Walking The Dog with Emily Dean - David Baddiel

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

This week Emily goes out with comic, writer and confirmed cat lover David Baddiel who tries out his dog compatibility with Jimmy, a rescue greyhound from The Dogs Trust. They discuss fame, his brilliant partnership with Frank Skinner, the extraordinary family David grew up in as well as his current tour and becoming a hugely successful children’s author - also featuring David’s brother who calls him halfway through! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Would it be helpful to know that he does us, Ron Atkinson's hair? I don't want to look like Ron Atkinson. Hi and welcome to Walking the Dog. This week I went out with comedian, writer, an all-round Renaissance man, David Bedeal. David's been a bit of a hardcore cat man all his life, but he was really keen to have a blind date with a dog. So we took out the lovely Jimmy, who's a greyhound from Dogs Trust.

And I think it went pretty well. One of the things I love about David is his absolute inability to keep anything back at all. So we talked about everything. Fame, Frank Skinner, family. He takes a call from his brother at one point. There's a bit where he stops the podcast and deliberates whether to go to the loo in a bush. And best of all, he even let me stroke his guinea pig. I'm just going to leave that there. You must go and see David's show, by the way, my family, not the sitcom.

That's not a plug. It's a genuine piece of advice from me because it's life-changing. And it's your last chance, I think, this tour. So go to David Beddil.com for dates. Also, his latest kids' book, Birthday Boy, is out right now. So that's all your Bidil-based info for 2018. Also, I should say, if you want to contact Dogs Trust about rehoming a dog, do get in touch with them.

They're at Dogstrust.org.com. My last piece of advice is rate, review, and subscribe. Because there's no easy way of saying this without sounding cheesy, but you complete me. Yes, all of you. with the boot-cut jeans. Hello, I'm me. Hi, David.

I should introduce the podcast. Yeah, okay. So, I'm with David Badeal, and this is Walking the Dog. Hello. I like your very polite hello, like you're on The One Show. Yeah, well, I always like to start

with the One Show, you know, element. Rob Newman, who I used to work with, someone once said about him that he was very good at the start and end of conversations because he was so liable to say something terrible in the middle when he was. sort of lost himself, that he was self-consciously say something positive at the start and end as a kind of barrier, you know, buffer for that. And I think I've got a bit of that.

We're doing this podcast today. And at the moment, we should say... We're dogless at the moment. We don't have a dog. It's just you and me and some parkers. We're going to have a dog in a minute, though. We're going to have a dog in a minute because the lady from the dog's trust is here. And they've blown... When they first called me and I said, I'm doing the podcast with David Bidiel. He doesn't have a dog, but I really want... want to do this with him and I want to talk to him about dogs and understand the obsession with cats. Yeah and also I've spent my whole life thinking or I might get a dog and so far not.

So the phantom dog is with me at all times. Okay well when they call me they said it's a bit of a funny looking thing but we haven't we have got I think they may have been talking about me because he's not particularly funny looking he's called Jimmy and is he a greyhound. He is a greyhound. He's Irish and he's called Jimmy and he's a greyhound. Okay, well... Oh, here he is. Okay. Can we take him now? Is that okay? Hello Jimmy. Hi Jimmy. Hello Jimmy. He's really beautiful. He's not a funny looking thing.

I'm going to describe Jimmy. Can I do that? Yeah, please do. Okay, Jimmy, come on. He's having a shape. Jimmy doesn't want to come with us. No. He's anti-Semitic. Okay. Jimmy is white with brown and black patches. He's a greyhound. He's very much what you might expect with a greyhound. I've never seen a greyhound that's anything different shape-wise. You might have thought there'd be the odd fat greyhound, is what I'm sort of saying, but there never is.

Yeah. No, the body type is quite standard, isn't it? It is. And he's got a lovely face, although at the moment it's stuck against a tree. What I've been told about Jimmy is he's four years old. Yeah. You're making him sound like in Miss World Contest. Yeah, he's four years old.

He wants World Peace and to be able to shit near a tree, which is very common amongst Miss Worlds. He was found, I think, in a bad way but then the dogs trust sorted him out and then he was in fact housed and then brought back to the dogs trust because he didn't get on with the other pets and that brings us into it straight away an issue I have with dogs. Go on so tell me what you're all. So I've always kind of wanted a dog. Yeah. I like animals in general. I sort of like animals. I really like animals. Yeah. As I go older I've become more obsessed with animals. I'm thinking about being a vegan. Never, it won't happen. But I often think about it. I think about the sentience of animals a lot about how how animals it's clearer and clearer to me are very, very sentient and very like us. Yeah. So anyway, I thought about getting a dog for many years, but as you've...

Hello, yeah, please do. I was about to say thank you, but he's not my dog. No, but... He's from the dog's trust. Yeah, he's from a dog's trust. He's called Jimmy. Are you looking for a home? Yeah, he is, actually.

Are you interested? No, I've got two dogs already. Oh, what a moment it would be if we'd have... How's Jimmy so early off? He's lovely though. Well, never mind. Well, you've done really good PR for him anyway. He's lovely, isn't he?

Come on Jimmy. Yeah, so, but the problem for me with the dog is twofold, but the primary thing is I've always had a lot of cats. Presently have four cats and it's perhaps a little bit cliched of me narratively to assume the dog and the cats won't get on. Right. But I do worry about it. It's a bit of a sort of a sort of, a little bit of a little bit of a cliched of me, narratively, I'm not.

Tom and Jerry It is, it is. Yeah, it is. But particularly monkey, who is my old cat, who has had to put up with a lot in his life. He was in love with Chairman Meow who died. Would you say that was a cat?

That was a cat, yeah. That was another cat. It was named by Frank Skinner, actually. When you shared a flight, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And what actually happened was Frank didn't like cats, didn't want a cat.

I had to have a cat because I don't feel comfortable without a cat. And he said, okay, we can have a cat if it's named after the cat in true grit. John Wayne film. So we have to call it general, like crum, crudry long name. Yeah. It's a general, someone or other, Sterling Anderson or something like that.

And that didn't really work once we got the cat. So eventually we sat and had a comedy brainstorm. And of course, Frank said, looking for a pun, what does the cat do a lot? I said, meow. And he instantly said Chairman Meow. He's good, isn't he? And I still think that is a very brilliant name for a cat. Anyway, chairman meow, who monkey was in love with died.

Right. And now we've got three other cats. And monkeys just dealt with all that. You've got Monkey, who I met earlier, who's 20. It's 20, yeah. And you've got... Pip, who is the mum of Tiger and Ron, who are brothers. And we kept them from nine kittens that Pip had over two litters.

And they've all been given to good homes, the other cats. But basically what I'm saying is we've got four cats. And I would never not have a lot of cats. I don't really feel comfortable without a lot of cats around. And do you think that bringing a dog into the proceedings, at this stage is a bit like meet your new mom. I don't know, is it? I mean, that's the question.

I think it depends on the dog and the cat. But I don't want to get into a situation whereby, having been warned by cartoons and comics over many years, that these people don't get on. I like that you use cartoons instead of public information films. No, but I haven't watched that many public information films. But what I would say is cartoons are very clear about it. I would hate to think, oh, well, you know,

if I brought a dog into the house and it didn't come with a cat, It's like, who knew that was going to happen? Oh, God. Someone could have told me. For some reason, they don't get on at all. It's so strange. Now, I understand that. And when you were growing up, David, in North London,

did your mum and dad have cats? Yeah, we always had cats. Fomfer was our principal cat. Yeah, Fonfer. Yeah, because with the cats, what would happen is my dad would name the cat in a very Pardiel House way. He wouldn't give the cat an ordinary name. He would give it a sort of.

Bedeal language name. And my dad, sort of obverse, in a weird way of what Frank did, he said, what does the cat do a lot? And then he held the cat up, and what the cat was actually doing was purring. Yeah. But my dad, I don't know if he'd never heard of purring. My dad's a cantankerous man. Maybe he didn't understand a sound of pleasure and joy.

