Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: I've mentioned already the unsurprising information that I've spent a
Speaker 2: considerable amount of time in therapy. Whilst there, I was
Speaker 2: always saying to my therapist that it was difficult to
Speaker 2: find a template from my type of child on trauma.
Speaker 2: Or to put in another way, the writing of a
Speaker 2: story about a boundaryless mother who flaunted her infidelity in
Speaker 2: front of all and sundry, including her children, might suggest
Speaker 2: an intense and difficult drama. But frankly, the gravitat of
Speaker 2: that tone is scuppered the moment you have to include
Speaker 2: the phrase engulfing memorabilia. I think one must accept that
Speaker 2: whatever damage was caused by all this, it is, in
Speaker 2: the end a comedy.
Speaker 3: That's David Biddil, London based comedian, TV presenter, screenwriter, author
Speaker 3: and singer. Davis is a story of a secret that
Speaker 3: lived out in the open, one that shaped his family life.
Speaker 3: It's also a story about speaking one's own truth out
Speaker 3: loud with courage and gusto and plenty of humor. I'm
Speaker 3: Danny Shapiro and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that
Speaker 3: are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others
Speaker 3: and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2: I was born in Upstate New York and Troy, near Albany.
Speaker 2: I have no memory of that time, but I think
Speaker 2: it is still quite important because my dad very much
Speaker 2: what wanted to be a scientist. He was a scientist
Speaker 2: and he'd got out of working class semi polity in
Speaker 2: Wales because of that.
Speaker 1: And then during the sixties had.
Speaker 2: We married my mother, who was a refugee from Nazism,
Speaker 2: and a baby which she came feeling that they went
Speaker 2: off to America, which was part of something at the
Speaker 2: time called the brain drain from Britain, where essentially clever people,
Speaker 2: mainly scientists, thought there was more work and more money
Speaker 2: to be had in America. And so my dad was
Speaker 2: teaching at a place called Renselare Polytechnic Institute, and two
Speaker 2: children were born, one of which was me and the
Speaker 2: other which was my older brother in quite a small
Speaker 2: amount of time, which suggests that they were having quite
Speaker 2: a lot of sex at that point in time. And
Speaker 2: then they came back to Britain and we lived in
Speaker 2: a tiny flat in a place called Made of Veil,
Speaker 2: which I also have no memory of, but my life
Speaker 2: sort of begins my memory life begins about nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: nine nineteen.
Speaker 1: Seventy when we moved a place in.
Speaker 2: London called Dollis Hill, which is not to be clear
Speaker 2: for anyone who might know London a bit like Piccadilly
Speaker 2: or Hampstead or Kensington. It's not a place redolent with
Speaker 2: poetry that you see in Richard Curtis films.
Speaker 1: It's a very very mundane part of London. It's rock solid.
Speaker 2: Not suburbia in terms of leafy and nice suburbia, sort
Speaker 2: of inner city suburbia, kind of rough suburbia. And we
Speaker 2: had a semi detached house there and I lived there
Speaker 2: with my mom and dad and my two brothers, my
Speaker 2: then and a kat who was quite an important finger.
Speaker 2: One key thing in there was a kind of mixed Jewishness,
Speaker 2: by which I mean my mother was a refugee from Nazism.
Speaker 2: As I said, her father, my grandfather, had been in
Speaker 2: a concentration camp Dachau before the war. When they came
Speaker 2: to London, they were committed reform Jews. They weren't Orthodox,
Speaker 2: but they were very committed to still doing all the festivals,
Speaker 2: providing a Jewish life for their daughter and for her children.
Speaker 2: I meanwhile, I went to the nearest school to my
Speaker 2: house where a Jew wouldn't get bullied in nineteen seventy London,
Speaker 2: which was, as it happened, a very very orthodox Jewish
Speaker 2: primary school. And so I and my brothers when we
Speaker 2: went to school, we wore at yarmockers. I wore something
Speaker 2: called sitsit, which are an internal like a Mormon style vest,
Speaker 2: which has sort of tassels that you have to show.
Speaker 2: If you don't show the tassels at the school, you
Speaker 2: get into trouble. That Hebrew, I did blessings, I only
Speaker 2: kosher food at the school, and yet my dad, who
Speaker 2: was a stone cold atheist, would basically be making me
Speaker 2: bacon sandwiches for breakfast before I went off to this
Speaker 2: school every day. So there was just a mass of
Speaker 2: incoherent Jewishness that define my early life.
Speaker 3: I relate to this more than I can say. Where
Speaker 3: did that sit with you? I mean having bacon, eggs
Speaker 3: and shees for breakfast and then going to essentially the ashiva,
Speaker 3: Like where did that reside for you? Who did you
Speaker 3: think you were when you were that age?
Speaker 2: That's a really really good question, because I guess I've
Speaker 2: always been massively interested in authenticity and authentically being who
Speaker 2: I am. It's the thing I've chased in my life
Speaker 2: and to some extent monetized in my career because as
Speaker 2: a stand up comedian, the work I do is all
Speaker 2: extremely personal. It is all very much based on my
Speaker 2: family history, and a lot of it is about having
Speaker 2: had this sort of mixed up childhood and also involved,
Speaker 2: particularly in the case of my mother, there's this very
Speaker 2: strange self dramatizing shadow play which may or may not have.
Speaker 1: Had anything to do with who she really was. I
Speaker 1: think it became very.
Speaker 2: Important to me because of this as I grew older,
Speaker 2: even from adolescence, to live authentically, to think who am I?
Speaker 2: I must be all the time, exactly me. I cannot
Speaker 2: bear to be not.
Speaker 1: Me in any way.
Speaker 2: But when I was a kid, it was all pretty
Speaker 2: mixed up. One thing I am incredibly militantly unashamed about
Speaker 2: is being Jewish, because even though these were many different
Speaker 2: types of Jewish as all batting up against each other,
Speaker 2: my family life was still really fucking Jewish. A lot
Speaker 2: of Jews have this mixed up child that I think,
Speaker 2: and I got inculcated very early on into a mistake
Speaker 2: about the world, which is I think I thought thought
Speaker 2: that the whole world was Jewish, or my parents' friends,
Speaker 2: for example, were Jewish. I went to a Jewish school,
Speaker 2: my grandparents were Jewish, went to Jewish youth group. And
Speaker 2: then I guess the shock of realizing when I went
Speaker 2: to secondary school to high school, oh, it's not there's
Speaker 2: Jews who are tiny minority, and there are anti ze
Speaker 2: Mites in Britain. It was too late for my internal self,
Speaker 2: it was too late for my soul, I think, and
Speaker 2: I guess I continue at some level even though it's
Speaker 2: not true about the world. The world is very much
Speaker 2: presenting it to us as not true at the moment.
Speaker 2: But I think I believe that Jews are the default
Speaker 2: in the world. The Jews are the norm, and everyone
Speaker 2: else is not the norm. They used to be a
Speaker 2: Broadway show actually be called When You're in Love The
Speaker 2: Whole World is Jewish in nineteen sixty seven. I used
Speaker 2: to have an LP of that show for some reason.
Speaker 2: And the whole world is never Jewish, but I thought
Speaker 2: it was until early age, and I still do in
Speaker 2: a way and in a way to comfort to me.
Speaker 3: David describes as mother as a fantasist possessed of a
Speaker 3: rich strangeness. These qualities are present in his mom for
Speaker 3: as long as he can remember, though the layers of
Speaker 3: meaning of that rich strangeness come into fuller view as
Speaker 3: he grows up.
