truth of your life. But I assume you also have to build a guard of a kind of persona when you're on stage so that you don't feel completely disembowelled as a person when it goes wrong. Is it hard to balance the two? I think I don't do much of that, and I think less and less. You don't do much of the guard? Of the persona, persona yeah I don't know if I ever did that much I probably did more when I was young and first starting out even then I wouldn't say there was that much persona what

there was was probably more aggression than there is now so I was more sort of sort of attack and I was slightly more just here's my jokes and you know whatever partly it's the truth thing it's also partly to you know i'm very keen on admitting failures by the way i like admitting failures at some level if i was to be male about it i would say the ability to admit failures is always an expression of strength so for example i do a show on radio 4 called david tries to understand in which i start always from saying i don't know anything about this and it's really hard for me to understand it. And for me, that's an expression of intellectual security. But in terms of the persona thing,

I think it partly came from a limited range of performing. I am not in any way Steve Coogan, or indeed Morwenna Banks, who is my wife. You know, Morwenna can do any voice, any persona, all the rest of it. I can't even do an accent, which, by the way, is, I think, even do an accent, which, by the way, is, I think, to do with the truth thing.

It's a limitation, but it's also because I feel deeply uncomfortable even doing an accent that isn't mine. I'm shit at it, but I also feel like, what am I doing pretending to have a different voice from my own? And so I don't think I did much of that, and I do less and less and less of it, so that if you had come to see my family, not the the sitcom one of the things that would have struck you about it is this is a level of truth telling that is unusual on stage and people I think come away from that show really

feeling that they know who I am and who my family was therefore yeah you do open yourself up for more disemboweling as you put it if it goes wrong I mean I obviously mind it, but I can't imagine any other way of doing it. It's so interesting you say that about accents because I grew up in Northern Ireland. We moved there when I was four and I never once adopted the accent. I think for a similar reason, I was living in a culture

where lots of lies were being told. And that was the one thing that I could stick to is the truth as I knew it. And I think that, I don't know if you feel this, but as a writer and as a storyteller, as long as you're connecting with someone from a place of truth, the rest of it doesn't really matter. You've said two things there that were the second, which I didn't quite understand. The first thing I do, I mean, I definitely think that that idea of T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alphaproofrock talks about people creating a face to meet the faces that they meet which a lot of people do and i'm not criticizing people who do that because i

think that's just an instinctive thing that people do i don't do it i don't think i quite have the ability to do it so i connect completely with that sense of like going to northern ireland and not wanting to speak like the people because it's not you you once you've realized who you are as a person and you're truthful about that in your world will no one rid me of this troublesome priest. This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago

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that inspires the locations, the characters and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And what you seek to do in your work is connect with others. That's the key point. So whether you get a heckler or whether you get some twats at the alternative investment management heckling you on stage

and telling you to piss off, it doesn't matter because it's coming from a place of your truth. Maybe. I mean, it does matter. Don't get me wrong. It's horrible. Dying on stage is horrible.

That was a horrible experience. I mean, it's interesting. Just yesterday, because I'm doing this show about trolls, I occasionally scour the internet. I don't even Google myself anymore because that is just ridiculously hideous. This is a stage show you're doing. Yeah, I'm doing a stage show about social media,

but specifically about people being hateful on social media and hateful towards me a lot of the time. That's what the show is. A lot of it is abuse directed towards me. And I ended up looking at this bloke doing a video blog about George Galloway slagged me off quite recently George Galloway hates me good that's a feather in your cap but he hates me but I reacted to it because he called me a vile Israel fanatic and I said well considering that every single thing I've ever said about that country is entirely meh because my point about my stance on

Israel is always I have no opinion about Israel and imagine that I have an opinion about it is racist, that I have to have an opinion about it as a Jew. I don't. It's a foreign country, about which I think very little. And he called me a vile Israel fanatic for his own weird purposes. So I said, you can only mean Jew, can't you, George, in which case you are an anti-Semite, and now come at me with your stupid fucking lawyers. And he immediately retracted it. Like all bullies, he was like, okay, now i'm being stood up to i have to retract but i happen to be looking at

one of those rabbit holes on the internet and someone had done a blog about this some bloke just in his car i've done a blog to camera about this and he starts going on about me and he doesn't know who i am at all he said he's obviously galloway sport it's like david bidey some comedian from the 90s yeah i don't know much about him he's crap i think blah blah and i'm watching this and i'm thinking as i often do now with the part of the troll thing is like what psychic cost is it to me to watch someone slagging me off or to read something slagging me off all the time and i don't know the answer to that but i do know that my process is to try and make that into something into material or into comedy or whatever.

