CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to Desperately Seeking Wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for anyone hoping to lead a wiser, more fulfilled life. I talk to well-known people and some experts about the lessons they've learned and wisdom gained, particularly during the tougher times. Our guest today is David Baddiel, one of Britain's best-loved comedians. David seems to have been centrestage for decades: he burst onto the scene with The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and then captured the mood of the nation with Frank Skinner and Fantasy Football League, England fans have been singing along to their ‘Three Lions’ anthem for more than 25 years. More recently, he's blurred the lines of comedy with autobiography, with stage shows exploring his mother's affair with a golf memorabilia-salesman and his father succumbing to a particularly cruel form of dementia.

DAVID

I think I say in the show, the dead are not angels: after death, and maybe also in late stages of dementia, what we do is create an idealised version of our family, or our loved ones - whoever they might be - meaning that if you make them into angels, then you lose all sense of who they are. If I did have a motto, it would be ‘the truth is always complex’. I think we live in a time where people look more and more and more for simple truths to explain the world.

CRAIG

There seems to be no end to David's talents. He's a successful children's author and playwright, and his recent book, Jews Don't Count, made us rethink the nature of racism. We talk about what he learned from all of that, and his soon-to-be-released The God Desire about why he's an atheist.

So it's great to see you, David, thanks for doing this. How are you? And where are you?

DAVID

It’s an interesting question, because I've just come in to something I've only recently just acquired, which is I've got an office now.

CRAIG

And how's it working in the office?

DAVID

I like it in general - the one thing I really wasn't thinking about was… British weather. So I bought this and moved in in the summer. And it was really nice, it's about a 10-minute cycle ride from my house, I get up and I think, oh, I could have gotten to work to downstairs…. But now I have to go in the rain to work somewhere. Why have I done that? I am privileged that I've never had a proper job, I've only ever been a comedian and a writer. So obviously, I have gone out to work to comedy clubs and theatres and television studios. But I've always only written at home. And I just thought it'd be quite good to have a different space. I'll tell you what I think it forces me to do, is having spent money on this place, I now get here and try and write a bit more than at home where I was spent ages just looking out the window and at the internet.

CRAIG

I've got so many questions. I've been reading your books recently, I've been listening to podcasts and looking back on some of your comedy. But I wanted to start, because so much of it - seems to me - is rooted in your childhood. Can you talk a little bit about what your parents were like?

DAVID

Yeah, I mean, I'm actually writing a book about that at the moment, which is based on my show that I did, I did a show called My Family: Not The Sitcom, which ran for a couple of years in the West End. And I did it internationally as well. And the reason I mention that is not just a self-aggrandize, I think, but to make a point about what I was trying to do with that show, which is when my mum died, a lot of people were doing a thing that people do at funerals, which is to come up and tell me that my mother was wonderful. And I heard that word a lot. And I remember thinking, if that's what you're gonna say about my mother, you may as well say nothing, because that's what people say at funerals about everyone, is generic, it's a thing that people say. And it felt to me like a second erasure, following on her death. So what I did was I created a show, it was about her and my dad, my dad at the time, he's now gone as well, but he was in the advanced stages of dementia, which I guess is about memory, after death, and maybe also in late stages of dementia, what we do is create an idealised version of our family, or our loved ones, whoever they might be, and that is a disservice to them. I think I say in the show, and I say in the book, the dead are not angels, meaning that if you make them into angels, then you lose all sense of who they are. And so what I talked about was very, very specific things about my parents, for example, that my mother had an affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman, which led to her turning our whole lives over into golf, making our house into a palace of golfing memorabilia, overnight almost, suddenly she became obsessed with, of all things - for a woman who was born in Nazi Germany and was a refugee - into golf, the most, sort of, British of things. And somehow my dad managed to sort of not notice what this was about, but it was entirely obvious to the rest of us that it was all to do with this golfing memorabilia bloke. People would come up to me after the show and say, oh, this is just like my family - and I thought, well, it can't be, because no one else has had a mom who turned into a golfing memorabilia queen of North London overnight because she was having an affair. But all families have weird, strange, particular things going on.