He just said, oh, it's going kind of fomfer, fomfer. And that's what that cat was called. Fonfer. We had another cat called Ben Finfilling Fonf, which is a kind of Hebrew. That's the daughter, son of. It's actually sort of his Hebrew for son of Phompfer. Jonathan Ross actually is very keen to, he's keen on Bedele family trivia and he will mention Ben Vimfielfifflin from time to time and other cats called Jewish things.

We weren't even even that Jewish. It's one of the things about that people misunderstand about my family, not even that Jewish really, but nonetheless we had cats called Ben Fimpleg and Schmendrick and one called Hatsy-Potter. You had a cat called Schmendrick? Yeah, we had a cat called Schmendrick, yeah. What brilliant names, I love it. We had loads of cats, but we did, I believe, have one dog. Which way should we go, David? Up this way, yeah.

Actually, no, let's go, no, this way, yes. Okay. I should say we're on Hampstead Heath. But we did have a dog who I don't remember. Yeah. And this was when you were really small? It's something, oh, Dingle. Okay.

That's it. Dingle. I know that because I was once asked for my pawn name. And my porn name at that stage, because it seems to change, doesn't it? Yes. But my porn name at that stage was being suggested that it was my first pet and the road that I grew up in. So it was dingle. called Kendall. I think Dingle is pretty good as a poor name, but Kendall slightly lets the side down.

Yeah. Doesn't it? I think he was a Jack Russell. Okay. And he once bit my older brother. Well maybe that's why you didn't have him anymore. Yeah, maybe. Also I can't imagine my parents who were literally the most irresponsible parents in the history of parenting looking after a dog. They hardly looked after us. Right. Did they? I mean, you've seen my show. Yes. You will know that not a lot of actual parenting went off. Yeah. Because they were maybe... You were sort of self-parented really, right? And by my brother, in fact, who was got over the dog bite to parent me. So when you were, I mean, we'll talk about your show, obviously, because I love your show,

which is called My Family Not the Sitcom. It is. I want you to, because you've got a history of doing these shows. You've got My Family, Not the Sitcom. Prior to that, you had Fame, Not the Musical. I did, but I think in the triptych. What's going to be the next one then? Well, I was planning on a triptych.

I was planning on a trilogy because I thought, oh, that'll be really clever, and that'll brand me. And now I don't want to do a show with Not in it, just because the next show I think is going to be about trolls. because what I have is a huge bank of funny and I think also interesting about how we live now material that I've built up over quite a long time now of having a policy towards trolls which is the opposite of don't feed them they're hecklers therefore I will retweet what they say just as a comedian you might repeat a heckle while you think of a put-down and then put them down funnally and that has led to some very funny stuff but also some very interesting interesting stuff and I think there's a whole show in that but I can't call it a not the

no you can't call that I'm gonna call it how to deal with trolls I think you should just mess with everyone's mind then call it Hollyoaks not the soap opera and it sort of doesn't make any sense yeah that's true maybe I could do that or maybe nothing to do with TV yeah because I've done the first was fame not the musical then it was my family not the sitcom it should be something like Mona Lisa not the painting it should be some other art yeah come on Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy come let's go for it you know what I'm thinking Yeah, go on. When I'm saying Jimmy.

Yeah, go on. Car. Yes, I keep thinking of Jimmy's calls. As I'm going, Jimmy, come on, Jimmy. All I'm thinking is I have Jimmy Carl on a lead. Hey, does that mean that Jimmy's in the Jimmy chair? You know, Frank has this idea about the chair. No, I don't know that.

So the chair is basically, if you have someone who's overweight in the public eye, that's the person you will always go to. They're the go-to reference point for fatness. Yeah, exactly. I'm the go-to reference point for Jew. You're very much in the Jewish chair. I'm in the Jewish chair. I mean, that's partly because it's so few.

Is Jimmy and the people named Jimmy chair? I think he is now. Well, there's the guy in cold feet, Jimmy Nez bit. Oh, yes. But you've then, you called him the guy in cold feet. It took me, because I'm old and I forgot his name for a second. Shoe, who I know very little about. Is he a shoe person?

Yeah, he makes shoes. Jimmy the Greyhound, of course. I think, well, from our point of view, in our world, yes, Jimmy Carr is in the Jimmy chair. So I know you talk about this in your show, and obviously it's something I'm familiar with, because I've known you quite a long time now. I would say, 20-something years, I don't know. a long time. I don't know when we first met. How come we don't remember? Well, I always say to Frank Skinner, it was around 1996. But we met. Yeah, I think, or maybe slightly earlier at 95, yeah.

So I obviously know, because I've known you a long time and I've seen your show, a lot about your childhood. And it is kind of endlessly fascinating. Yeah. But I'm trying to sort of, I didn't know you then. And I know that you go up. I can't imagine that we would have known each other then. Oh, you say that, but. Well, no, you were in North London. I was in North London. I just think of you in more rarefied, not that much more rarefied. I was still the poorest kid in the rich kids school. Yeah. You know, it's just that my family spent all my money on paté is what happened.

For dogs, sort of. For themselves. For themselves, yeah. Which is like he had no money, but I think... I don't quite like the sound of it now. No, you've said it. I think that I have this idea of you as being super clever, and people kind of look at you now, I think,

and think, oh, he was like Sasha Baron Cohen or he was from this rich Jewish middle class family in North London and went to Habbardash's private school. And that's kind of not the story, is it? No, it's not the story. I mean, I think the people who are paying attention, which is always the issue with fame to some extent. I mean, there's lots of issues with fame,

but one issue is you realize very quickly, and my show, Fame, Not the Musical, was to some extent about this, that when you become well-known at all, there's a version of you out there that is not you, and what it is simplified. It's a caricature because we know too many people. We're designed to know about seven people in our cave and environs,

but we know hundreds of people, or we think we do, even the ones we haven't met. And for the brain to process who those people are, you have to reduce them. And for me, to some extent, it is actually complicated. Because I've spent so much time trying to do different stuff, I think it's a number of different things. So some people totally still think, oh, he's a little like someone, on Twitter said to me the other day when I was having some intellectual conversation,

I followed you because I thought it'd all be about Chelsea and music. It was cross about that. So that some people just think football lad still. And other people think, yeah, Jewish, probably from some upper middle class family, like the Korans or the Freud's, Bohemian, blah, blah, blah, and no. Because your dad worked for Unilever. Yeah, he was a middle manager running a laboratory. My dad wanted to be a scientist.

Now has dementia. Still is a clever man. Yeah, my dad. In a strange way, I still see shards of intelligence in my dad, but obviously, urologically, he's, but nonetheless, I still see. You can tell that he is, or certainly was, a man of cognitive ability. But he wanted, I think, to be quite an eminent scientist. He had a PhD in biochemistry, wrote a couple of papers, all that, but ended up working for Unilever, which is a company that, at the time, mainly made kind of shampoos and deodorants or whatever, and was bored, doing that. and then his laboratory got closed down

and he was made redundant. He was out of work for three or four years, around about when I was 13, and then ended up selling dinky toys, which was his hobby, I say hobby, at a antiques market called Grey's Antique Market in Bond Street.

Which is quite funny because my dad was always, I thought, the worst possible salesperson because you have to have a certain amount of charm and persuasion, do you know what I mean? Flotatiousness to sell something to somebody And my dad is, I mean, let me tell you this story. Should I tell you this story? You may have wondered, you're the kind of person,

you may have wondered where it all went wrong for Michael Barrymore. Well, Michael Barremor collects dinky toys. He would always tell me that. If I bumped into him at things like the Comedy Awards in the 90s, because he'd gone down to my dad's stall to buy dinky toys. But he stopped doing that, and that's because my dad never used to watch telly, except for football and stuff. And one day, Michael Baramore comes and buy some toys.

And as he leaves, as he's gone, another bloke who works down in Grace Antiques Market, says to my dad, do you know who that is? This is the sort of early 90s. And my dad says, no. He says, Michael Barramor. He's off the telly. He does strike it lucky. And my dad thinks, all right.