Speaker 2: When I was young, my grandparents would occasionally fill in
Speaker 2: the gaps of their history, this terribly, terribly, unbelievably traumatic
Speaker 2: history they had in the thirties in Germany, but my
Speaker 2: mother later on would fantasize about it. So she would
Speaker 2: tell me, for example, that she could speak German when
Speaker 2: she couldn't. Later in life, she told me that she
Speaker 2: didn't believe her parents were her real parents. She believed
Speaker 2: that her dad was in fact her mother's brother who
Speaker 2: had died in the Warsaw Ghetto. And I now understand
Speaker 2: why she's doing that, because for my mother, that was glamorous.
Speaker 2: My mother was always chasing a kind of lost glamor,
Speaker 2: and it, even though it's a terrible tragic thing that
Speaker 2: she's fantas sizing about, at some levels, she would have
Speaker 2: preferred to having a live parents, the glamour of her
Speaker 2: parents or her dad being someone who had died in
Speaker 2: the Warsaw Ghetto. And this is as I say, this
Speaker 2: is what I understand, is that my mother was always chasing,
Speaker 2: I think, but couldn't find it and found it very
Speaker 2: difficult to find in dollars hill a phantom glamour. And
Speaker 2: I think this is because she was born into a
Speaker 2: family that, if Hitler had not existed in a parallel universe,
Speaker 2: would have been very, very wealthy. They were industrialists, they
Speaker 2: were sent me aristocratic in a place called Kernigsburg in
Speaker 2: East Prussia. They were the sort of mainstays of their
Speaker 2: Jewish social class. They had servants. My cousin Michael tells
Speaker 2: me they had a RUBINTI I don't know if that's true,
Speaker 2: but I wish it was true so that.
Speaker 1: I could look for it.
Speaker 2: And I think my mother knew this even though she
Speaker 2: hadn't experienced it, I mean only as a really young child,
Speaker 2: because she was born in ninetly thirty nine and only
Speaker 2: just got out.
Speaker 1: So that's an important thing as well.
Speaker 2: My mother, I think, even though it wasn't at the
Speaker 2: front of her mind, unconscious, must have.
Speaker 1: Been aware of the nearness to death, of.
Speaker 2: The fact that she was only here at all by
Speaker 2: the skin of her teeth. And I think this was
Speaker 2: partly what created in her this need to live life
Speaker 2: as best she could had a very intense pitch, but
Speaker 2: this pitch was not offered to her because she was
Speaker 2: actually living in a very dull place with this very
Speaker 2: working class man with three children.
Speaker 3: I mean, your mother was a baby when she came
Speaker 3: here with her parents. And when you say skin of
Speaker 3: their teeth, it really was the skin of their teeth.
Speaker 3: It was a miracle when anybody got out when a
Speaker 3: tue got out of Germany in nineteen thirty nine, but
Speaker 3: they came in what was it August, and by September
Speaker 3: the borders were completely closed, and everyone who stayed was Yeah.
Speaker 2: I actually actually didn't know until I started doing some
Speaker 2: research on it quite recently, just just what a close
Speaker 2: shave it was. I was always aware of it because
Speaker 2: I always knew that my mum would been born in
Speaker 2: March nineteen thirty nine. You know, it was always going
Speaker 2: to be close. But what I didn't realize was after
Speaker 2: Crystal that my grandfather had been sent to a concentration camp.
Speaker 2: Three hundred thousand Jewish men were sent to concentration camps
Speaker 2: after Crystal Act, which there is a much away innss
Speaker 2: of I think I think people think concentration camps are
Speaker 2: something that happened in ninety forty one when the Final
Speaker 2: Solution properly started.
Speaker 1: In fact, many Jews were sent to concentration camps.
Speaker 2: Before that, and he got out again something that people
Speaker 2: don't realize happened. He got out I think with bribery
Speaker 2: and under the premise that he would leave. It was
Speaker 2: basically the dues were allowed out of concentration camps for
Speaker 2: a short time as long as they were leaving the country,
Speaker 2: as long as they pledged to leave the country. And
Speaker 2: the problem with that, of course, is that they would
Speaker 2: have no entry point to another country. They were writing.
Speaker 2: These are just letters that I've seen recently to Jewish
Speaker 2: Asignum organizations in London pleading to be allowed into the UK.
Speaker 2: And they had no money at that time, and they
Speaker 2: had to show as part of this process a thousand
Speaker 2: pounds It show was.
Speaker 1: A huge amount of money obviously.
Speaker 2: Then in a British bank account before they would be
Speaker 2: allowed in it.
Speaker 1: They had to have avid davits from.
Speaker 2: British systems and all sorts of other paperwork, and then
Speaker 2: they had a child and the most extordinary letter, which
Speaker 2: I hadn't really thought about aunt I saw it is
Speaker 2: a letter from one of these Jewish organizations in London
Speaker 2: that are trying to help them to my grandparents saying, okay,
Speaker 2: we will have to redo your visa now to include
Speaker 2: your child. You know I it seems weird because they
Speaker 2: must have known that was happening anyway. The letter says,
Speaker 2: if you wait another ten days and this is July
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty nine, by now, we will get you another
Speaker 2: entry guard. But then you need to go to Berlin
Speaker 2: to get it stamped, and all of this bureaucracy. It's
Speaker 2: just infuse, which is it's infused with such.
Speaker 1: A high level of anxiety.
Speaker 2: You know, when I'm reading it in twenty twenty four
Speaker 2: now and then when you're reading it in ninety thirty nine,
Speaker 2: you and your child, it's so extraordinary.
Speaker 3: Do you think your mother knew these facts of her history?
Speaker 3: Did her parents talk to her about it? Or do
Speaker 3: you think that this was real analyzed intergenerational trauma the
Speaker 3: kind of ineffable, you know, the things that we sort
Speaker 3: of pick up and that we maybe can't attach an
Speaker 3: actual memory to or a language two, but that becomes
Speaker 3: part of what forms usays the way it clearly did
Speaker 3: with her.
Speaker 2: Well, some of it is fact, I mean the fact
Speaker 2: that she knew. But my mother's real name I'm using
Speaker 2: really in a very ironic sense. There her first name
Speaker 2: was not Sarah. That was the name that you know
Speaker 2: she used. I thought of her as Sarah, but her
Speaker 2: first given name was a name given to her, as
Speaker 2: it were, by the Nazis, forced on her by the
Speaker 2: Nazis because in ninety thirty nine Jewishly.
Speaker 1: Was had to be named from a list.
Speaker 2: You had to choose their name from a not very
Speaker 2: pleasant list and names. A lot of horrible names were
Speaker 2: on it, and as far as I can remember from
Speaker 2: it was the best of a bad bunch. And the
Speaker 2: interesting thing is that although my mother designated herself in
Speaker 2: later life as Sarah, which is by the way, still
Speaker 2: a Nazi name, because Jewish children also had to be
Speaker 2: Sarah or Rachel as their middle names, and I think
Speaker 2: Moisture or Isaac there were boys had to be their
Speaker 2: middle names. But one thing I didn't realize is that
Speaker 2: my mother was still called from it by her parents
Speaker 2: when she was living in Cambridge as a child, which
Speaker 2: is where they lived in Britain.
Speaker 1: After the war. I actually did a show.
Speaker 2: I did a stand up show based on my parents,
Speaker 2: and I used to come out afterwards and Q and
Speaker 2: a and ad lib with the audience. And one time
Speaker 2: a man stood out, Who's I found this really movie?
Speaker 2: And said, I actually knew your grandparents, and I've got
Speaker 2: a letter here from one of them. And he wrote
Speaker 2: a letter from my grandma to him, written in about
Speaker 2: I don't know, nineteen fifty two or something, in which
Speaker 2: she says, I have to go now because it's time
Speaker 2: for little from.
Speaker 1: Its prayers, or because I can.