CRAIG

And I think it's also very true that we spend a lot of time sort of hiding them and try to act in a normal way. And when actually, I think what's great about some of the stuff that you've been doing is that you're willing to shine a light on it. It sounds like it was pretty tough at times. So we'll talk about your mom's affair in a moment, but your dad was made redundant, that kind of thing. It must have been tough.

DAVID

Yeah, well, tough. Since the constant self-consciousness that has been placed on all of us by the advent of social media, one of the earliest mantras of social media was ‘check your privilege’. It's quite hard, I think, to speak about. And my own sense is that my life was tough - in a way. We lived in basically Dollis Hill in Neasden, a part of London which was sort of lower middle-class, very dull, mainly, quite rough, but mainly dull, very mundane, very not glamorous, really, the idea that I might become famous at the time felt to me like a complete impossibility, was like another world. And my dad then got made redundant from Unilever, which was the, he was a chemist, and he worked for Unilever. And he wanted to be, I think, an important research chemist, he’d done a PhD but he'd ended up middle-managing a laboratory for Unilever. And then he was made redundant. And he was a very angry man, my dad, I mean, he had a very typical sort of - you know, of that generation - male way of being affectionate, which was to be maybe insulting and abusive, and make fun of his children, of his three male children. But he was incredibly angry. And my mom, yeah, was having an affair, and I think was living out a drama of her own life that was a compensation for what happened to her, I think, as a person who had had her own life ripped from her. One of the things I think about damage is that if you're someone who spends a lot of their time talking about who they are, which is what I do and what I'm doing now, then you always have to be kind of grateful for who you are. Because, you know, I'm incredibly lucky, I'm actually pretty happy. I'm very expressed, I'm sort of absurdly over-expressed by who I am. And how I got there will be partly about the damage, do you see what I'm saying. So I can't reject that. I can't say that it was terrible, because it got me to who I am. And I'm quite pleased with who I am.

CRAIG

What's really interesting about what you do is that there's these moments which feels sort of tragic and difficult and emotionally raw, but you also find the humour in it. I mean, you were saying in one situation, your father once farted so loudly in an antique shop you had to leave, which of course, must have been an acute embarrassment.

DAVID

I think of this as being a bit on the spectrum. And that might get me into trouble with people who are on the spectrum, but it's what I feel is on the spectrum about me, which is that I am absolutely uncomfortable with anything that isn't absolutely true. So that is not completely right. We weren't around at the time. It was a story told to us by my dad, and indeed by friends of my dad. He did indeed go to antique shop and farted very, very badly. And they did leave. But the key element of it is that when my dad and his friends went back to the antique shop later in the day, a sign was put on the shop, that it was closed because the owner had had to go to hospital. That is the key element for me of the story.

CRAIG

And it feels like that that was obviously resonated a lot with you.

DAVID

You know what, when I was younger, I really hated the fact that a lot of my favourite comedians, whether it be, I don't know, Woody Allen or whoever it is, would think that comedy wasn't enough and would clearly, as they got older, feel the insecurity of the comedian, which is that I need to deal with bigger subjects, I need to do serious films, or whatever it is, and I used to hate that because I would always just think that comedy is the greatest art form. And I still think that, but what I have changed is my own way of looking at the world. Really, because things that have happened to me, like my parents dying, my dad getting dementia, whatever else it might be, are serious. And that doesn't mean I don't look at that with comedy, but I now feel that what I do is I will talk about serious things - anti-semitism - but it's no jarring, it's no incongruity for me to make a joke in the middle of talking about the most serious thing. I can't see why it should be.

CRAIG

So something like your mother having an affair, you find the humour in that, but it must also have been tough on you. I mean, it sounds like you were quite young when you realised it was happening.

DAVID

Well, yeah. My mother was flagrant about it. She was very proud of her affair. My mother was an obsessive person, and whatever was her thing, that would be all her personality, so she couldn't have quiet, secret affair, like most people have. She, as I say, transformed her life, she essentially copied that person's business and set up her own business - I don’t know how he felt about that, about whether him having sex with my mother meant to encroach on his market share. But anyway, that's what she did. And she would tell everyone about her affair, including her children, because she was kind of proud of it. Because she thought it was glamorous, which it probably was.

CRAIG

And how old were you?