I think it is damaging, but I also think that what you've just said is important, which is I think you've got a very, very strong sense of self, which I do. For better or worse, I have a very strong sense of self. I think that is one way. There are lots of ways of thinking about that and thinking about abuse or whatever, but one way of holding yourself together with abuse is by having that, I think. You tell stories in multiple ways. You're a terrific novelist. Thank you.

And I do think a lot of people don't know that, which is ridiculous, because your novels are very critically acclaimed and sell well in terms of literary fiction. But one of your failures concerns your last adult novel death of e.i gold i made it sound like it was a kind of sex fantasy when i say adult novel oh i see yeah i was on um six music this morning talking to sean kevin and because i write children's books i referred to myself because i was trying to talk about my work apart from the children's books i referred to myself as an adult entertainer which made me sound like Stormy Daniels. So that was a bit worrying. But yes, because I write kids books, I do have to occasionally say grown up books or whatever,

which sounds ridiculous. But yes, I mentioned The Death of Eli Gold as my second. And it's very interesting that you said that my novels are critically acclaimed because you see, I don't have a strong sense of that. I mean, I have got some good reviews for my adult novels, but I'm going to mention that one specifically and the bad review of that. I mean, I have got some good reviews for my adult novels, but I'm going to mention that one specifically and the bad review of that one, which made me feel it was a failure. Now that, in terms of what you said early on about men refusing to acknowledge failure, I guess this is the most I'm going to be like that, in the sense that I very much don't feel that Death of Eli Gold is an artistic failure. I think it's a good novel and it's probably my best grown-up non-children's novel, my best literary novel. And it's inspired by my

obsession with American fiction and about the character of Eli Gold, who unfortunately then became a character in The Good Wife as well. They're not the same character, but the name, Eli Gold, was then taken, not taken directly, but it happened to be also the name of the character The Good Wife, which is a real problem. by alan cumming yeah yeah yeah and then when that book came out about six months later when that happened people saying haven't you watched the good wife and no i i came up with the name first but anyway he's a kind of mash-up of philip roth and saul bellow and norman maynard and all those sort of great male narcissists that bestowed american fiction in the last century it's really a novel about maleness, about the death of big, high maleness.

And I think it is good, but it was a failure, and this is what I mean, why I decided to bring it up, because, like, what constitutes failure? You're meant to, as a novelist, I think, or any kind of creative, like, just do things because you feel the need for self-expression and blah, blah, blah. It doesn't matter what the world thinks. That's bollocks. It does matter.

And it particularly matters, actually, in the realm of literary fiction because a writer wants to be read. It's a really stupid idea, a rarefied idea that still exists. Like the Booker Prize, I haven't read Miltman. Actually, it looks quite good to me. But what was said about it by the chair of the judges, which is it's like a walk up Snowdon. It's very difficult and challenging.

But when you get to the top, the view is marvellous. And that's really stupid. Don't say it's like that, as if difficult and challenging is good in itself. So I don't agree with that idea. Dickens wanted to be read. Austin wanted to be read. And unfortunately, now, if you write a literary novel in Britain, you can only really be read on a wide scale if you get nominated for a major prize. I mean, that's really the truth. So that book wasn't. Not only that, it got a shit review in The Guardian from a bloke who I then met called Stephen Paul. Interestingly enough, when I met him, I used to do a radio show called Forethought, and he was on that. And I said to him, I think we need to talk about The Elephant in the Room, which is a really horrible review of the death of Eli

Gold. This was about a year later. And he went, oh, I'm sorry, I don't remember it. And I thought, you cunt, you so do. You fucking do. But you've just decided to play that card as a way of dealing with the awfulness of it. But it's also a way of saying, you know, like it's just one of many novels.