Speaker 2: Hear a little from it crying. I never heard my
Speaker 2: mother called that, you know, in the wild, as it were,
Speaker 2: and I found it very extraordinary that then, you know,
Speaker 2: as a child, she would have been called from it.
Speaker 2: She would have been called this name that was handed
Speaker 2: down to them, forced on them by the Nazis.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know how much detail of this that my
Speaker 2: mother really knew, but that in itself seems to be
Speaker 2: an unbelievable bobbld of complexity to live with.
Speaker 1: On her shoulders.
Speaker 2: My father is called was called Colin Badiel is also
Speaker 2: Jewish in a slightly different lineage that also involved fleeing
Speaker 2: his grandfather my great grandfather was fleeing from Russian pogroms
Speaker 2: from Cossacks. I think they were in Latvia, and the
Speaker 2: story goes I think this might be an urban myth
Speaker 2: that applies to a number of Jews in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: was that my great grandfather smuggled himself onto a boat
Speaker 2: and the boat was meant to be going to New York,
Speaker 2: but was go to New York.
Speaker 1: But he didn't speak in English.
Speaker 2: When they stopped at Swansea to refuel. Swansea in Wales,
Speaker 2: he didn't speak an English and he just thought it
Speaker 2: was the end of the line. So he got off
Speaker 2: and presumably ten years later, said to someone, excuse me,
Speaker 2: where is the Statue of Liberty? And they said, no, no,
Speaker 2: you're in Swansea. And that's why that part of my
Speaker 2: family is from Wales. My dad was very Welsh, I
Speaker 2: sort of, you know, come extremely Welsh at some level.
Speaker 2: When you tell people in Britain that my dad was Welsh,
Speaker 2: they will say often, oh, I thought he was Jewish,
Speaker 2: and I said, yeah, it was Welsh and Jewish. But
Speaker 2: for some people people find that In Congress it's very interesting, well,
Speaker 2: people assume where people assumed Jews can come from basically Germany,
Speaker 2: Russia and New York. He was very working class. His
Speaker 2: dad used to sell cloth material from door to door.
Speaker 2: He was essentially a tinker. And my dad was born
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty four. They lived at a terraced house
Speaker 2: in Swansea that I stayed in on holiday many times
Speaker 2: when I was growing up. We never used to have
Speaker 2: nice holidays abroad in the South of France or anything
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 1: My dad just used to take us.
Speaker 2: Back to Swa and we lived and we stayed in
Speaker 2: his parents' house. He's not untypical my dad, I guess
Speaker 2: of that generation, a very very intelligent man, but with
Speaker 2: always no emotional intelligence. You know. My father was very clever,
Speaker 2: very funny, incredibly and forward about science. I think in
Speaker 2: his heart he would have liked to have been an
Speaker 2: important man of science, a researcher who made great discoveries,
Speaker 2: and that eluded him because of life.
Speaker 1: Because he had three kids, he had to feed.
Speaker 2: Them, and so he got a job with a corporation.
Speaker 2: He became essentially a middle manager for Unilever. But I
Speaker 2: think that a sign. I think that in all my
Speaker 2: dad's quickness of mind and funny as there was a.
Speaker 1: Lot of rage.
Speaker 2: And it's weird because I think of intelligence now as
Speaker 2: involving emotional intelligence. I think you can't just be well
Speaker 2: read or good at science and be an intelligent person.
Speaker 2: You have to have some awareness of what's steaming your
Speaker 2: way and your inner cauldron. I'm not sure my dad did.
Speaker 2: I think that is the source of the dysfunctional fit
Speaker 2: that happened with my mother. Someone recently asked me how
Speaker 2: it happens a lot with this story is people said,
Speaker 2: your daddy must have known about this affair, and I said, well,
Speaker 2: it's hard to tell, because my father would not express
Speaker 2: an emotional vocabulary. He didn't have the emotional vocamputery. It
Speaker 2: seems to me that you have to have an emotional
Speaker 2: vocamplary to talk me about the fact that your partner
Speaker 2: is having an affair. My mum had a very romantic,
Speaker 2: slightly grand delinquent sense of life, but she was normally
Speaker 2: enough in my sense of her until about ninety seventy
Speaker 2: three or seventy four, when I'm about ten, at which
Speaker 2: point she becomes obsessed with golf and everything to do
Speaker 2: with golf and golf memorabilia. I one think about golf
Speaker 2: is in America, I think people take it more seriously
Speaker 2: as a sport, but here golf is really thought of her as,
Speaker 2: if I can use the word, a naff sport played
Speaker 2: by cilly men with mustaches and silly clothes.
Speaker 1: But she did.
Speaker 2: She became obsessed overnight in this very extreme way.
Speaker 1: She went on to.
Speaker 2: Write five books about golf, and the whole house suddenly
Speaker 2: became covered in golfing memorabilia. She wore golfing brooches, golfing earring,
Speaker 2: golfing necklace, Every card, every calendar was about golf.
Speaker 1: It was amazing.
Speaker 2: She just covered herself in golf and golfing. Member really,
Speaker 2: but I don't think she was actually interested in the sport.
Speaker 2: She liked children's books. Before that, she had worked as
Speaker 2: a dental receptionist, but never anything to do with sport.
Speaker 2: We were interested in football. She wasn't interested in that anyway.
Speaker 2: A key element of all of this is that this guy,
Speaker 2: David White appeared in our life at the same time,
Speaker 2: and he was a golfing memorabilia collector, loved golf and
Speaker 2: played all the time, played golf all the time, and
Speaker 2: talked about golf all the time. So it's not a
Speaker 2: complex equation to work out that those things might be connected.
Speaker 2: That this man was around her house a lot, always
Speaker 2: talking about golf, and she had fallen kind of absurdly
Speaker 2: in love with it. Eroto manically. Eroto Mania is an
Speaker 2: actual word, isn't it for when people fall in love
Speaker 2: in an over obsessive way.
Speaker 1: And you know, we all knew when the golf was
Speaker 1: a clue.
Speaker 2: But my mother was also very very key to tell
Speaker 2: everybody about this affair.
Speaker 1: She would mention it, you know, like just in passing as.
Speaker 2: A story, I'd tell about how my brother took one
Speaker 2: of his first girlfriends to see my mom at her shop, Golfiana.
Speaker 2: She had a store in an antique market opposite my
Speaker 2: dad's store. My dad, by this time it was done
Speaker 2: agra scientist. He lost that jobsly dinky toys cars at
Speaker 2: an antique store in opposite it was my mom's golfing
Speaker 2: memorabilia store.
Speaker 1: So that's something of a red flag.
Speaker 2: Anyway, my brother took this new girlfriend to see my mom,
Speaker 2: and my mom just mentioned within seconds David White and
Speaker 2: then turned to this girlfriend, this new new ivors and
Speaker 2: said my lover of twenty years, and then carried on
Speaker 2: talking to my brother as if nothing had happened, because
Speaker 2: you know, she really thought the affair was a plus.
Speaker 1: She thought it was glamorous, and he was kind of glamorous.