So he goes and watches strike it lucky. Three weeks later, Michael comes back. My dad says to him, oh, I watch your TV show. It was shit. Now, the point is he's a very, very wealthy man who my dad has chosen to alienate. because he can't control his own cantankerousness. And do you think that was sort of a form of Tourette's, though, in some ways with your dad? Yes.

That had possibly not been diagnosed, or people didn't really understand about that. Well, that's very complicated. Maybe. I mean, Tourette's itself is obviously a very complicated illness. Yeah. My dad was just a very, very sweary man who wasn't able or never chose in any way to hold back on his swearingness and aggression and all the rest of it. not because my dad was abusive exactly in any kind of real way, but he's a bloke, incredibly male man,

whose way of communicating, and certainly whose way of showing affection and comedy is to swear at people. That's his primary thing. Your mum, who obviously I met, she was still alive, and was she the kind of, I mean, I always got the sense where she was such a, what people would have described as a character,

such a character your mum. She's an incredible character. Very hard to describe. at some level, one of the things I'm proud of about my family, not the sitcom, is that people who have never met my mother will say, oh, I really feel like I know your mother. And I think you must do, because actually the version I paint in the show is true in a very extreme way. That's what it is. It's very true, and it involves talking about my mother in the way that people don't normally talk about their mums, especially after they're dead, involving talking about how

sexual she was, how she reveled in this affair that she had, how she turned her life over. some people will know this already, to golf and golf memorabilia because she had an affair with a golf memorabilia collector and in a very my mum way couldn't contain that. She was very boundary-less woman, and she couldn't contain that as just the affair. Her whole life suddenly had to be about golf, and therefore our life. She wrote five books about golf.

She ran her own business called Golfiana. She became a member of the British Golfiana, golf member of society and then later chucked out of it following a scandal involving some forged golf paintings so David we've got the hand of the basketball's coming up here I think Jimmy's okay he's just got I don't know I mean has Jimmy had had some difficult moments in his life I don't know how to I think he's um because he looks a bit troubled now but yeah he looks a little bit scared worried about the dogs but got that's really like it's always like a dog sound effect that we've created off It's like, it really sounds, doesn't it?

Like, okay, we're not actually walking the dog, but can you just make that dog noise? Come on, Jimmy. Make that very carry-on, off-mic dog noise. Oh, oh. Jimmy himself seems to make no noise. But it's interesting you talking about this, David. I mean, on stage, obviously, and to me here,

because this is, you know, you're conscious about this is your way of dealing with it, isn't it? Because that is traumatic. I think there were aspects of your childhood, which were quite upsetting in some ways. Yeah, loads. Loads, but I have, you know, I sort of believe without wishing to be sort of, you know, to paint two rose tinted a picture of comedy,

that the thing I've managed to do, and I think is helpful in general, and it's helpful in the moment with dementia, is to say, okay, how is this funny? And I don't mean that in a kind of, oh, yeah, comedy's all about pain, way. I mean it in a more practical way, which is I think if you can narrativeise

stuff that's happening to you that might be damaging and make it funny or just make it into a story which everyone does, that's what you're doing in therapy. To some extent you are narrativeising your own damage, that's what therapy is. But you can do it in a way that finds the comedy in it. I mean, I'll give you a very good example.

When I was in therapy, my therapist, my main therapist, because I had quite a few. She would quite a lot want to talk about David White and my mum's affair and all that kind of stuff, as you might expect. But I said to her, the problem with this is that I'm happy to talk about it,

but I think what you want me to feel about it, which is sort of terrible pain and anguish, so I can cry and get through it, it's quite hard to do because it's about golf. Right. And the golf, the comedy of that makes me unable to feel that pain about it. You know what I mean? Comedy, for me, is a way of, it may be a deflection,

but it is also a way of, it's like, if it's funny, I can't feel that much pain. Yeah. I understand. Well, do you think it anesthetises the pain as well? So it becomes about something else. It's a distraction, essentially. Possibly, but also what you have to remember is you say things in your childhood were quite damaging.

They were, but I'm 53. And all I can talk about those things is how I feel about them now, really. I can't time travel. When I think about Doctor Who, I obviously just think of Frank Skinner and his strange late-life obsession with it. But I don't have an obsession with Doctor Who. I'm more interested in how, you know, you are now. and as I am now, I know that I can't think about my dad making walrus noises in bed, or indeed something I talk about in the show, which is for my mum,

shouting out the name of her lover while she was masturbating, which happens to be my name, because she chose not to say both names. If she said David White, while she was orgasming, it would have been so much less confusing, but she chose us to shout David, David, David, three times. And that is confusing and damaging for the 12-year-old next door. But I can't think of it really. as anything else but funny. Not as nothing else but funny.

I can see how it's all so shocking and... But when you were in it, so when you were... That 12 year old? Yeah, that 12 year old. Would you look back and say, oh, I was happy? I don't know.

I don't think I had a very happy childhood, but I also didn't have a really awful bleak childhood either. I had a childhood that was very idiosyncratic and certainly was sort of the opposite of, to some extent, what I've tried to create around my children and what most people are my generation, I think I've tried to create around their children,

which is, you know, a very possibly over protective, over, let's make sure our children are not damaged, let's change our lives for our, you know, children. My parents didn't in any way stop their lives. It's a very 1970s thing, I think, that like, you know, I don't know about your parents, who I think was quite 70s, but more glamorous than mine,

but they just had these lives and they didn't think, oh, we have to change them, now we have children, which is totally what my generation is. Well, it's that idea, isn't it, that now it's that sense, I think, that you know, you become the frame and your kids become the picture. Whereas my parents were always the picture. Always, yeah.

And I think that's probably similar to yours. Yeah, yeah. But not even with my parents, it's almost like it didn't occur to them. That might be the case. I mean, they were narcissistic people, but it wasn't like they were aggressively narcissistic people. Like, I happened to have watched film stars, Don't Die in Liverpool yesterday, the BAFTA DVDs, which is about a woman called Gloria Graham, who's a kind of sub-Glorious Swanson figure, and the portrayal is of an intensely narcissistic woman. My mum wasn't really

like that. It's just it didn't occur to her that her own obsessions, her own life, her own sexuality or anything like that should change as a result of having children. I mean, to use an example, which I have talked about on stage, but I don't always talk about on stage because it's a bit too much for some people. So when I used to do a Q&A after the show, this bit would only be in that bit is that when my mum shouted out David three times when she was masturbating and I was next door, what occurs to me most about that is if I, the very unlikely event was having an affair now with a woman called Dolly. Dolly is my daughter. Yeah. It's all very unlikely that, but more unlikely is that when I was masturbating, I would shout out the name Dolly three

times with my daughter next door and not think, no, wait a minute, I'll try and contain that impulse. It's already quite bad situation I found myself in, but that is taking it slightly too far because she's next door. My mum had always had a camera on herself in her own mind. She was always someone who thought of, it was always acting some part greater than her Dollis Hill life. Yeah. And did your two brothers, so you had Iva and Dan,

who now lives in New York? Yeah, he's a taxi driver in New York. Oh, he's not just a taxi driver. Well, he is just a taxi driver. Well, yeah, there's something pretty special. Well, he's regularly now. I think he's been in four of them. I've seen this year.

Yeah, in the New York cab driver's charity calendar, which is a bit like the thing that happens in Calendar Girls, which is a bunch of not particularly, well, certainly not as photogenic as those women, not very photogenic men, who have chosen to strip off and be pictured near their cabs or in their cabs or in their cabs in their camps, in one case, in one case,

looking like he's been kidnapped in another time, I absolutely love it. And Dan, I should say, he's probably about 17 stone. But can I ask you, I've never, why did, so you and Iver brought up here, why does Dan in New York then? Well, he once told me it was to get away from me from my fame that he didn't like it. Really? But I don't think that's true. I think that's something Dan said.