I'm not going to take any notice of you bringing it up. But the bad truth is that if you write a literary novel and it gets a terrible review in the Guardian, then you've basically killed any chances of that novel in Britain being nominated for that prize or being considered an important piece of literary fiction. It did get some good reviews as well, but sort of the Guardian in a weird way is the watermark of like whether a certain band of small cultural gatekeepers will let your novel through the gate. And I guess that's the positive I'm going to take from that, although I think it is quite a big failure and quite a big negative because I would

like to carry on writing literary fiction. But I stopped, much like with stand-up, writing literary fiction at that point, because I did think really a lot of thought and effort has gone into that book and it's just been dissed and that will mean that it won't be acknowledged and it's not just about acknowledgement much though we all like acknowledgement is about it being read and bought whatever then about two or three years later I had the idea for the parent agency which is my first children's novel I mean that went through the roof right apparently and now my children's novels sell millions and here's the weird thing about that is that there's no question a small part of me feels like oh am I limiting my sort of novelistic talent for want of better words my novelistic

self-expression because I'm just writing kids books and probably I am at some level at another level I think there's something so brilliant about children's books, which is precisely that exact direct contact you have with the readers, not overlooked by terrible cultural gatekeeping. No child, even though the books are bought by their parents or whatever, ever thinks about, oh, you know, I don't know if this book's had a good review in the Guardian, so I don't know if I should put it on my dinner table. Do you know what I mean?

It's a very, very straightforward relationship. The children like... Yeah, it's really brilliant. The children just like the books. I mean, they clearly do, because they buy them in truckloads. And they tell me, and I go to schools and read them, and there's a very immediate reaction. And it's so lovely to not have to have that baggage,

that literary baggage of, oh, my God, is it going to get on this list or that list or whatever? I said this quite recently, and, oh, my God got someone got cross with me and said but I review children's books and I know that people take notice and I thought like if you review children's books and you're listening don't take that the wrong way but actually it is true that readership is one of the last in a way sort of directly involved with reading without worrying about reviews or what the zeitgeist is or whatever. It's so interesting that because it was actually very brave of you to put yourself out there as a

novelist. I mean, you didn't need to in the sense of presumably you were pretty financially comfortable. It was something that you clearly felt you wanted to do as a means, as you say, of self-expression. I don't know don't know I mean actually it was a weird way it happened the first one time for bed which my first novel happened in a weird way which was that Rob Newman was writing a novel and we were quite competitive and people said to me are you writing a novel and I said yes but that was literally like two paragraphs that I'd put on paper once and then publishers got in touch and said oh oh, we'd like to publish your novel. And I thought, I haven't actually written it.

And I didn't say it, obviously I hadn't lied. I just said, I am writing one, but I hadn't written one that could immediately. So at that point I thought, oh, fuck, I should write it. And then I did, and I liked that book. I mean, I like all my novels, to be honest. But I think probably it wouldn't necessarily have happened without the catalyst of being in a slightly competitive relationship

with Rob Newman at the time. What happened to his novel? He wrote a novel called Dependence Day. It was his first novel, which was really good. I think I've read all his novels. I've liked all of them except the last one I haven't read. Yeah, I think he still writes novels. I don't know.

Are you a competitive person or is it just with Rob Newman? I think I was, less so now. I think, yeah, I think certainly when I was in... I mean, that relationship was quite... had all sorts of, like, aggressive elements to it. And it was a complicated, very combative relationship. And also, actually, at that time, which led to the death of Newman and Baddiel,

Rob had decided, I want to be interviewed separately from you. I've got important things to say in interviews, and you're hampering me by being in these interviews. And that was a mistake. It was a mistake in terms of the ongoing health of Newman and Baddiel because I'm a truth teller so when journalists interviewed me by myself and said how's it going I would say I think he's gone mad I think he's something's happened and we don't seem to be getting on anymore and he's really like gone a bit mental and that was a wrong thing to do a it was just

my point of view and b I shouldn't have said it because at the time I was very unfiltered with journalists and I am still unfiltered, but I don't do feature pieces generally anymore unless I'm very certain about like trusting the person or whatever, because then I would see endless feature pieces about me or Newman Beale where I just thought, well, this isn't true. And this isn't exactly what I said,