Speaker 2: He was a smooth looking, polo necked, pipe smoking, bearded man,
Speaker 2: handsome in a kind of nineteen seventies way. I think
Speaker 2: he used off to shave things like that that my
Speaker 2: dad didn't. He was more middle class, more you know, clubbable,
Speaker 2: less Jewish, not Jewish at all. Basically, this was the time,
Speaker 2: by the way, when in Britain Jews were still not
Speaker 2: allowed in a lot of golf clubs. Golf clubs were restricted,
Speaker 2: not always formerly, but Jews just couldn't get in. I offered,
Speaker 2: wonder if, subconsciously as well, that to do with my
Speaker 2: mother trying to overcome this internal jewishness that had caused
Speaker 2: us so much trouble when she was a child.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm just thinking about the way that no,
Speaker 3: this wasn't a secret. And at the same time, the
Speaker 3: tagline for this show is the secrets that are kept
Speaker 3: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 3: secrets we keep from ourselves, and to me, the secrets
Speaker 3: we keep from ourselves are often the most interesting or
Speaker 3: poignant the way in which this affair sort of lived
Speaker 3: in your family and was out in the open because
Speaker 3: your mother was out in the open about it. But
Speaker 3: at the same time, and one of the things that
Speaker 3: comes up and I find really moving, is that you
Speaker 3: have all these documents, right, so you have this artwork
Speaker 3: that your older brother made. You know that it's supposed
Speaker 3: to be I guess about family or who his dad
Speaker 3: is or whatever. And in every single one of these
Speaker 3: child's drawings, somebody smoking a pipe. Yeah, you just think
Speaker 3: like wow, you know, like I mean, just what would
Speaker 3: a child therapist do with that? Like pipes are smoking pipes?
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I love that it was. I think
Speaker 2: one of the key things for pout David White that
Speaker 2: he smoked a pipe. I think you could take that
Speaker 2: in many ways, one in the Freudian way that there's
Speaker 2: something a bit you know, sexual about a pipe, bit
Speaker 2: panic about a pipe. But also there's something that is
Speaker 2: sophisticated about a pipe, or there was in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 2: there's something absurd about a pipe. But there's also something
Speaker 2: fatherly about a pipe. My mother would archive everything she
Speaker 2: was a kind of archive ast the hoarder of her
Speaker 2: own life. So she's left and I have them and
Speaker 2: use of the book, every love letter, every poem she wrote,
Speaker 2: any poems, many erotic poems to David White.
Speaker 1: She copied all of these.
Speaker 2: She would send them to him, but she always keep
Speaker 2: copying and captable. And she also got a magazine called Pipeline,
Speaker 2: which is a pipe smoker's magazine, and she always just
Speaker 2: brought that because she was thinking, Oh, how else can
Speaker 2: I service a service my lover's interest not just golf,
Speaker 2: I must become interested in pipes as well. It's poignant,
Speaker 2: but it's also funny because the specifics of this relationship
Speaker 2: are comic. And there might have in other ways in
Speaker 2: which I could have told this story, or I could
Speaker 2: think about this story as completely somber and tragic and
Speaker 2: moving and damaging. But in my heart, Danny, I find
Speaker 2: it more moving because it's funny. I think that what
Speaker 2: lifts it from the damage is the comedy and gives
Speaker 2: it joy. And the secret that I've discovered as I've
Speaker 2: decided to research this and find out about it in
Speaker 2: order to write about it and talk about it, is
Speaker 2: how deep my mother went. You know how many artifacts
Speaker 2: golfing pipe and how many letters there were. Things keep
Speaker 2: cropping up, and I just think that's another level of
Speaker 2: extraordinary obsession and extraordinary flagrancy about this love. When she died,
Speaker 2: me and my brothers were sorted through stuff in my parents'
Speaker 2: house and we were depressed, you know, because our muma died.
Speaker 2: It was bleak, and she had died very suddenly and
Speaker 2: rather horribly, and it's not nice sorting through your dead
Speaker 2: mother's stuff. But then my younger brother, Dan, who is
Speaker 2: sort of angrier than me about the whole infidelity David
Speaker 2: White thing, and I think feels more damage by it,
Speaker 2: suddenly came up to me and said, oh, I found
Speaker 2: this at the back of the cupboard. You might want it.
Speaker 2: I was going to smash it, but you might want it.
Speaker 2: And he handed me a mug, a coffee mug with
Speaker 2: a picture of David White on it on both sides
Speaker 2: of the mug. And I didn't tell my older brother
Speaker 2: that we found that. But next time there was a
Speaker 2: break in the sorting through stuff and a call for
Speaker 2: a cup of tea, I secretly did it, and then
Speaker 2: I just handed my brother his tea in that mug.
Speaker 2: And he laughed and laughed, And that's my point. You know,
Speaker 2: for a moment, there was laughter in that house of death,
Speaker 2: and that's very important for me, because comedy is very
Speaker 2: salvational for me, for want of a better word, it's
Speaker 2: what lifts these moments from being too sad and too grim.
Speaker 3: What is there to do with that other than to
Speaker 3: make comedy out of it? And do you think you
Speaker 3: would have become a comedian? It's pass to pull this apart,
Speaker 3: but do you think that this is what made you
Speaker 3: a comedian or do you think that being a comedian
Speaker 3: and having that innate talent is part of what saved
Speaker 3: you and allowed you to kind of work through things
Speaker 3: that otherwise might have ended up feeling like anger.
Speaker 2: It's a really hard question, I think for me to answer.
Speaker 2: I know that I think of comedy as an enormously
Speaker 2: useful buffer or reworking of things that are too grim
Speaker 2: to deal with. And I don't think of my mother's
Speaker 2: affair as too grim to deal with. I do think
Speaker 2: of her death as appalling the way it was. And
Speaker 2: immediately after my mother's death, we had to go and
Speaker 2: tell my father, who was already deep into dementia, that
Speaker 2: my mother was dead, and despite their very, very rocky
Speaker 2: and flawed marriage. I think I say in the book
Speaker 2: that theirs was a very ragged form of love. He
Speaker 2: was incredibly upset and vulnerable, and me and my older
Speaker 2: brother we had to try and comfort him.
Speaker 1: We did that.
Speaker 2: We hugged him, told him everything would be okay, that means,
Speaker 2: and then forty five minutes later we had to do
Speaker 2: it again, and then again and then again.
Speaker 1: For a year.
Speaker 2: At the end of that, my dad started doing this thing,
Speaker 2: you know. He would just do this dimastic and say,
Speaker 2: where is she? Where's the mother? That's what he called
Speaker 2: my mother. He would always call it the mother. I
Speaker 2: would have to tell him that she was dead later on,
Speaker 2: you know, about a year later. He wouldn't react quite
Speaker 2: in the same kind of fall and crumbling way. He
Speaker 2: would sort of go, yes, yes, yes, I knew that,
Speaker 2: and then start saying, so, I'm a single man.
Speaker 1: Now, perhaps I should get out on the pull, which for.
Speaker 2: Any if you know that expression, basically maybe I should
Speaker 2: go out and try my luck were in the singles market.
Speaker 2: And it's awful, it's terrible, And it was so in
Speaker 2: character for my dad and funny, you know, and Basically,
Speaker 2: if anyone point to me towards comedy, it was my dad.
Speaker 2: My dad used comedy as a form of denial. He
Speaker 2: would definitely prefer, you know, rather than dealing with a
Speaker 2: difficult situation. He could make an aggressive joke about it
Speaker 2: at someone else's expense.
Speaker 1: But you know, I am.
Speaker 2: Not a person who believes in God. I don't believe
Speaker 2: in any kind of great pattern to life. I think
Speaker 2: that essentially we are just dust here for a little
Speaker 2: while in what John Updyke called brilliantly this complex interval
Speaker 2: of light. And I think the only thing, really, the
Speaker 2: only thing that for me, takes all this somewhere else,
Speaker 2: is laughter. Really, if I was to believe in God,
Speaker 2: I would say his greatest gift to us is laughter,
Speaker 2: because it allows us to process and deal with things
Speaker 2: that otherwise would be intolerable.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back. It was Dad may have tried
Speaker 3: to turn towards humor. There's a moment when David's breaking
Speaker 3: the news to his dad about his mother's death, and
Speaker 3: his dad just crumbles, he falls apart, and it would
Speaker 3: be the most natural thing in the world to wrap
Speaker 3: his arms around his father in a hug. But David writes,
Speaker 3: we are not a huggy family. I hug my kids
Speaker 3: a lot more than they want. But that does not
Speaker 3: come from a forty three Kendall road inheritance. But in
Speaker 3: a way, doesn't it. One thing we can do with
Speaker 3: the things that are not the way we would have
Speaker 3: wanted them to be growing up is that we can
Speaker 3: grow in counteridentification to those things. We can decide, well,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be a different kind of parent or
Speaker 3: partner or human being in the world.