DAVID

Well, when I definitely knew about it, I was, you know, in my early teens. But in all honesty, I don't think I can look back on it now and think of it entirely as a trauma. I mean, there is trauma, which has to do with the fact that my parents’ marriage was very, very… there was a lot going on. And there was a lot of anger from my dad towards her, which was obviously to do with this, even though he never admitted openly that she was having an affair, but he was enraged in various ways. There was a lot of that, and it was concomitant with him losing his job. So the general feeling in the house was definitely fraught.

CRAIG

So he was kind of avoiding the reality while also playing out?

DAVID

That creates a picture of my dad as this kind of, sort of cuckolded, in-denial man, which is not what it was like at all, because my dad was unbelievably male. And it was more like he was so male, that my mother's drama was on a wavelength that he couldn't pick up. It was like, it's like everything from my dad was aggravation. Like, he was a man who, I think I once described him as being interested in food, football and shouting ‘oh, who the fuck is this now?’ every time the phone rang, He was a man for whom everything was sort of irritating. And my mom's affair, at some level, my mom's emotional dramas were kind of irritating for him. And so he just shut them out and said, I can't be bothered with all that.

CRAIG

But what I think is interesting, though is, and I think that I recognise from some of the things that happened in my childhood, too, is that you sort of normalise it, don't you? And you find a way of carrying on, but sometimes these things are a bit like depth charges that go off later, or have an impact later. And so you said that your mother did die in quite traumatic circumstances. Was that a moment when some of this stuff came to the surface and had more of an impact?

DAVID

No. No, my mother dying dramatically was a function of death. And actually, I've written about this quite extensively in my book, which is, I think we have a notion of death, sort of idealised notion of death, which comes from films and books and whatever, of it being closure. And it being a white room, last words, in some kind of insight being passed on, a sad moment, and then they've gone. And it was the opposite of that, it was much more like what death actually is, which is Northwick Park Hospital, a harassed and short-staffed emergency team running around, trying to save my mother who had probably overdosed, because my mother had had an operation in her 40s for an acoustic neuroma and had suffered scar tissue and pain ever since. And had taken too many drugs, too many painkillers as a result. So in that moment, no, in that moment, there was just shock and sadness and trauma, terrible trauma. But since then, if we're going to get very psychoanalytical about and I have done a lot of therapy, I think I have tried to work through my own sense, I think I try and apply a type of forgiveness, not any kind of, not from any moral point of view, but just because I understand that everyone is flawed, to the damage imposed on me by my parents, Because - firstly, because it's made me who I am, but also because I recognise how damaged they were, especially my mother. My mother was born in Nazi Germany. She came here when she was about six months old. Her father was then interned on the Isle of Man, as were most German-Jewish refugees at the time, so she didn't see her father for three years - they lived in one room anyway, they lost everything, and lived in one room. They were speaking German during the war. And as she grew older, I think she would have had a strong sense of how many people she had lost and of a whole life that she'd lost. And my mother was not an emotionally aware woman, those kind of extreme emotions would have been very difficult for her to process. And so when that comes out in having an affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman, it's kind of comic at some level, but I also can't find it in me to be angry with her now, because I kind of think like, of course she was damaged, of course she was traumatised. Right? So what I'm saying to you - sorry Craig, just to finish, I know I'm talking a lot but you've asked me very deep questions. What I feel now that she's been dead for five years, is I worry a little bit I didn't forgive her enough while she was alive. Because I was irritated often with her when she was alive. She, you know, she could be immensely exasperating.

CRAIG

And I think that's incredibly common and lots of people feel that about their parents, but one of the themes that sort of comes out in this podcast when I'm talking to people about this is, Dr. Bruce Perry said that we've been asking the wrong question for years, which is what's wrong with you? And the real question is, what happened to you? And when you start seeing people in that way, and understand that they’re products of their background and their behaviour, and often sometimes that maybe they're a bit broken, and that there are parts of them that can't react in the way that you want them to, or hope they would.