Because I don't think Dan quite knows his own mind sometimes. Okay. So when you went to Cambridge, did you have a sense of... So actually, just before we get onto that, in terms of kind of back to what you were saying about how my childhood doesn't really fit into that idea of the sort of pote bourgeois Jewish family. So we didn't have very much money. I got into haberdasher. Like lots of immigrant families, what my parents working on, especially my mum, was education.

Right. So was that really important to your parents? Well, again, it seems hard to imagine it because they sort of weren't bothered about us at some level, but they were bothered about education. Like they were very bothered about seeing our reports and whatever. And it's interesting that. I think it's really interesting because I think now, when I read my children's books at schools,

I notice that whatever the top schools are now, tend to have lots of Asian kids in them. And I think that's a thing with immigrant communities. And I would say with Asian communities, the sort of mechanics of the British class system don't get so involved. So I think if you're from an Asian family and you go to whatever a top school is,

you don't get so quickly accused of, you know, class traitorship or whatever it might be accused. but that doesn't need to apply with Jews, like every other thing, doesn't really apply with Jews. They're a strange special case. But my point is that I went to haberdasher, which is a private school, because at the time it had a direct grant system. It is a good school, although I hated it, and pretended to be ill. Did you?

And do you think it was psychosomatic? Well, I think it began psychosomatic, but it couldn't have been that psychosomatic because, I was going to, with my parents in a very 70s way, going to school was totally about whether or not you had a temperature. And in fact, my brother went to school with appendicitis because he didn't have a temperature, right? So my parents used to put the thermometer in my mouth, then always leave the room because they couldn't be bothered to hang around with me.

I would then, I noticed with old thermometers, if you shake them upside down, your temperature goes up. So I'd do that, put it back in my mouth. So it's not that psychosomatic. And they would come back to, I always got a temperature, you can't go back to school. And that went on for six weeks,

and I ended up in hospital, where, of course, I couldn't do it. So then I said, there's nothing wrong with him. I had a lot of nat bites. Again, a very 70s thing. There were a lot of gnats midges in our garden. And I had a lot of them on my stomach. And I remember lots of doctors looking at that,

as if, like, maybe it's something to do with these. But it wasn't. It was to do with shaking the thermometer. Anyway, I went there. because it was direct grant. And direct grant at the time was a scheme, I think it set up by the Conservatives, whereby you were means tested.

Your parents were means tested, and if your parents didn't have much money, but you were clever and passed the entrance exam, you would go to this school. So my parents paid something like a hundred quid a year. Right, to send you there, yeah. And then I went to Cambridge, which was free. That's one of the most ridiculous things,

it's this idea that Cambridge. I mean, obviously, some people who went to Cambridge could be posh, but the fact is it was free. I had a grant and I was, yeah, what I was was clever. Yeah. And I went to Cambridge for a specific reason, which was I didn't really know much about comedy but was really interested in it. Right.

Had done something at my school, a review show that had normally been terrible. And then when I'd done it, I'd changed all the sketches. So they were about teachers I didn't like and it stormed it. Yeah. And I nearly got expelled and was cool at school very briefly. wanted to go to Cambridge because I knew about Cambridge Footlights. You'd heard of that, yeah. I'd heard of that.

And I was obsessed with Peter Cook and Monty Python and stuff like that. That was the wrong thing too, because it was the 80s, and Footlights was the wrong place to start in comedy in the mid-80s. It was the right place before that, and actually pretty the right place after that, when Mitchell and Webb and other people like that, and people started to be less bothered about. But you found your, you found some pals, though.

I know, I liked it and I certainly got a chance to do some comedy. I try and get a sense of you at Cambridge. I can't imagine what, you know, I sometimes see pictures of people like Jimmy Carr, who would have been there slightly after you, I think, wouldn't he? Yeah, 10 years after. I see Jimmy with this sort of curly hair and looking so studenty. And now, but I can... You've never seen a picture of me at Cambridge.

No, I don't think I have. I had very, very extreme 80s hair. Did you? Yeah. The main thing. I looked like Robert Smith. Yes, that's what I was imagining, yeah. It spent a lot of time back combing.

But you see, this is fascinating to me because I think this is quite a common thing with comics, that in some way they were outliers when they were younger. I think it's clearly something to do with attention-seeking. You know, I mean, one doesn't go on stage unless one wants some kind of attention, and going with that when you're young would be dressing in a way that garnered attention, I think. I'm trying to imagine, you know, as a comic, did you have that sense, David, When was your first sense of, I'm funny? Was it with your family or with your friends?

Or did you get that growing sense? Matt Lucas talked to me about how he would do impressions of the teachers and that made him realise that, oh, this is a thing? This is something I can do. Did you have that? Well, yes, but in a different way because Matt is much more of a performative person than I am. I mean, like the opposite extreme to some extent

in that what Matt can do is transform himself into incredible characters and voices and all that stuff, what I can do is be myself in a very extreme way in a way that most people can't on stage and in interviews and stuff like that. And I'm obsessed with that. That's what I spend my whole life doing. It's like having a horror of being anything else but myself,

which means I'm shitter accents or anything like that. I had these mates, Pete Smith and Dave Billington, and they used to make cassette tapes of themselves just talking to each other and doing sketches and they were really funny. And I had a lot of mates like that, none of whom have gone on to be comedians but just who were really funny people. I went to this Jewish youth group called Habonim, which is a socialist Zionist group based on kibbutz and whatever.

But just my main sense of it was, again, lots of really funny people. in it. And my own kind of, what I would consider to be kind of lower middle class, North London Jewishness is something that I think, I certainly wouldn't have known this at the time, but I think there was a type of person who had a voice, a comic voice, that I was completely soaked in. And that's what I've sort of done, really. That's my voice to some extent. Yeah, I can see that. I suppose when you go to university and you meet, I guess, like-minded people, and you think, I know, from when I used to watch, your first thing was Mary White House experience,

and it wasn't the first thing you ever did, I suppose. No, I'd been on the cabaret circuit for five years by the time that happened, but yes. No, but that's important because I think people, you know, I wish to sound defensive. I think people thought I came out of Cambridge and got a radio show and then a TV show. No, I'd been doing the comedy store for five years.

Right. But that's interesting to me, because that was my first encounter with you. And what was that sort of early 90s, mid-90s? The radio show, Mary Wights Experience, on Radio 1 from about 1988. Yeah. It had loads of series packed into sort of two years on the radio. And then the pilot on TV was 1990.

And then the first... But I looked at that and I thought, oh, this is like... They're like me. This is like how my friends talk. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. When I think... I mean, I think that's...

I'll be honest you, I think that's mainly me. Because I think when you look back at Ray Wight's Experience, or, you know, whatever Punt and Dennis or Rob Newman were doing, which was all really... funny, I think the person who you probably thought, oh, wait a minute, this is sort of the comic voice of me is me. Because like Rob Newman was doing like crazy weird stuff, Martin Dennis were doing sketches. I'm the one who you think like, oh, hang on, that's a bloke who could live next door to me.

I mean, whatever. I think that's true, yeah. And I think that's what created some animosity with me as well, putting people's backs up by being arrogant or whatever I mean. There was also an element of, no, wait a minute. I could do this. I think journalists like he's too like

people I might know. He's not like Vic Reeves who is like an alien outlier, weirdo and brilliant or whatever, but he's sort of, you know, isn't he, surely I could be doing, you know what I mean? And I think that, I think that created...

He's too like a bloke who could be writing for the guards, yes, exactly, and just was at my school. Yeah. But actually it's very difficult. I'm not difficult, I mean, I can do, but it's an unusual thing. Oh, that's my phone.

You can get it on the podcast. I can get it. It's who it is. Obviously, we'll take it out if it's something. Okay. It's my brother. Why don't you get it?

I will get it. Hello. Hello, Iva. Hello, how are you? I want to just check some things with you because I'm doing a podcast at the moment where with Emily Dean. I don't know if you know Emily Dean, really.

Hi, Eva. Emily Dean? Yeah, she's on Frank's show. That's right. That's right. I wouldn't call her a sidekick. No, I'd say she's integral. But anyway, she does a podcast.