Speaker 2: My obsession with authenticity, whatever that means, is I think
Speaker 2: in reaction to my mother creating, as it were, these
Speaker 2: personas for herself. These different personas are different boys in
Speaker 2: their life. But the biggest and long mister, which was
Speaker 2: golf memorabilia queat golf of them a brilliant nut. But
Speaker 2: I always thought watching and doing that, even when I
Speaker 2: was young, I thought, who is this?
Speaker 1: This isn't you.
Speaker 2: So the authenticity thing is kind of in reaction to that.
Speaker 2: And I think absolutely the way that I've parented my
Speaker 2: kids is in reaction to that. I think generationally we
Speaker 2: come from parents who, on the whole were not brilliant
Speaker 2: at showing affection. My generation, you know, we had parents,
Speaker 2: especially fathers who were not brilliant at that. And there's
Speaker 2: a notion or else simplistic notion of cycles of abuse
Speaker 2: being repeated. But there's another idea, which is I think
Speaker 2: you can grow in counter reaction to the way you
Speaker 2: were brought up if you were aware enough. It's not easy,
Speaker 2: you know, awareness, it's not always easy to know where
Speaker 2: the damage was that happened to you that you don't
Speaker 2: want to pass on to your kids, or it might
Speaker 2: be their subconsciously. One thing I talk about a lot
Speaker 2: is cats. I'm very obsessed with cats. And there was
Speaker 2: a cat in our house when I was young, and
Speaker 2: that cat got all the affection from my dad, got
Speaker 2: an awful lot of affection, And that's clearly one reason
Speaker 2: why I'm obsessed with cats. You know, I think people
Speaker 2: want affection, but sometimes there are blockages, and there were
Speaker 2: a lot of blockages at forty three Kindle Road where
Speaker 2: I grew up. So now I see how that cat
Speaker 2: ended up as the repository of simple affection because my
Speaker 2: dad was able to show simple affection to an animal,
Speaker 2: but he couldn't show it to his wife and not.
Speaker 1: Really to his children, And so.
Speaker 2: I think that implies that my dad wanted to show affection,
Speaker 2: that he wanted to receive affection, but he couldn't do
Speaker 2: it in a straightforward way to his family because it
Speaker 2: would mean showing vulnerability. But I saw vulnerability on his
Speaker 2: face when I told him, when me and my brother
Speaker 2: told him that my mom was dead, and it was
Speaker 2: so intense, you know, it spoke.
Speaker 1: I guess of this huge need, perhaps his.
Speaker 2: Whole life, a huge need wanting to be hugged, wanting affection.
Speaker 1: Who knows.
Speaker 2: It's hard to tell with someone as male and as
Speaker 2: rejecting of emotion as my father.
Speaker 3: Do you think that your parents ever had a conversation
Speaker 3: about David White or do you think that they ever
Speaker 3: ever talked about it?
Speaker 1: I don't really know.
Speaker 2: It's a strange thing how much I know that I
Speaker 2: don't know that, and how much everyone seems to know
Speaker 2: around my family that my mother was so flagrant with
Speaker 2: all this information. They argued all the time, ceratinly. My
Speaker 2: dad shouted at my mum all the time. My mum
Speaker 2: didn't tend to respond that much, but my dad was
Speaker 2: very shouty out. He wasn't a violent man, but he
Speaker 2: was very loud and very angry. Irritated all the time, aggravating.
Speaker 1: I could hear.
Speaker 2: Them sometimes arguing through my bedroom wall. I had many
Speaker 2: things through my bedroom wall, but shouting at her. Once
Speaker 2: I heard him shout we're supposed to be in love sarcastically,
Speaker 2: which is a very grim thing to hear your parents
Speaker 2: shout angrily at each other. But I did never hear
Speaker 2: him shout your fuckings someone else. Actually, there's an amazing
Speaker 2: letter that I have seen where David White writes to
Speaker 2: my mom. It's about some big golfing memorabili snaff who
Speaker 2: that they've had. They've basically got into trouble because David
Speaker 2: White got my mum to sell some dodgy golfing memorabilia
Speaker 2: on his behalf. It was fake in various ways, and
Speaker 2: then they were thrown out of the golfing memorabilia society.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's a long story, a terrible scandal.
Speaker 1: But then David White writes my mum a letter saying, come.
Speaker 2: On, we need to talk about this because they were
Speaker 2: loggerheads about it, and my mom suggests that my dad
Speaker 2: could be the referee, the umpire between them, and then
Speaker 2: David White writes a letter back to my mum saying,
Speaker 2: I don't think the good doctor, that's what he calls him.
Speaker 1: He says, I.
Speaker 2: Don't think he'd be right for this, because I've always
Speaker 2: found it rather rude and boorish towards me, David White says,
Speaker 2: in this imperious way.
Speaker 1: And what's brittant about that is my dad.
Speaker 2: Was rude and borish to everyone, you know, but David
Speaker 2: White would be the one person who he actually had
Speaker 2: every reason to be rude and borish to. So that
Speaker 2: letter implies this weird I don't know, I know what
Speaker 2: the word is a touch of drama, a shadow play
Speaker 2: where everyone was going to have a meeting David White,
Speaker 2: my mom, my dad.
Speaker 1: It's the climactic scene.
Speaker 2: My dad was going to be the umpire where anyone
Speaker 2: admitting that what was actually going on was an affair
Speaker 2: between two of these people and the other two were married, and.
Speaker 3: It was your mother's idea. She said that was a
Speaker 3: good idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was my mother's idea.
Speaker 2: But it's interesting that David White said I don't want
Speaker 2: to do it because he's rude and bor it. She
Speaker 2: doesn't say, obviously, I don't want to do that because
Speaker 2: we're having an affair and he's your husband. He doesn't
Speaker 2: say that. He says no. Colin is too rude. Well,
Speaker 2: the lack of transparency in all the parties is so
Speaker 2: strange because my mum is talking about the affair all
Speaker 2: the time and yet not if you see.
Speaker 1: What I mean.
Speaker 3: That's where it makes it a really interesting family secret, right,
Speaker 3: because what you just said is the lack of transparency,
Speaker 3: and yet on the surface of things completely transparent, but
Speaker 3: not in the way that the people around it are
Speaker 3: metabolizing it. And also it's to me, at some point
Speaker 3: this affair kind of loses steam or stops altogether in reality,
Speaker 3: but does not stop for your mother.
Speaker 1: That's true. It's hard to know what the true truth is.
Speaker 2: The height of the affair was in the late seventies
Speaker 2: early to mid eighties, when my mum is in her.
Speaker 1: Mid thirties to mid forties.
Speaker 2: Is definitely happening then a lot, because I have all
Speaker 2: the erotic poetry. It's all written then, and the erotic
Speaker 2: poetry has mundane elements. It tends to detail things like
Speaker 2: where they've met up. I also have answer phone messages
Speaker 2: on Casseka. She recorded all of them, and she kept
Speaker 2: the two of them talking, which often includes her saying,
Speaker 2: where shall we meet? I booked a hotel, let's go here.
Speaker 2: By the way, he David White is often quite demuring
Speaker 2: about that. He doesn't really seem to want to agree
Speaker 2: to anything, but he obviously did agree to some of it.