DAVID

I think, as a society, and this is really not helped by social media, which is very, as we know, morally binary and very out to sort of find who's the villain, as a society, we're very obsessed with blame. We're very obsessed with that someone is responsible. And the way that we have come to think about parenting and the formation of personality, which still is hung over a little bit from Freud, that we imagine that our parents are responsible for, you know, whoever we are. Firstly, that's not true. There's a whole bundle, a whole basket of things for the responsibility of who we are, and not just theirs. But also, I think we create an idea that there are things wrong that they did, and things right that they did. And actually, it's much more complicated than that. It is probably wrong at some very simple level for my mother to have had a flagrant affair, and to share it with her children that's clearly transgressive and damaging, but at the same time, I can celebrate that damage. It's very difficult to explain this, but you have to sort of see my show, because it's funny, it's crazy, and it leads to a kind of idiosyncratic, weird universe that I now almost feel nostalgic for, as well as sort of thinking, but there's comedy there.

CRAIG

I hope I've got this right. There's a bit where I think one of you asks whether or not your father ever loved you, or asked him and he says, if it’s bol-

DAVID

Should I say it Craig?

CRAIG

You tell the story.

DAVID

So that was during a documentary that me and my brother made for Channel 4 called The Trouble With Dad, which was about my father's dementia. So for anyone who doesn't know, my father had a particular type of dementia called Pick's Disease, which is a frontal lobe dementia, which… so the joke that I always did was that the symptoms of Pick's disease - I think this is more or less correct - include impatience, disinhibition, obscenity, laziness, and when I first heard these symptoms, told me by the neurologist, I said, sorry, does he have a disease, or have you just met him? Because my father was always that kind of person. He was always extremely irritable, and sweary and whatever, but it did make him like 100 times worse. It was like he had a disease that cartooned who he was anyway. And towards the end of that documentary, we're sitting around, me and my older brother, Ivor. And the director of the documentary says to me and Ivor, has your father ever told you he loves you? And I say, no, of course not. Meaning, of course not, you've seen him, he's not that kind of man. And the director says, why not? And I - as a joke - I say, I think he doesn't. And he turns the camera on my dad, and says to my dad, your son is saying you've never loved him. And he says, my dad says, that's absolute bollocks. And it's moving, very moving, I think, because that is the closest I will ever get to my dad telling me that he loves me. Not only that, more importantly, for me, who's obsessed with kind of authenticity and being who you are, that is the only way Colin Baddiel could ever say it. Aggressive, sweary, battling, male, bantery, jokey, that meant I love you. He could do that.

CRAIG

Yeah, there's so many layers in that, isn't it? I mean, my parents are of a generation where they just didn't do it. It just wasn't a thing. And I know that they did love me, but then there were definitely years where you go through it where you question it? Because why can't you just articulate it?

DAVID

What do you think that's led to for you? Do you have children?

CRAIG

Yeah, I have children. I think I probably over-compensated, I think I spent quite a few years like constantly telling them that I love them. And like finding every circumstances in which to do that, which I think in its own way, can be slightly oppressive.

DAVID

I agree. I do that as well. I still do it. I mean, I feel it, you know, I feel it so I say it, which is sort of who I am as a person. I don't know that necessarily that thing that our generation has done which is to be over-expressed about our affection for our children is right either, but then as sort of saying there's no wrong or right anyway, For some reason I'm reading quite a lot of Ishigoru at the moment, Kazuo Ishigoru, and all of Ishiguro’s work, you know, Remains of the Day and all his other work is really about people who can't express emotion and don't have self-awareness, coming to a point where they sort of have to, it’s usually some sort of crisis, and then it leaks out of them in some way. And it's always very moving to see that, sort of very moving to see someone who can't express emotion, being brought to a place where the emotion comes out anyway. And that's what I felt when my dad said that thing. And I thought, I guess I'm saying that if we're a generation, me and you,- you're younger than me, but nonetheless, - of men who are just sort of a bit incontinent with saying that we love people, and then we lose that thing, of that really moving thing of watching people who can't do it somehow come to a place of doing it.

CRAIG

You also said, ‘I'm a baby at heart, we’re all that’. And you then said, we're all just winging adulthood. What did you mean by that? I mean, it reminded me about Kierkegaard saying, life is lived forward, but understood backwards.