Co-presenter, exactly. It does a podcast about dogs, about walking dogs. And I'm presently walking with a lovely dog called Jimmy and Her. But yeah, you just said it. I said earlier that our only dog was called Dingle. That's correct, isn't it? A bit either under the arm. You see, it's all come true, as ever, truth at the centre of my being.

It's having confirmed. I didn't ask him to do this. And he was a Jack Russell? You're not sure. No one's going to be able to prove it otherwise. No, that's true. Definitely not. All right, I've got to go, Ive, because I'm right in the middle of doing this.

All right. Talk to you later. Bye, Iva. My brother, sorry. But it's good that he confirmed the dog story. That's great that he confirmed the dog. And I like that you did that quite our mum's thing of saying, that was my brother. I knew that.

I was also totally aware in a kind of, what's his name again? Oh, he's so worried about my memory from this point of you. No, I do as well. Who's the very famous American comedian who just does phone calls? No, just does phone calls. He's from the 50s. But my point is that, like him, I knew exactly what I was doing when I said, no, I wouldn't call her a sidekick.

I knew what I was doing. I know. I thought there was a certain amount of that going, I enjoyed it. So when you became, that's when you became famous. And I know this is another subject, as well as your family, that you've examined and talked about. a lot, is being famous. And how did that first feel? Were you sort of conscious of your life changing and feeling different or other people

being different towards you? And was it an experience that you enjoyed initially? Yeah. Well, there's a number of things. Here's the key thing with me in fame, I think, which is I don't think fame changed me at all. I really liked it because it meant, you know, that I could do things like, for example, the first time I probably noticed it.

It was where you go, David. That will lead us back to my house. No, I'm not ready yet. Okay, well then we can go up there. Okay, yeah. So if you turn right, we'll just carry on up towards Parliament. You were doing. I thought we were wandering aimlessly.

No, no, I know what I'm doing. It really knew. This is my patch. So the first time I really noticed it is, I think we've done one series of Mary White House experience. And me and Rob Newman were doing a stand-up gig. I think the first one that we did after Mary White's experience had had one series on TV. and both me and him had regularly been doing

cabaret circuit gigs at that point club gigs and we do this venue called the venue in New Cross which I think is like a 900-Zeta and I sort of hadn't occurred to me it just hadn't occurred to me what might happen and we turn up there's people queuing round the block like we double sell it out

and people can't get in and that A was sort of amazing but also it's quite a good example of how I'm slightly on the spectrum with that because I sort of do things without thinking about what the impact of them might be. It's part of you know the way that I talk. Yes. It's like I haven't really thought, okay, this might have like quite a strange impact on people telling them this stuff. Yeah. I hadn't really occurred to me. I'm on the telly. That means people will want to buy tickets. And to be honest with you, they don't always.

People can be on telly for many years and not really parlay that into selling tickets. But me and and Rob really did. So I liked all that. But I really don't think, and this is partly to do with what I'm going on about quite a lot on this podcast with me in typically for me quite a wearisome way which is the meanness of me which is that I think of myself as I say quite weary weary me I'm sort of like you know T S Eliot says in the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock that he creates a face to meet the faces that he meets or says that everyone does that I don't do it I don't think I do it I never change who I am in any situation I find the idea of changing who I am really uncomfortable and problematic. The only thing that has changed me, I think, deeply and psychically as a person,

is having children. That's changed me quite a lot. But fame, I don't think changed me at all. I think I am like Larry David in that respect without wishing to claim the same status as a comedian as Larry David. I heard Jerry Seinfeld once say, this is a bloke about him who's gone from playing tiny, tiny clubs to having a syndicated show on American TV and earning loads of all, all the rest of it, but it hasn't changed at all. And you can see that's true. about Larry David. I think it's true about me as well. But I liked it until I didn't like it. And when did you not like it? I didn't like it. I didn't get the sense when you did that, you know, which was at that point the peak of your career when you did the Wembley arena gig,

I didn't get the sense that you were particularly happy then. I wasn't happy then, but that was to do, you know, I mean, again, I'm not sure this is to do with fame. Fame amplifies and toxifies a situation that you're in if it's difficult. So I was in a very difficult situation with Rob Newman then, where we were not speaking, only speaking on stage, like Sam and Dave, the Soul Stars, who I don't know. Did they not speak? Yeah, they had to have separate tunnels constructed to a stage, so they didn't even see each other except when they were on stage.

But me and Rob were not very far from that. And why did that happen with you and Rob, do you think? Rob became obsessed with billing mainly. Right. Rob, who I think, I think I was incredibly talented, certainly when I worked with him and funny and kind of a genius, really. was very insecure. And I think because he was beautiful, which he really was, and I was the kind of rather more bookish, less beautiful glasses wearing one,

he started to become incredibly worried once he became famous, that people would think, oh, he's the genius. People think David's the genius, and I'm just the hymbo. And so thus he was suddenly insist that we had to be called Newman and Bedele when we were previously called Badele and Newman. Frank Skinner tells a story of the copy, just so I was starting to get friendly with Frank, the copy coming through for the first Newman and Bidil VHS, and sitting with him, with us at Amnesty International gig and Rob going through every single Badil and Newman and changing it to Newman and Badil and be just looking a bit depressed.

I wasn't that bothered about it at first, but then it became like Rob insisting on standing on whatever the right side is, is it the left-hand side in every photo, coming in first. Yeah, coming in first in any sketch, stuff like that. And then getting just really angry with me one particular occasion. Because that again, in terms of what I said before about me not really censoring myself. Yeah. He would then, as part of Rob's, I have to be, you know, this person within this relationship. He started saying, I want to be interviewed by myself.

Now, he made a mistake there because of my truth jag, journalists would then interview me by myself and say, how's it going? And I would say, I think he's gone mad. Right, right, right, right. And then he would get furious. Yeah, yeah. So, and obviously, I shouldn't have said that. I agree.

I shouldn't have said that. I should have found another way of, you know, expressing myself there, and that was a mistake. And he's right to be angry with me. But anyway, it would lead a terrible route. And there was one particular row, I think I did have talked about this once before, where we hadn't spoken for about three or four days. And we were on stage at Leicester de Montford Hall, which I think is a 4,000-seater arena. Something like that, actually maybe not that big, but a big place. And I had done a bit of new material because we were never a proper double act.

I basically did some stand-up, Rob did some stand-up, and then we would come together to do history today and a couple of other sketches. So I did some new stand-up, and then I did a joke about the eye. IRA and the fact that at the time Margaret Thatcher, this is how long ago this was, had insisted on them not being allowed to speak normally on telly. And I did a joke about that. I can't remember the joke, but it transpired that Rob had put a joke in into his set later in the second half about the same thing. But I didn't know that. So I'm doing the end of my 20-minute stand-up bit at the top of the show.

I come off and Robby's dressed as Jarvis, who you may remember is a kind of lounge lizard, sex-obsessed, aristocrat character he used to do and he's dressed as Jarvis waiting to you on and do Jarvis. We haven't spoken in three or four days and he says just off stage with all these people watching you can't you fucking you knew

that was a bit of material that I do you fucking did that to be you fucking and that's the first time we speak in three or four days and then I remember in the interval I'm so angry about that I go to his dressing room and call him a for nearly 20 minutes solid

And what you need to know is there's about five journalists with us at the time, all doing the new rock and roll think pieces, huge feature pieces. So this is not good. This is all, this is a relationship falling apart in public. And so I, and Rob, decided we didn't want to do it anymore. I mean, I was lucky because I'd already become friendly with Frank. And then you got to know Frank. Yeah.

And I mean, I didn't think of Frank as someone who I would necessarily be working with. So did Frank moving with you after you were working together? No. He was living with you. Frank was someone I met on the cabaret circuit, basically. I thought it was something involving a drive somewhere in an 80s car. There is a drive in an 80s car. That's specific to Frank, which I could tell you.