or they've spun it this way or that way, particularly people very keen on spinning it in a way that meant these two are falling apart, which actually we were. So anyway, so I think the question, are you writing a novel happened in a separate interview. And I was probably at the time, you know, worried about Rob writing a novel and thinking, oh, yeah, I should put my marker down because I feel I could. I think that those novels and writing novels is something that I feel that I like doing an awful lot and actually kids novels is a really interesting from that point of view in that I've banged on and on

and on about truth throughout this as I often do and yet the kids novels that I write are absolute flights of fancy I mean they are the most sort of they're always magical all my kids novels like the first one's about a world in which children can choose their own parents the second one is about a magical game controller that two twins have that gives them game powers the third one's about a kid who turns into animals what i would say is that all of them do have a truth like i'm obsessed with animals right i have four cats and i think that one of the things about being a comedian is that it allows you to retain the child inside you until much later so all of us are actually children

no one is really an adult you know maybe Theresa May but you know in real life I know you know this that like really one feels about 14 or whatever but just has to hang around with a decaying older body and wing it as far as adulthood goes talk about yourself with a decaying older body sorry sorry sorry I am talking about myself but we're all decaying older body and wing it as far as adulthood goes talk about yourself with a decaying

older body sorry sorry sorry i am talking about myself but we're all decaying however however early on we are in the process that is still happening right so my point is that i think being a comedian allows you to be the child you're also given license to be a child and actually history today which me and rob newman did which was a big sketch that we did was two old men behaving like children and i think that writing the children's books has allowed me to completely let that loose so even though they are complete flights of fancy they have a truth in that it's what the 12 year old inside me wants to read and wants to express how do you feel about fame i mean i know you wrote a whole show about it, but where are you at with it now? It's mainly a positive, Fame, mainly.

Fame, not the musical, was a show about the everyday mundane humiliations of Fame. So I made it clear in that show, this is not a show like Janis Joplin talking about the awfulness of going back to the empty hotel and after you've made love to 25,000 people. Nor is it a show, an X Factor show, in which someone talks about the incredible drive they have to be famous and how that will just... It's more a show about how if you're on Ryanair and you're keeping four seats back for your family, despite the fact that you haven't paid priority for the rest of your family,

and a bloke comes up to you and tries to sit in those chairs. And then I say to that person, look, you know, I'm just keeping these back for my family. And they say, oh, right, you didn't pay for those seats, but you've come on early to just try and claim those seats, right? And then they say, but deal. That's what I'm talking about in Fame, Not the Musical, right? That thing of being just slightly more recognisable than other people.

And if you're seen doing something even just a tiny bit embarrassing and shit, people know who you are while you're doing it. That's really what that show was about. And what comes with that is a weird sense that they do know who you are. I mean, actually, that bloke was right. I was doing that. I don't know if you've ever done it, but you can do it on Ryanair. Anyone on Ryanair who are presently in the news for being racist anyway erica young said the more

famous you are the more people will get you wrong and that is true i think and some people revel in that you know i think some people bowie or lady garg or whatever for them fame was about creating a character that was not them but because i'm obsessed with the truth i think it's been complicated for me that for example you you mentioned ladism in your introduction. So a persistent idea of me, I think, for lots of people is football lad, even though it's quite a long time ago now. But that's still persistent. I mean, in The Death of Eli Gold, Eli Gold says fame is like starlight, by which he doesn't mean that it's glittering and magnificent. He means whatever you're first first scene it comes from long ago

so whatever your first scene as with fame that tends to reify and stick on you updikes head fame is a mask that eats into the face and i think it's true it's hard for me often to get away from that sense of like you're this football lad and that is part of me i love football and i'm very male in lots of ways i remember reading a review of my third novel which is about the internment of jewish german refugees on the isle of man called the secret purposes and the bloke who reviewed that in the evening standard norman labrecht i can remember his name talks about it like he likes it about half the review and then says but i have seen david on the telly drinking beer and talking about football and therefore i't believe this novel. I don't believe this is who he is or what he wants to say.