Speaker 2: And the Erotic Poetry includes some very very graphic references
Speaker 2: to things that.
Speaker 1: Happened between them.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's properly erotic, but not in the sense
Speaker 2: that one would read it and feel aroused, while I
Speaker 2: certainly would. Maybe I think one would think, oh my god,
Speaker 2: I can't believe she's put that in a poem. But
Speaker 2: you know, it's very graphic and atomically. I mean, I'll
Speaker 2: be honest with you, Danny, it was weird when I
Speaker 2: found the Book of Erotic Poetry, because you know, it's
Speaker 2: very very graphic, and most people would shut it immediately
Speaker 2: because it's very mind their mum. But for me, seconds
Speaker 2: after I found it, the Nora Efron Everything is copy
Speaker 2: gene kicked in because at that point, which was soon
Speaker 2: after my mom's death, you know, and I found this
Speaker 2: the school book. I mean, these poems, she'd written copyright
Speaker 2: on them, and I think she'd written copyright on them
Speaker 2: because she would really like them to have been.
Speaker 1: Published, you know.
Speaker 2: And I didn't have a problem very quickly with how
Speaker 2: graphic they were, and I thought it's brilliant as well.
Speaker 2: I thought this is material, which is great, but I
Speaker 2: also thought there's something beautiful about them.
Speaker 1: Even though they're terrible. They are terrible.
Speaker 2: Formerly does a poetry, But what's brilliant about them is
Speaker 2: how much my mother doesn't know what poetry is, which
Speaker 2: is why she's included these very very extraordinary details of
Speaker 2: their love making in a way that isn't really poetic
Speaker 2: and hilarious for that.
Speaker 3: Reason, including decidedly unpoetic descriptions of anatomy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is some incredible lines about the detail exactly
Speaker 2: what they did together, as well as a lot of
Speaker 2: this mundane stuff like there's literally one poem which is
Speaker 2: just about trying to go and meet David White to
Speaker 2: talk about a golfing fair together, and in the poem
Speaker 2: it says things like I'm going to meet you in Willesden,
Speaker 2: which is near Dolly's Hill, and the BBC man, I
Speaker 2: don't know who he is, a BBC man will be there.
Speaker 1: I will wait for you there, And you.
Speaker 2: Realize that this is just my mother's diary, but she's
Speaker 2: put it in Stanzas because she wanted to poeticize her life.
Speaker 2: She wanted her life to be poetic, even if she
Speaker 2: was not a poet. I think that if I was
Speaker 2: someone else, if I was not a writer, not a comedian,
Speaker 2: I might have been horrified. I might have thought this
Speaker 2: must never see the light of day. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but now I thought, this is brilliant, this is material.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't just that. It wasn't quite as cold
Speaker 2: as that. I think there is a coldness to it,
Speaker 2: whoever it is, even in war. I think there's a
Speaker 2: sliver of ice in the heart of the writer. Poetry
Speaker 2: means anything that happens in their life they will seize
Speaker 2: and turn into story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but also it's true.
Speaker 2: I thought my mother's funeral, you know, this idea that
Speaker 2: she was wonderful and it was lovely and everything else.
Speaker 2: I thought I was being told. I thought, that's not
Speaker 2: saying anything about it. Where's she gone? Where is the
Speaker 2: woman gone who writes very very erotic poetry that somehow
Speaker 2: isn't erotic and isn't poetry, but it is still somehow amazing.
Speaker 2: Where's that wonder everything about my mother is there. There
Speaker 2: are many many people coming out to me at my
Speaker 2: mother's funeral telling me that my mother was wonderful, just
Speaker 2: say over there again, she was so wonderful, so wonderful,
Speaker 2: such a wonderful woman. Often while I found that disorientating,
Speaker 2: you know, I wanted to say to them, did you
Speaker 2: I actually know her? Not because she wasn't wonderful, but
Speaker 2: because there was no detail in what they were saying,
Speaker 2: And it felt to me like a second death, like
Speaker 2: a second more profound erasure of this incredibly idiosyncratic woman.
Speaker 2: If you just idealize someone as we tend to do
Speaker 2: after they died, and actually their memory fades again, is
Speaker 2: crushed again, because you can only call them up and
Speaker 2: make them live by detailing their strangeness, I think, and
Speaker 2: their idiosyncrasies, and that in humans that's often very flawed specifics,
Speaker 2: and my mother had a lot of specifics.
Speaker 1: When I first did.
Speaker 2: A stand up show about my parents, both my brothers
Speaker 2: were uncertain, unhappy.
Speaker 1: Both of them said, in different ways, don't do this.
Speaker 2: My younger brother, who, as I say, is angrier about
Speaker 2: the whole thing, and you're not fucking doing it. And
Speaker 2: my older brother said, look, I know you, and we
Speaker 2: could talk about this for hours, but you know you're
Speaker 2: going to do it, aren't you? And I said yes,
Speaker 2: And I said, you're gonna have to believe me. It
Speaker 2: comes from a place of love. And then when I
Speaker 2: did the show, I came back on stage offers for
Speaker 2: an encore. It was a Q and A, just an
Speaker 2: ad lib Q and A with the audience, and all
Speaker 2: these people have their hands up and I say that
Speaker 2: you just have to wait a minute, just everyone. I
Speaker 2: had to find out, first of all, what my older
Speaker 2: brother thought. And I look at the room and I
Speaker 2: can't see him, and I said, Iva, what do you think?
Speaker 2: And he said, I loved it. And then he said
Speaker 2: I loved it because it felt like she was in
Speaker 2: the room, which I found incredibly moving and still do,
Speaker 2: because that's job done. That's what I was trying to do.
Speaker 2: I was trying to make genuinely live again in the
Speaker 2: way that platitudes at a funeral do not.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful. It reminds me of something that William Stafford,
Speaker 3: great American novelist, was once asked at like at the
Speaker 3: end of his life, what he would say to his mother,
Speaker 3: who had died when he was very young, and he said,
Speaker 3: I would say, look, I wrote all these books for you.
Speaker 3: There's something in that. It goes really back to what
Speaker 3: you said about us anticity, which I found very moving
Speaker 3: given your childhood and the impossibly mixed messages or you know,
Speaker 3: just mixed realities that you were, you know, getting between
Speaker 3: you know, home and the Yeshiva and who are you?
Speaker 3: And what that blossoms into could have blossomed into something
Speaker 3: else for someone else, but what it blossoms into for
Speaker 3: you is an absolute like just inner mandate to be authentic,
Speaker 3: to not lie, to not omit. I mean even the
Speaker 3: idea that like to be fully fully there without editing
Speaker 3: yourself in a way. And I don't mean on the page,
Speaker 3: but I mean, you know, when you do your comedy,
Speaker 3: when you do your shows, which it would seem to
Speaker 3: me is the huge saving grace for you here, is
Speaker 3: that you could make meaning out of all of this,
Speaker 3: including some really really hard intergenerational stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's true even now, Danny, in this moment,
Speaker 2: when you ask me a question, my response is just
Speaker 2: to come back with the truth as much as possible,
Speaker 2: don't filter it.
Speaker 1: It never occurs to me.
Speaker 2: I don't have time to think, how can I frame
Speaker 2: this in a way that will, you know, look good
Speaker 2: for me, look good for my mom, look good for
Speaker 2: my family. I can't do it. And I know that
Speaker 2: might sound a bit self aggrandizing. It's not meant to be,
Speaker 2: because you know, I see it at times as sort
Speaker 2: of almost incontinent, like I'm sort of continent with the
Speaker 2: truth at some level. Luckily I have enough skill to
Speaker 2: shape that being continent into stories. But my instinct when
Speaker 2: I'm talking, when someone asks me a question, when you
Speaker 2: ask me, you know, incredibly brilliantly perceptive questions about my childhood,
Speaker 2: it just triggers in me. I need to tell you
Speaker 2: the absolute truth as near as I can articulate it.