That wasn't a key moment. There were two key moments. One is doing jonglers, which is a club in Battersea together kind of in 1989 or something. When we're both still on the cabaret circuit, actually it must be 1990. Of course, it was 1990 because we were watching the world. cup in the dressing room, Ireland, Egypt, and the Irish team at the time, Jack Charlton's team, were playing very negative football, but they were doing quite well. And I was complaining about that because I like Fancy Dan Flash football. Frank, of course, is very happy with very

sort of purist, grim, defensive football, of course he is. And so we had an argument about that, but we both ended up thinking, oh, he's all right, that bloke. You know, I think Frank even thought, of course, because from Frank's position, I am posh. Oh, he's a posh bloke, but he knows about football how weird. I think you'd ever come across that before. And sort of genuinely knows about football. Yeah, genuinely knows about football. I'm on you're rare. Yes, so genuinely. That's because Frank's wrong that I'm posh. I'm lower middle class. So obviously, particularly the Jewish lower middle class, has always been obsessed with football. And then I also remember seeing him soon after that and him saying, hello, Dave, always a pleasure. And that really moving me at the time,

because at the time I was just starting to become really famous and most other comedians, I'd got this element of sort of resentment and anger and rage from. It seemed just a really nice thing to say. Yeah. And then, I mean, this seems amazing now. I'd hardly met him at all. He was basically kicked out of the flat that he was sharing with his girlfriend at the time and didn't have anywhere to live.

Couldn't go back to Birmingham because he'd also split up with his wife. And so I just offered him a room in my flat. My brother, the one that I've just spoken to, had recently gone a bit mental, and left the flat and bought a boat, not a proper boat, a tug on the Thames to live in. And so I had a free room in my flat. and Frank came to live with me. And then we moved from there to another flat

and then we were just living together for six years, 40 quid a week. You never put the rent up, despite the fact that he became a massive TV star over that time. And this happened when he was living there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But that's what I think is so, kind of touching in a way about your friendship with Frank is the sort of odd couple thing. It is an odd couple thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean a lot of it is about comedy. It's just like he's really funny. I am funny. You know, we share a lot of jokes and I suppose also a slight, if one was to be

slightly self-regarding, a slight kind of muscularity that we feel to each other about sort of slight no-nonsenseness about other stuff. Come on Jimmy, Jimmy, come on. And it's funny because when you first met Marwena, which would have been what, late 90s? Come on Jimmy. No, I knew her before then. I certainly met her before then. I started seeing her. Towards the end of the 90s. Well, I remember you mentioning her, and it was quite under wraps, but I had this sense of it being... It's a very odd couple thing with me and Molyner. Because, you know, she is the opposite of me in terms of I basically like to tell everybody, everything about my life.

And she likes nobody to know about her life. Yeah, she's incredibly private, isn't she? I mean, I think you're a real extrovert. In terms of, I think, you derive your energy source from other people. conversation. Yes. I get the impression with when, like, going to a party, she'd rather... Oh no, she doesn't like parties.

No, no. She doesn't like anything to do with that. I would say she's an introvert who performs. Yes. Yeah, well, she's very unusual. I suppose there must be other people like this, but I've never come across anyone as introverted as Walwena, who is also...

goes on stage and does stuff in front of people. But she is a character performer. Well, Wanner is not herself. That's more common, like sort of Rowan Atkinson. Yes, that sort of thing. Yeah. Though she's not like Rowan Atkinson, I should stress. No disrespect to Roe.

No. But I think the idea of more than being like Rowan Atkinson seems a bit weird. No. I'm not suggesting. When, if you're listening. No. I'm not suggesting you in any way like Rowan Atkinson. Either physically.

Or... On that note, I had my hairdresset and I didn't... It was one of those situations where I didn't... Can I say that I'm desperate to go to the lavatory? Okay. I'm sort of looking around for a bush. I mean, my house might be nearer. Do you want to...

We can go to my house. Well, I certainly do need to go to the loo. Okay. We can carry on talking. It's not like I can't think for urine. We'll go back to you. Come on, Jimmy. Jimmy, come on.

Are we going down this little alley? Yeah, this is the little alley that leaves in my house. Come on, Jimmy, we're going down the alley. You were going down the alley. You were going to mention Rowan Atkinson earlier, and I just thought you would enjoy this. I don't want to keep going on about him. Yeah. What about Ryan Atkinson?

Well, I think, do you think this is strange? I wanted to run this past you. Okay. When I was at my hairdressers, and I couldn't get my regular hairdresser. Yeah. And he said, well, we have got Lee. And I said, oh, I haven't had Lee before.

He said, oh, Lee's amazing. He said, well, look, I've got to be discreet here. But would it be helpful to know that he does just Rowan Atkinson's hair? I don't want to look like Ron Atkinson. No, that really is a petite. I mean, again, no disrespect to Rowan, if you're listening. But Emily, obviously, has full, lustrous, glamorous hair. You have in style hair.

Whereas Rowan... Has he even got hair? Hair by Rowan Atkinson. Hair by Rowan Atkinson's hairdresser. I'm right. I presume what they just imagined is that you would want to know that he does some celebrities. Anyway, I'm digressing. Let me tell you something you are digressing.

I'm going to carry on digressing. Which is I was with Simon Nye the other day, the writer. And his wife was telling me about some hairdresser, a friend of theirs. He's called something like... I haven't got this name right, but it's something like Rafi or something like that. That's the name of this friend of theirs who's a hair. hairdresser. Anyway, they told me that his hair dressing name was Julian. I thought, I've never heard of that before. Hairdresses have a hairdressing name, and particularly one so comical.

But if any hairdresser is listening, if you do have like a hairdressing name, yeah, like a stage name. So while I'm in the salon, could you call me Julian, please? Why is he doing? And what happens if someone forget? Well, apparently it gets furious, I imagine. That's excellent. Wow. I have a very good hairdresser now. Well, because for years, all I ever had was just, was the bloke around the corner who used to do the guy. Who's the bloke in Georgia Mildred?

Is some, well, there's youth of George. No, yeah, no, the man. And then he is called Brian. Yeah, Brian. Brian Murphy. Murphy, yes. So my hairdresser also called Brian around the corner used to do Brian Murphy's hair. And you used to tell me about how he used to do.

summer seasons with Brian, go with him to Blackpool in the 70s and get a lot of sex on the back of being Brian Murphy's hairdresser. I mean, that shows how powerful showbiz is, doesn't it? But my point is that now a man called Winston does my hair. And he's a bit more expensive. He's at Henry Iggins in Hampstead in Floss Walk. And I think he's, I finally found someone who can make my hair look like a haircut. Why he loves him so much at Henry Higgins? It's the fact, I tell you what I'm laughing at, David. It's the fact that you went to such, to great pains to drop the Iggins,

to drop the eight from the Igins. Because you felt you didn't want to betray the integrity of the name they'd work so hard. That's true. That is absolutely correct. I would have said it's called Henry Higgins. You went, Henry Igins. It is called Henry Higgins. They went to all the trouble of a sign writer with two apostrophes.

So I feel I have to be true to that. Are there no H's then? No, that's what it's called, Enry Iggins. It's in Floss Walk, have you never seen it? I know, I still think I would have reverted. Oh, I can bring this all around. Hey, no, I'm so pleased about this. So Winston, you probably won't let me tell you this.

But I stuck with him despite him doing something very peculiar ones, which is I'd booked him, something I never do with a hairdresser. Brian Murphy's hairdress I used to wander in, right? I'd actually booked him because I thought, oh, this boat's really good. I arrive at Enrique Higgins, he's not there. He's disappeared. Henry Higgins? No, Winston, he's not there.

And I said to the woman and I said, where's Winston? I said, oh, I don't know, where's he gone? And then she calls Winston, right, on his mobile. Winston's gone back, he lives in Brixton. He's gone back to Brixton from Hampstead because someone had come into the shop with a dog that he was frightened of. And he was so frightened of this dog. He just ran out of the shop and went home. Isn't that weird?