And I thought, right, well, that's interesting, because what that means is that you have a failure of imagination about someone who likes football and drinks beer. Because why on earth should that not include the ability to think about Jewish German refugees on the Isle of Man? Yes, you're allowed to evolve and be complementary and contradictory because you are a human. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's a very, very narrow idea of the novelist to think that a novelist would be someone who only stays in their tiny room listening to Beethoven.

No. Although talking of football leads us on seamlessly to your final failure, which concerns football and more specifically a comic relief match. Yes. I can't remember exactly when this was. I think it must have been the 90s. But I should say straight away, in terms of why I included this one, is that I not only wanted to be a footballer when I was a kid, at some level, I mean completely wrongly, I mean I do think this is not true,

but I still feel it, so you can feel things very strongly that are not true, that I should have been a footballer, that I was good enough. So you can feel things very strongly that are not true, that I should have been a footballer, that I was good enough to be a footballer, and that that was my true calling. I understand as I say that, that that is wrong, but I still can't help but feel it, because I think I love football, I still play football, and occasionally, like once in a blue moon,

I do something on the pitch that makes me think, obviously I should have been a footballer. Look at that, that's incredible, right? So as I say, I can't say it enough. I understand that is deluded. Anyway, particularly in the 90s, now I'm basically too old, but I got asked to play in a lot of celebrity matches. And I was playing fairly regularly for a comic relief team.

We went to Africa and played football there and blah. Then we played one match at Villa Park against, I think, a sort of scratch England team of old England players or whatever. And it went to penalties. And I had to take a penalty, you know, penalty shootout. The reason I'm including it is whether or not I could have been a footballer, which I clearly couldn't have been. I can't say that enough anyway.

I realised then that I couldn't have been a footballer for another reason, which is that I had never had to actually play in front of a crowd, proper crowd before. And the crowd, because it was a laugh, I don't think they really hated anyone. I mean, it's comic relief. But for a laugh, decided to make, that's just the whole thing at Villa Park,

it as difficult as possible for every celebrity taking a penalty as they possibly could. So I'm taking a penalty. There's, I can't remember who it was, but there's a proper goalkeeper in goal. And suddenly the whole crowd behind the ground are shouting as much abuse at me as they possibly can. And I couldn't handle it at all. I think the first one went wide.

The second one I was so keen on it not going wide. It was like a lob into the goalkeeper's arms. And then how humiliating is this? I mean, by the way, when I say the second one, I was so keen on it not going wide. It was like a lob into the goalkeeper's arms. And then how humiliating is this? I mean, by the way, when I say the second one, because it was a comedy game, the ref just said, that's embarrassing. Take it again. Take it again.

Then when I lobbed it into the goalkeeper's arms, they said, take it again. And the goalie stood aside. The goalie stood aside. And I should have just said, no, I'm not doing this. But it was sort of part of the thing that I had to go through with it that was like a comedy as well as a football narrative that meant David now has to do the incredible humiliating thing of just tapping the ball into

an empty goal while the goalie stands aside what was particularly terrible is that Frank Skinner who is awful at football he would acknowledge that he's awful at football, he would acknowledge that, he's awful at football, and he's a West Bromwich Albion fan, right? So Villa hate West Brom. Took his penalty, scored it immediately. I mean, the abuse was unbelievable for Frank. I mean, it was bad for me, but it was unbelievable. Like, the noise trying to stop Frank. And the difference between me and Frank at some level

was he definitely fed on it. I remember him scoring, just tapping it into the corner quite calmly, and then reveling in the sort of like anger and rage of the Villa fans that they hadn't managed to put him off. And I just thought, oh, yeah, there's sort of something. I don't know what it is exactly, but I am more vulnerable than him because I couldn't handle it. I couldn't deal with the level of...