Speaker 3: And that is, at least in part, a response to
Speaker 3: being raised by a woman who literally couldn't do it.
Speaker 3: One other thing I'm curious about is, you know you
Speaker 3: can't know the answer to this. You can you can't
Speaker 3: know for sure whether your parents ever talked about David White,
Speaker 3: and you probably can't know for sure the answer to
Speaker 3: what I'm about to ask you. But do you think
Speaker 3: that by the end of her life and she died
Speaker 3: fairly young seventy four do you think that she ever
Speaker 3: had that moment of embodying herself? You know, did the
Speaker 3: fantasist ever rest Was there ever a point where she
Speaker 3: was truly authentically herself in a way that she would
Speaker 3: have felt or understood.
Speaker 2: I think my mother was someone operated in terms of persona.
Speaker 2: The way they're about to say that she's someone who
Speaker 2: couldn't tell the truth is that she's someone who is
Speaker 2: constantly telling her truth in some way, but it is
Speaker 2: not quite the truth, because she's fitting herself into personas
Speaker 2: that are absurd, that are not her, like golf memorabilia,
Speaker 2: nat or other ones that seem closer to who she is,
Speaker 2: but still don't feel quite real. So towards the end
Speaker 2: of her life, she became her persona was more Jewish.
Speaker 2: She became like being macha and did a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff around the local synagogue and was constantly having kiddershes
Speaker 2: in honor of her dead parents, and that felt closer
Speaker 2: to who she was, but still to some extent a
Speaker 2: role that she was occupying. To be fair to my mom,
Speaker 2: we all maybe occupy roles, although that is partly what
Speaker 2: I've set my stall out against. I think, how can
Speaker 2: I try not to play any kind of role, but
Speaker 2: just be as entirely in myself as possible. But that
Speaker 2: might be a role, right. There was one moment actually
Speaker 2: where I helped my mum manage to come out of character,
Speaker 2: as it were. I find it weird though, when I
Speaker 2: think about it. I went round to see them and
Speaker 2: I wasn't living at home. I was about twenty but
Speaker 2: already moved out home, and they were having, as they
Speaker 2: often were, an argument in our front guard, very public argument.
Speaker 2: We just got out of the car and we're having
Speaker 2: a route. But I've watched them have this route. And
Speaker 2: my dad went into the house and slammed the door,
Speaker 2: and my mother turned to me and she said, it's
Speaker 2: so tiring living without an emotional life, so tiring living
Speaker 2: without an emotional life. And I was really shocked, not
Speaker 2: because that wasn't true, not because I thought, how dare
Speaker 2: she say that about my dad? I thought, oh, that's
Speaker 2: absolutely right. And that was surprising to me because I thought,
Speaker 2: how is my mother, of all people, said something so unvarnished,
Speaker 2: so un self conscious and true. And it shocked me
Speaker 2: because I thought, maybe somewhat underneath all the layers of
Speaker 2: self consciousness and persona playing there's a real person with
Speaker 2: emotional intelligence and self awareness. But it sort of just
Speaker 2: flashed in front of me, and then she would have
Speaker 2: gone back to talking about golf or later Jewishness or
Speaker 2: the synagogue or whatever else she felt she needed to
Speaker 2: put in front of her to talk about. My mom
Speaker 2: didn't really relate to people as people. She tended to
Speaker 2: relate to them in terms of what she had decided
Speaker 2: they liked some very small thing that she decided X
Speaker 2: likes this, so al focus on that. Like my wife,
Speaker 2: who is per former writer herself, you know, she pointed
Speaker 2: out to me that my mom was always.
Speaker 1: Getting her champagne because once.
Speaker 2: Once my wife said, oh, it was having a last
Speaker 2: champagne that my mother was there and saw her doing
Speaker 2: that like it. So my mom was always trying to
Speaker 2: get her champagne, always very cheap champagne.
Speaker 1: But she was sort of a people pleaser in a way.
Speaker 2: But the way she would do it would be just
Speaker 2: to decide, this is what that person likes and then
Speaker 2: get them that stuff, and no amount of saying, actually,
Speaker 2: I'm not this person, I don't like it that much
Speaker 2: would make any difference. Like with me, she gas lipped
Speaker 2: me when I was a kid in the thinking that
Speaker 2: I was a fan of these books called Billy Bunter
Speaker 2: books when I was young. Billy Bunter was written in
Speaker 2: the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, and he's basically Harry Potter,
Speaker 2: but with more fat shaming. And I believed that I
Speaker 2: was a fan of Billy Bunter. And it ended up
Speaker 2: with her taking me to a thing called the Old
Speaker 2: Boys Book Club, a societ where they talked about Billy Bunter,
Speaker 2: where I was eleven and everyone else was seventy. She
Speaker 2: would leave me there and come back three hours later
Speaker 2: with all these very old people. And that was because
Speaker 2: my mother had decided, this is what David likes me, David,
Speaker 2: this is what David's and I must service what he likes.
Speaker 2: And at some level that's what she was doing with
Speaker 2: David White. David White likes golf, so I must become
Speaker 2: obsessed with golf. And it was of a weirdly mechanical
Speaker 2: decision at some level. And the fact that I didn't
Speaker 2: really like Billy Bunter, I'm just didn't know at the time,
Speaker 2: but so or that David White might have thought, you know,
Speaker 2: you know, I want to have sex with you, I
Speaker 2: don't really want you to intrude on my whole golf world.
Speaker 2: That would never occur to her because whatever you liked,
Speaker 2: she had to provide it in spades, in many, many
Speaker 2: different ways that were mad.
Speaker 3: It seems almost like, you know, you're describing someone who
Speaker 3: didn't have a center, or didn't have at access to
Speaker 3: her own center.
Speaker 1: That's very true.
Speaker 2: One of the extorted things she does is I did
Speaker 2: a documentary called who Do You Think You Are?
Speaker 1: I think in America as well.
Speaker 2: It's a genealogy documentary, and my mother's in it, obviously,
Speaker 2: and there's a bit that was cut because she just
Speaker 2: starts talking in a very very flirty way, sort of
Speaker 2: with the camera about her dad, my grandfather who was
Speaker 2: in Dachau and you know, escaped to Britain and then
Speaker 2: was interned in Britain because he was in an enemy alien,
Speaker 2: had this terrible life. She talked him out how I
Speaker 2: used to go to Soho in London, to the Red
Speaker 2: Light area, to Berrick Street to have sex with prostitutes.
Speaker 2: She doesn't actually say that out loud, but that's what
Speaker 2: she meets. It's clear and clear that this sort of
Speaker 2: went on, and she was aware of it when she
Speaker 2: was a teenager. And what she says, you know, we
Speaker 2: all knew what he was doing, but we pretended we
Speaker 2: didn't in this kind of twinkly flirty way. And I'm
Speaker 2: looking at camera like, what the fuck, what are you doing?
Speaker 2: Why are you saying this about your dad, my grandfather?
Speaker 2: But it's your point about her not having a center.
Speaker 2: There's some currency in her doing that, immediate currency for her,
Speaker 2: but it's so wrong. And that's like the golf. At
Speaker 2: some level, there's currency for her in being obsessed with
Speaker 2: golf and memorabilia. But it was entirely wrong. My mother
Speaker 2: was a great empress of wrong at some level.
Speaker 3: The great Empress of wrong. Yeah, we'll be back in
Speaker 3: a moment with more family secrets. In the UK, where
Speaker 3: David lives with his wife Morwenna and there are two
Speaker 3: grown kids, it must be said that he's pretty well.