He sounds quite sensitive. Well, hairdresser. I don't know what his hairdresser. The name is Rowan, I think. Right. We're going to say goodbye to the Dogs Trust people now. So nice to meet you and thank you for bringing lovely Jimmy. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, Jimmy. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much. Okay, I'm going to rush in here for obvious reasons. Okay, so we should say we're going into David's house now, which is one of my favourite houses. It's beautiful. Thank you. Oh. Thank you. Thank you.

Or maybe I logged her in. So we're back at home now. Yeah, we're back at home. And I have, this is Tiger. There's three cats. There's four cats live here. This is Pip, who is the mum of Tiger and another one called Ron. Ron has seven paws, seven fingers.

They're all polydactyl, all Pip's relatives. She herself has got six. I think Tiger's got six. They're polydactyls, which means they have more than five fingers or whatever the word is on their paws. which Ernest Hemingway only had polydactyl cats. He had loads. That's really weird.

I've only to see them. And Ron, who is not here, is incredible. Ron can open cupboards to get at food. We have put two child locks on the cupboard. He can still get there. He can break locks. But Tiger is an accident-prone cat. Now that is almost an oxymoron.

Because they're meant to have nine for nines, aren't they? And one thing you would say is they're agile, they get out of trouble cats. He is continually just falling over and banging his head. And one time he just broke his leg. We don't know why. And it cost me three grand. And he had to be in my study in a cage

because he wasn't allowed to move too much. But he's very, very, very friendly. While we're talking about my pets, we have one other pet, which is a guinea pig who lives upstairs in a cage. And he is called Bjorn. Now the reason he's called Bjorn is that originally we bought two

and the other one was called Benny. So it was quite a funny abbey. reference but Benny died and now we have this slightly odd thing of a guinea pig with this bleakly Scandinavian name like it's sort of a noir thing beyond right but it's only really upbeat with Benny isn't it but Benny's dead well I've heard that as a piece of advice people have said to me with dog be careful about name never name them anything like that don't do Bonnie and Clyde and go sonny and Cher because then Clyde on his own Clide on his own feels like a weird thing to call a dog you know you're right yeah it hadn't occurred to me when we're

we went for Benny and Bjorn. And actually guinea pigs, you know, they die. That's the main thing they do, like goldfish. I mean, have they got much personality? No. Okay. No, what they do is die, number one. And number two is run away.

Right. Because they think they're going to die. So, very difficult to stroke or interact with in any way. How long do they live generally? If they don't die, like early on, they live, I think their life expectancy without, like, you know, having some kind of weird heart attack is. three years, something like that. Right, okay. I mean, I quite like, I do like him,

but it's not like having a carrot or a dog. They're here for a good time, not for a long time. Yeah, that's... The guinea pigs. They're not really here for a good time. They're here for a frightened, slightly, incredibly boring time, because they don't want to do anything

except sit in their tiny little hutches and not come out, apart from lettuce. That doesn't sound like a good time to me. But in terms of, you know, I really do like animals. I've got this theory. Can I tell you my theory? Yeah. Okay, so as time has gone on, I have become more and more convinced that, you know, one of the many myths handed down by religion

is that, you know, we are special and the animals are less special and therefore we can eat them. And that simply clearly isn't true. Animals are, to a greater and lesser degree, just incredibly sentient, lots of them, and they just can't speak and stuff like that, although they can. Anyway, the point is, I think something is changing towards attitude to animals, And I don't think it's David Attenborough, I think it's YouTube videos. I think if you want to get something watched a lot, more than anything else on YouTube, it's an animal doing something human.

And I saw this video, which got like 8 million views of a gorilla, playing in a bath, in a big tub, not like a little bath, like a big tub. And it was just enjoying itself. It wasn't being told to be like this by human. It was splashing about. And it's like one of the most human things I've ever seen in my life. And I think things like that will gradually change people's attitude to animals and they'll start thinking, oh, of course animals, they're just versions of us with slightly different DNA.

Yeah, yeah. And it may eventually change what I do think. I don't know if you've seen Simon Amstall's carnage, but I think, I think sometimes amslercarnage is based on the idea that the mass slaughter of animals is basically a genocide and in a hundred years' time will realise that. And I think that's correct. So have you stopped eating... No, of course not, because I'm too weak-willed.

Although I try to eat less meat. You've made us tea and you haven't gotten any. No. Well, that's partly because I went for such a long way. I thought, if I drink something else now, I may be pushing it. This is lovely. So we're in David's beautiful house. But do you think how you've met someone, like I think you and when your relationship,

I really respect your relationship. And I look at your relationship as, yeah, I look at that and I think that's a good one. It is a good one. And how and why do you think that it is? Let's see. Well, I don't know really, apart from something really, really obvious, which is, I don't, you know, one of the things about me is I don't like to say things that are banal and obvious because then I just think, like, what's the point?

You may as well not say them. But the obvious thing is with me and Buena is we're very different people, but we share the same sense of humour. And the sense of humour in itself, I would say, reaches out as a node to us. other things to do with honesty, to do with approach to life in general. We talked about this before GSOH. I mean, actually, I've only had three major relationships in my life, you know, with women. I've had two other big girlfriends that I've lived with for a long time and whatever.

And all of them, I would say, were primarily about that. I remember in one of my very brief periods of singleness, I've hardly ever been single in my life, being very keen on having sex with lots of people. And I was in a trailer with Frank, I think it was, during the filming of Unplanned, the titles for Unplanned. And we'd got a lot of dancers in, you may remember, for the titles of Unplanned. And two of these women were in with us,

and they were being quite nice, and I thought, oh, maybe, and without it being in any way, hardly Weinsteinish, there seemed to be a possibility of something that might happen with. And I was saying, I was convinced, this is when I'm going to finally have lots of sex with lots of women in a kind of free and easy, foot loose and fancy free way. I'd say 20 minutes later, and this is no disrespect to those women,

well it is a bit of disrespect, what can you do? After those women had made jokes that weren't funny, a series of jokes that weren't funny, and it became clear to me that I could no longer be in that trailer, certainly not long enough to create a situation in which sex might happen. So I left that trailer. I think, by the way, I don't think Frank did anything either. But the point about that story, it's quite an important story for me

because it made me realise that this thing that I carry around with me and have carried around with me through various monogamous relationships of thinking, oh, but I want to have sex with lots of people, it is not as powerful as I cannot pretend to laugh at a joke that isn't funny, which a lot of people have to do a lot of the time, I think, in order to just get on with their social life and certainly their sexual lives, Because it would seem to me to be the case watching dating stuff on the telly

that that's what people do when they date a lot of the time. I mean, obviously, you might find someone who shares your GSOH bang, but that seems quite unlikely. So, you know, the force of the sexual dynamic, which I think of as very powerful, turns out not to be as powerful as comedy for me. That's really interesting, isn't it? Yeah.

And so that's, to answer your question, is I have never, in the... entire time that I have been with Morena Banks thought that's not funny why she said that. And that's why we're together. I need to, I don't need to, but I want to talk to you a bit about the show as well, my family, not the sitcom, because you've got a tour kind of ongoing right now. Starts on January the 28th in Bath and then goes on erratically a bit but then really taking off properly in March till July. It's interesting that show. I mean obviously it's done so well and it was Olivier. nominated and I've heard you talking about that saying it's strange that people see it as a play

you find that quite weird until you would stand up people go away from it and it does make you think about your own family you know that's that's the kind of yeah yeah the success of the show I mean the point is to laugh that's not the point in no no the point is to some extent yeah because you want to relate only connect and all that stuff and what the connecting point with my family not the sitcom is that the very very specific nature of an idiosyncratic nature of my upbringing. No one else has had a upbringing dominated by golf memorabilia eroticised by an affair that their mum was very public about. That's very unusual. I mean if anyone else has, please do right to me. But I think they would have done by now. But everyone has weird shit, weird stuff

in their upbringing, especially if you grew up in the 70s. I think the show speaks more maybe to people of my generation from that or people in between 35 and 55 from that point of view. although lots of young people have come and lots of really old people as well and seem to relate to it as well. So I think that's just a truism. I think people or a lot of people have got family stuff that they probably don't think of as like something you could talk about and be funny about, but you can.