DAVID

I'm not aware of that Kierkegaard quote. It really means that I am 58. but in terms of my sort of basic sense of who I am, I still remain about 12. And I'm not sure anyone really changes that - you gain wisdom, which is what this podcast is about, and you gain knowledge, but in terms of your essential self, which is a bundle of urges and desires and hopes and anxieties and fears and needs, it's the same, isn't it? It's always the same. I mean, I have an advantage, which is being a comedian and a writer, and not someone who has to do a proper job, I can throw off the shackles of pretending that I have to be an adult, and channel the child within me all the time. I write children's books, I used to do a sketch called History Today, which was two old professors, who behave like schoolchildren who start off talking as if they're going to talk about a very intellectual, historical, sort of dry subject, and then just start slagging each other off, like seven-year-olds, and why people laughed at that is, I think, because it busts through the illusion of adulthood. Me, you, you know, Rishi Sunak, whoever it might be, we're pretending to be adults, we have these bodies that say that we're grown-ups, but I don't think we, you know, we are. And comedy is very much about that, comedy - that's why I like it, often there's an honesty to comedy, a lot of the time, because it sort of says, stop pretending. You know, it's been generally good for me that the way that my brain works is very unfiltered. So even now, I'm not thinking about what I'm saying before I'm saying it to you. It comes out of me like, I always think of it like a squash wall, squash as in the game, that the question or the stimuli or whatever it might be, comes to me and I just bang! repeat what I think. And in those terms, even though I'm more articulate than I was when I was seven, it's the instinctive nature of the way that I live my life, and think and speak or whatever, is childish, because that's what children do. Children don't think, what do I need to say before I say, in order to achieve a state of respect, or adulthood? Or who am I? And how do what I say, what I'm gonna say now, conform to who I am. I don't, I literally don't do that. Because I find it very difficult not to say what's in my head. And as I say, it feels more articulate. But at some level, the urges that lead to the speech are exactly the same. They're just, as I say, about wailing need.

CRAIG

It's interesting, because I get what you're saying as well, that you remain in a kind of child. And I think there's definitely things that as I got older and realised I'd made mistakes in life and got things wrong, was coming across thinkers who tried to encourage me to respond rather than react.

DAVID

Explain to me the difference.

CRAIG

So I think that if I'm in a car and somebody cuts me up, you know, I might sort of like swear at them or be annoyed at them. But actually, can I get to a stage where I don't let those kind of things bother me in the way that they might have used to?

DAVID

Yes. Okay. So I'm gonna say something contradictory now to what I just said, my next show after my family show was about trolls, about social media. And I talked about using comedy to defeat trolls. And one thing I , sort of as a tip, I gave the audience was, you know, never get angry with a troll and indeed, appear to agree with them and then undermine them from a point of agreement. It goes along with a sort of improvisational technique, which is called ‘yes, but’ or ‘yes, and’, where you just agree with whatever the improviser on stage with you says, rather than shutting them down, blocking them or saying no, and I noticed that if you do that, to a heckler, on stage - you know, a brilliant example is that Frank Skinner, when I first saw him at the Comedy Store, there was a drunk guy, I think he was a medical student, shouting at him and at one point he shouted, ‘I recognise you from medical school’. And Frank said, yes, you were the one in the jar. And what's brilliant about that is it's yes, it's a yes, yes, of course you do. It's not saying, what are you talking about, I wasn't at medical school: it's going with it. And that actually is a version of what you've just said. Because your immediate reaction might be, don't shout, stop shouting at the driver and get angry, whatever. But in fact, very, very quickly, in the case of a comedian, there's been a mutation of that into, okay, how can I transform this into something that will get laughs.

CRAIG

I get that, that when you're on stage, you've got to do that. I wonder, like in the social media situations, though, like one of the things that we learned when I was involved in politics was, sometimes it's better just not to give fuel to the fire, if you just sort of ignore it and let it pass. you know, it's better not to have a fight with somebody because actually what they're seeking is your energy. And if you don't give them that energy, then it fades.