I mean, I think I probably might have been able to comically. So, as I say, I went along with the fact that I just put it in the goal for the third time or whatever. But I think because of this weird notion of mine that is very fragile and wrong, that I could have been a footballer and that being sort of weirdly important to the 12-year-old that's correct when it came to the crunch moment it was like it all fell apart my god this is so poignant this moment 12 year old David yeah that's what it was I felt very 12 year old I felt more 12 year old I think in that moment than I would have done in a comedy

gig where I had to deal with a bad crowd or whatever it might be. I've talked quite a lot about abuse in this podcast and about being able to deal with abuse or turning it into comedy or learning from it or whatever. But at that moment, I think, because when I was a kid, I wanted to be a footballer. I mean, let me tell you something else that makes it even sadder,

which is if you ask me why it is that I'm not a footballer, the truth is I'm not good enough. But I wouldn't say that. I would say what happened was, when I was playing for my Jewish primary school team, when I was like 10, I couldn't do my shoelaces up. My mum had never really taught me to do my shoelaces up.

And she'd asked a friend of ours, Marion Rosenberg, to do it. But she taught us using a big flat shoe that they used to have in the 70s as a sort of teaching aid to tell people how to do it. And I never understood, because I'm slightly on the spectrum, how to translate how you did it a big flat shoe that they used to have in the 70s as a sort of teaching aid to tell people how to do and i never understood because i'm slightly on the spectrum how to translate how you did it on the flat shoe to my real shoe like the change in dimension was really complicated so i remember asking the ref who was one of our teacher to do my shoelaces up and after the third time he just said i'm not doing this anymore i've got to ref the game so my shoe was constantly coming undone and i was terrible as a, and my shoes kept on coming undone.

And I remember thinking, this is like the world has conspired against me because I should be a footballer, but I can't do my shoelaces up. And I think that's the person who, when they had to take the penalty against Villa Park, that's the person who came through, the kid who was 10 and Mr. Rabbi.

He was a rabbi. I remember the referee, rabbi, whoever it was, Finkelstein, had just said, no, I'm not doing your shoelaces up anymore. There's that person that came to the surface when faced with the baying crowd at Villa Park. I mean, I am actually welling up. It's just the image of Tony or David without his shoes done up. If only they'd had Velcro. Exactly. They didn't have Velcro. They't have you can be predators in those days yeah I mean these are all excuses for the fact that I wasn't good enough but I did really want to be a footballer and the world didn't work for me to be a footballer that's how it felt and that carried through to that comic relief moment

we're drawing to a close yeah so I've got one because i'm not sure you're ever going to recover i'm palpitating with emotion i wanted to end with kind of a big question which is whether you feel like a success yeah yes i do okay great yeah yeah i mean uh that's a good question because i think like just like empirically, I sort of feel like a success, like we're in my house, which is a nice house and which I own because of my work. And I have done a lot of stuff that is definitely successful. I mean, to choose one stupid and obvious example,

Three Lions went to number one again over the summer. It's the only song ever to go to choose one stupid and obvious example Three Lions went to number one again over the summer it's the only song ever to go to number one four times from with the same artists and like that feels like successful in a ridiculous kind of like kind of quantifiable way and laughter itself is a kind of thing that is like quantifiably successful like no other art form it seems to me like you can kind of pretend that you're and there can be lots of emperor's new clothes around drama and music and indeed lots of other art forms but actually if comedy doesn't make people laugh then it's failed and although i have failed to make people laugh in some things i've done i have succeeded in doing it because i

can hear it yeah i mean i i do but in terms of what we began with, I think it's a qualified success. I mean, there's many things I've done that I think, oh, I would do that differently. Or there are things I've done that haven't worked. And also maybe there's stuff that I started out with that I thought I would be great at and I wasn't great at that. So for example, I've directed a few things and I thought I'd be really good at that. But actually, I'm not sure I'm that good at it because I'm not that visually minded. But I think I am pretty good at acknowledging these things.

So it's part of the truth thing. If you're obsessed with truth, then you have to be clear about being true about the things that you're not good at or that you can't do or you haven't done or that have gone wrong. And because I'm more obsessed with truth and I hate the idea of self-denial

than I am with bolstering my sense of self, then I think, yeah, the answer to that question is I'm a success but a qualified success. David Baddiel, I'm thrilled that you didn't become a Premier League footballer because you probably would never have come on this podcast. Oh, I would have done. I would have done. Okay, thank you. Well, if you have a second career as the New England captain. Still time. Still time.

Thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. thank you. Well, if you have a second career as the New England captain. Still time. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. And David Baddiel's latest children's book, Head Kid, is out now. I can highly recommend it.