And I think that's what's liberating for people as well as the stuff which we haven't really mentioned about my dad and his dementia, which is the other part of the show. Still obviously family but and still about memory. which is the show is something about memory and how you remember people. And does that get while your dad's, because obviously he's not great at the moment,

I don't know how he's doing, but... The picture that I paint in the show is really of him as when he was first in the grip of dementia, when he was very wild and kind of out there and sort of Touretti and whatever. He still is like that, but he's physically more frail and so therefore quieter

and slightly less likely to tell you to fuck off, although he still completely will do that. And as you may know, that's for me an absolute symbol of health for my dad. Not of overall mental health, but of general the fact of him still being... Yeah, still having his essence essentially. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, he's still very truculent, very sweary, very grouchy, cantankerous and funny. He's just quieter, his shorter memory is worse. Do you talk to him about your mum, however? No, not anymore. Occasionally. He will remember. who my mum was

but he is difficult to engage my dad now in a long conversation about the past he will talk for about four or five sentences and then look a bit confused and then go oh fuck it or something like that and also because you said that in the show there is that difficult thing where you it's traumatic because you're having to relive that

regularly with him essentially well I don't do that well that was I don't say that in the show actually that's in the film I was that in the film yeah in the channel for documentary I did the trouble with dad I talk about the day that we told him that my mum died and how awful that was and then having to tell him again, like 20 minutes later, and then again and again and again that day. I mean, that was unbelievably like being in a weird circle of hell.

We need to talk about your books as well. You've become this incredibly successful children's also. I know. Well, that's good. I'm glad about that. It's brilliant. I hadn't really expected that as a thing. Ezra, who you know, who is my son and who at the time was about, he's 13 now, but I guess he was about nine. This came from an idea that he had. Ezra's idea, Ezra said to me one day, why doesn't Harry Potter run away from the Dursleys and try and find some better parents and I said I don't know although I do know as it happens which is that J.K. Rowling wants his life away from Hogwarts

to be as horrible and mundane as possible so that Hogwarts is a huge magical escape but anyway I didn't say that. I said I don't know but it's given me an idea and the idea was a world in which children can choose their own parents and that's another thing to do with I feel I'm talking about myself a lot but I suppose that's the point of this podcast. It's another thing about me Emily I feel like, oh, I feel like I'm on Big Brother, you know, Big Brother, people always say,

in the chair. People are always saying, I think about me, is, yeah, that's the way you is you say, my sister always had a thing that she would say, and I catch myself because of the memory of her whenever I do this, she said if someone says, I mean, I have changed so much, she would entirely write them off as a person. And you know they wouldn't have done. They wouldn't have changed at all. That's what you would know from that. But I noticed on Big Brother that people would always say

often on the smaller conversations where it's just the two people say, well the thing about me is, okay, this is someone who's not self-aware. But the thing about me is, no, one of the things is that as a writer, I don't really accept the boundaries of form. So I think the idea dictates the form. So if I have an idea about a Muslim who discovers that he was born a Jew,

I think, oh, that sounds like a feel-good movie, body-swap movie to me, so I wrote that. When I had the idea about a world in which children can choose their own parents, I thought that's a kid's book. And I hadn't written a kid's book before, but I'm a writer. So it doesn't matter, does it? I'm a storyteller. I know how to write a book without any long words and without any swear words in it,

but tells a good story. And so I wrote that, and it was very, very, very successful. I mean, Ezra's 13. He's only just 13. And I would say he has almost exactly the same sense of humor as I do. I mean, he's possibly funnier. and that's to do with him being brought up on the Simpsons rather than the Magic Roundabout.

I mean, also by me and more winner. But then you would have been brought up on the Magic Roundabout. Yes. Well, yeah. So then that's what I find interesting. So where did you get yours from? For my dad, who's a very funny bloke, or certainly was a very funny bloke,

for all the fact that he wasn't a great father in lots of ways, he's definitely funny. You know, I remember him watching, you know, Python and stuff like that. but then my brother, very key, Iva, who introduced me to... Who he heard from earlier because he interrupted the podcast with a fan call. Iva very key, introduced me to Derek and Clive. And we should say Iva is actually a comedy writer. Comedy writer, very funny himself.

And also when I watch telly, I always think I'm so much like Iva. I'm very interested in that in general, in second siblings who are quite well known. So me and on a much bigger scale, Sasha Baron Cohen, Like Sasha Bancourt is very like Aaron Barenkoen, who I wrote a musical with, I wrote a musical of The Infidel with Aaron Berencoen who writes Sasha's music. But the main thing I noticed, first of all,

when I started hanging out with Aaron, is, oh, that's the template. Sasha's, you know, got the template from you, and I got the template to some extent from Iva, without any doubt. Like your older sibling is very important from that point of view, I think. Well, also, do you think as well,

I think, because I was the, out of me and my sister, I was the kind of extrobel, I suppose. Yeah, she was older. So yeah, she was older. So she was, people often say to me, God, you really sound like her. There's something of you, but I suppose I was a slightly wild and noisier version of her.

Yeah, but that's interesting, I think. The sort of slightly more out there version of the original template. That's what I'm talking about. You know, is that Aaron's shyer than Sasha. I'm not shy exactly, but he's not as out there. No, I'm just like that. As me. But I took that template and I put it, I made it more public.

Yeah. And that happens quite a lot, I think. We had the safety to do that because we had the template safe at home. Right. So I think that's why we could do that. Yeah, yeah. It's a whole other discussion. But I do think that as a culture, as a psychological culture to do with Freud,

partly we get very obsessed, not incorrectly, but most obsessed with the idea of parents. And like, what did your parents do to make you who you are? But I think that siblings are incredibly important. Obviously, not everyone has siblings. But in my case, because my parents were neglectful, I was parented mainly by either. I'm certainly when I was a little bit older, when I was from the age of about 10, when my parents particularly were sort of lost interest in being parents, Iva was still cooking my breakfast, you know.

Really? Yeah. When I went to Haberdash, I had to get up at 6.30, he went to the city of London, and so he got up the same time as me, and my parents were just in bed. So Iver would cook my breakfast. And we'll tell you, I think, were you to speak to him, that he still feels like slightly, I need to keep an eye on David. Well, you have that thing with Iva that my therapist said about me and my sister,

which is why when she died she said the sense of loss was so profound that because we were a little bit self-parented as well in a different, but kind of similar way, if you get it. And she said it was... I think when you have parents like yours or like mine who are very of themselves, who don't need necessarily to engage with their children to be, you know, their children aren't the thing that they need to make them bigger or whatever. They're not one of those, my life's changed, it'll never be.

the same again. No, exactly. We had some kids. But then if you have a sibling, then, yeah, I think, I'm sure that is. You become a sort of babes in the woods is what I think. But that's more typical, I think, of people that they'll have a sibling and, it's like, oh, my brother or my sister somewhere over there, whereas I would see you and Iva is quite close. You know, we are very close.

Yeah. David, we need to wrap up the podcast because I will just stay here all day because I love walking. But I've, and I'm glad that we went out with Jimmy the dog. Yeah. It was lovely. I've loved hanging out with the cats, but I think he was a sweet dog. He was a really sweet dog.

I do, when I see a dog, I like to finish by saying, like when I go walking without a dog, I normally see about seven or eight dogs, I think, oh, I really would like to live with that dog. I mean, not like I'm going to nick any, don't worry, dog walkers, but I always think, oh God, that's so sweet. So maybe I will get one. Well, David, as Frank Skinner wants said to you, always a pleasure. You too. Thanks so much for listening.

I hope you love that. I thought David was great. rate review and subscribe and remember what happens at doggy daycare stays at doggy daycare you don't want to know what my shih Tzu and his pals get up to i mean it makes wolf of wall street look like valamori