Speaker 3: He's pretty famous, like recognized when he walks down the
Speaker 3: street kind of famous. He's a comedian, presenter, scriptwriter, author, singer,
Speaker 3: a multi hyphenate. As they say, fame can be erupting.
Speaker 3: Of course we all know that, but David's commitment to
Speaker 3: authenticity is his own personal shield against all that humor.
Speaker 3: Fierce intelligence, and the desire to do it differently are
Speaker 3: his superpowers. Laughter is the best medicine. But one less
Speaker 3: than funny note is that David White passed away just
Speaker 3: a few days before this conversation.
Speaker 2: David White actually died quite recently, just like a week
Speaker 2: ago or so. I got told. People are who read
Speaker 2: the book are always asking me, what did David White think?
Speaker 2: What does David White think about you doing all this?
Speaker 2: But I've had very little contact with him. I did
Speaker 2: write to him when my mom died and said, I
Speaker 2: thought you should know this that she's died. She was
Speaker 2: always in love with you. He sent me a letter
Speaker 2: about but he didn't real respond to it because you know.
Speaker 1: I see you in his own way.
Speaker 2: He's a man like my father, even though he was
Speaker 2: a man quite happy to have an affair, which my
Speaker 2: father was not, but a man, you know, without interest
Speaker 2: in dealing with emotional complexity. He lived in Slovenia and
Speaker 2: never really engaged with anything. When I was unearthing my
Speaker 2: family secrets of the world, and then his half sister,
Speaker 2: who came and saw the stage show that I did,
Speaker 2: wrote to me and said, I think you should know
Speaker 2: he died the other day, which I felt kind of
Speaker 2: sad about, because as I think about all this, one
Speaker 2: thing I should make clear is, you know, I celebrate
Speaker 2: all this.
Speaker 1: I think of all of this as rich.
Speaker 2: And strange and funny and weird. And yet there's damaging
Speaker 2: stuff going on in transgression and narcissism and fairly psychotic
Speaker 2: behavior in some ways, and it did cause problem and
Speaker 2: my dad having to live in denying of it in
Speaker 2: the way that he did was obviously damaging for him,
Speaker 2: and my mum crossed all sorts of boundaries. But I
Speaker 2: have lived to find it funny and I'm very glad
Speaker 2: of it. I know both my brothers find it troubling,
Speaker 2: but at the end of the day, often the damage
Speaker 2: that we work through when we're young is what makes
Speaker 2: us who we are. And I am happy with who
Speaker 2: I am, so therefore I do not judge my mother negatively.
Speaker 2: You know, I think that I don't call it damage
Speaker 2: in the book, I call it accidental sculpture. So anyway,
Speaker 2: the point being, for all the trouble and whatever it
Speaker 2: may have brought, I think my life would be duller
Speaker 2: without it. I may not even be a comedian. So therefore,
Speaker 2: when I found out that David White had died, I
Speaker 2: was quite sad.
Speaker 3: Well, it's also in a way it's the end of
Speaker 3: that story, right, yes, exactly, Yeah, yeah, I mean all
Speaker 3: three legs of that stool are gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the main players have exited the stage.
Speaker 1: And that feels sad.
Speaker 2: Fame place a strange angular role in all this, because
Speaker 2: I think fame is a type of mistaken identity. Erica
Speaker 2: Jong said, the more famous you are, the more people
Speaker 2: will get you wrong. And that's definitely been my experience
Speaker 2: that people refract a version of you that they want
Speaker 2: to see, which won't be who you are, and that's
Speaker 2: troubling if you're someone who's obsessed with authenticity. I don't
Speaker 2: really do characters. I just talk about myself in my
Speaker 2: children's books. I can create character. The way that I
Speaker 2: talk as a stand up about my own life and
Speaker 2: shape my own life for my own voice is a
Speaker 2: way of combating that mistaken identity. And I think that
Speaker 2: what I feel from my own family experience is that
Speaker 2: now I want to be a situation is where there
Speaker 2: aren't secrets and everyone is being as true and authentic
Speaker 2: as possible, but there are some things which I've also
Speaker 2: taken and absorbed.
Speaker 1: It's not all counter reaction, you know.
Speaker 2: Like within the family that I grew up in, my
Speaker 2: older brother is incredibly important and he definitely first started
Speaker 2: turning me onto comedy. He played me LPs and tapes
Speaker 2: of really funny early British comedy. My dad used to
Speaker 2: play me Peter Seller's records. Peter Sells used to do
Speaker 2: these sketch records, and comedy was a saving grace in
Speaker 2: my house in forty three Kendor Road. And that's one
Speaker 2: thing about comedy. You know that when you laugh, you're
Speaker 2: not pretending. It's sort of impossible to be pretending when
Speaker 2: you laugh. When you laugh properly, I mean, obviously, people
Speaker 2: who sit and pretend that Shakespeare is funny are pretending,
Speaker 2: you know, in the theater they are pretending because they
Speaker 2: want to hear that they want people to.
Speaker 1: Hear they're very clever.
Speaker 2: But proper laughing is a version of no pretense, I think,
Speaker 2: because it's such an instinctive thing, particularly when you lose control,
Speaker 2: as something that's really funny. And so I think that
Speaker 2: it would have been for me even back then if
Speaker 2: I didn't realize it then the fact there was funny
Speaker 2: in the house. That would be a way of finding
Speaker 2: authenticity that might have been missing elsewhere. And maybe I've
Speaker 2: built on that. I mean not just me, me and
Speaker 2: WI Whener and our kids have built on it, as
Speaker 2: it's so key to the way we communicate.
Speaker 1: We just communicate through funny.
Speaker 2: You would be absurd to match that we spend all
Speaker 2: our time laughing at each other, but we do spend
Speaker 2: a lot of time laughing. And I love it that
Speaker 2: both my kids are really funny.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: That is so important to me because it feels like
Speaker 2: I've managed to find a way of creating the truth
Speaker 2: that is most important to me in this current space,
Speaker 2: in my family space now. And I had some of
Speaker 2: that when I was young. But I also had this
Speaker 2: other thing, a wide and crazy untruth that I guess
Speaker 2: is where I would try and place the way I've
Speaker 2: gone forward from where I came from.
Speaker 3: Here's David reading one last passage from My Family the Memoir.
Speaker 2: I knew before I had written or performed the show
Speaker 2: about my parents that it would, in its own way
Speaker 2: be an act of love, a show that celebrated the
Speaker 2: what or more specifically, but I think this is of necessity,
Speaker 2: born out of love, an act of reclamation, because, as
Speaker 2: I've said, my mother died abruptly, and so the lack
Speaker 2: of time, the lack of dying time, meant there had
Speaker 2: been no longer bye, no mobilization of memory.
Speaker 1: What I was trying to do with.
Speaker 2: The stage show and my family, not the sitcom, and
Speaker 2: already had an instinct about before I even started it
Speaker 2: was this sounds creepy, but hey reincarnate to describe it
Speaker 2: in such detail and to leave nothing out that you
Speaker 2: would truly come alive again on stage, not truly at all,
Speaker 2: of course, but in the sense that people use that
Speaker 2: phrase to push it as far as it could go.
Speaker 2: And then obviously I didn't know this in advance, performing
Speaker 2: across the world for two years, thus giving me, with
Speaker 2: a whole load of people who never met her, the
Speaker 2: chance to properly say goodbye.
Speaker 3: Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Accur
Speaker 3: is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 3: If you have a family Secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 3: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 3: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 3: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 3: find me on Instagram at Danny Rye, and if you'd
Speaker 3: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 3: check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.