David Baddiel, 'My Family: Not The Sitcom': Review

David Baddiel's new show, 'My Family: Not the Sitcom' is one of the most uproarious, melancholic, filthy and tonally imbalanced hour fourty-fives I've ever had. Some people walked out half-way through: well, I think, that's their loss.

Supposedly a show about memory (though that's more of an excuse to dredge up as many amusing anecdotes as possible), Baddiel's monologue chronicles the bizarre lives of his parents, two people weird and endearing in a way that would be a gift for any comedy writer. His mother was a sex-mad collector of golf memorabilia who revelled in her life-long affair with another collector; his father an incredibly talented and often acerbic man whose form of dementia, Pick's Disease, has exacerbated these qualities to the extreme. However, nowhere in the show does Baddiel exhibit feelings of shame or condemnation for his parents' odd behaviours: rather an intense affection and desire to share and memorialise these people with a wider audience, lettting us into his family to appreciate them for ALL of who they are.

Surprisingly, the show doesn't start this way- rather with a meditation on Twitter and trolls, which whilst highlighting the theme of 'assertion of self' does give the show a slightly mutated and hybrid feel. This appears similarly in the slightly less-developed second half, which focuses on Baddiel's father, and which whilst continuing the shock-awe of the first half (especially with the story of his father at his mother's shiva/mourning ceremony) doesn't quite have the same impact. As a result there is the occasional sense of padding, as in the extended look at jokes Baddiel has made on Twitter, but this isn't to the detriment of the piece: rather it is a gentle introduction to the bawdy barminess to come and a good way of utilising multi-media material to generate laughs. The Twitter section was certainly appreciated by the largely middle-aged audience I was surrounded by who, to be charitable, may not be versed in the ways of the Twitter-sphere.

Of course there are ethical questions raised by this piece, which so intensely puts two people's lives under the spotlight and dissects them mercilessly, and which is especially difficult when certain characters (such as his father and his mother's lover) are still alive. Baddiel acknowledges this, and perhaps this accounts for why the second half focusing on his father contains less meat than the section on his mother. Although Baddiel asserts his rights to discuss these stories by claiming 'ownership' of them as his parents' son, what causes more consternation is the explicit nature of the material. Is it right to air your dirty laundry to the world? Although the show provides no conclusive answer to this, it does demonstrate the pros and cons of this approach in a very funny and engaging way .

Despite the “vulgarity” (and unlike DB's mother, I can use inverted commas correctly) of this show, it never fails to be humorous, thought-provoking, unstoppably shocking and intensely memorable. What emerges out of it are two stories: one of two brilliant, interesting and bonkers people who were nevertheless loving and loveable, and the other of a man trying to celebrate them and get the audience to find them as irritating and wonderful as he does.