DAVID

Yeah, well, I think I've come more to that position than I used to. When I first started it my ‘comedian with hecklers-instinct’ very much kicked in. And it was fine actually, it's one of the ways I got a following on Twitter, or whatever it was, by being funny with hecklers. And it is a third way, because what most people do is they get very angry, or they try and take the hecklers that, you know, tweet the troll apart with arguments, which never works. There is another way, which is that you can make fun of the troll. And you're right as well, you are, in some cases, when it's certainly professional trolls who work for troll farms, you are just adding fuel to some kind of fire. I mean, I'm sure that is the case in politics as well. I'm going to ask you a question, if I might. I know we don't have that much time. But what you see a lot now, I mean, what you see on social media, but obviously elsewhere, is the assumption that almost anything that happens in politics - happens anywhere, but certainly in politics - is some kind of plan.

CRAIG

Yeah. So when I started in politics, I thought things were 99% cock-up and 1% conspiracy. And I suspect when I left politics, it was more like 85% cock-up and 15% conspiracy. But the reality is, overwhelmingly, it's just this sea of stuff coming at you. And most people are just trying to keep their head above water. And you end up wrapped up in a stupid row, which is basically back and forth and trolling and becomes cultural and political, and very little discussion of what's actually led to this or that this is a very deep, complex, nuanced problem, can we have a serious conversation about why it's happening and how it's happening and that kind of thing. And I think that that is a huge issue with politics. And social media, like so many other things, has allowed that fast-forwarding and also allowed that kind of very, very limited debate, which is very tactical, and not very strategic at all. And it becomes quite boring, I think, quite quickly.

DAVID

Yeah, but I think as well, I've written and talked quite a lot about conspiracy theory. And I think I once said, you know, conspiracy theory is how idiots get to feel like intellectuals. And I still see that, I see people on all levels, thinking, oh, I've spotted a pattern here. And the real thing they're doing is claiming some kind of intellectual ground, because it's quite easy to spot apparent patterns. Whereas the truth is, most of the time we're just living in chaos.

CRAIG

Yeah, well, they spot that there's a sort of fact that's true, or a grain of truth. But actually, they cling on to this grain of truth. And I think so much of people who are into conspiracy theories, it's a kind of narcissistic ‘I know something you don't’, I can parade around and say that, Which is not to say that there aren't occasionally conspiracies.

But I want to talk a little bit about Jews Don't Count, which I read and thought was great. And I wonder what the reaction was?

DAVID

You know, if anything has been successful, from that book, to some extent, was the title because the title sums up an attitude in quite a sort of controversial, sort of immediate way. What actually happened was, the TLS asked me to write an essay book about whatever I wanted, a sort of essay book in the tradition of George Orwell's kind of pamphlet-sized books, about a subject that I could write about. And I've been thinking about on Twitter, and on, a bit on the newspapers and a bit in my stage show, talking about this specific thing, which is the sense not just in racism, but in general in the whole conversation about identity politics. So that would include gender minorities and stuff about disability or whatever, that the oldest form of discrimination, to some extent, which is anti-semitism, was low down in the mix of that conversation which was intensifying continually. Over the last 20 years in particular, there's been a huge intensification - again, driven by social media - of that conversation about minorities and offence and about identity and representation and inclusion and Jews were low down in it. And I packaged it in a way that feels to me and I sort of know this is true from what mostly Jews have said to me, is a lot of Jews felt the same way, but no one had quite articulated it. Partly because most books about anti-semitism, most conversations about antisemitism, are about something else, are about the far-right, and are about Nazis and Neo-Nazis and whatever. And this was not. This was about the people who were supposed to respond to the far-right, and their hatred, and not feeling that that sanctuary is there. And I've had some quite extreme pushback. But I feel that since the books came out, the dial has shifted a bit on that whole conversation and certain things that have happened since like, for example, the Royal Court, doing a play that had a stereotypically named Jewish billionaire character in it, when the pushback happened towards that, the thing that trended on Twitter, in response to it was #Jewsdontcount, the brand of Jews Don't Count has sort of stuck. And it's stuck a bit in America as well, where I've seen it used to talk about things that have been happening there.

CRAIG

I know that you love English literature, and you comment very well on a lot of great works of literature. I'm a huge fan of T. S. Eliot. But reading the book, there was a moment where you point out that Radio 4 read out what is a blatantly anti-semitic poem by T. S. Eliot. I just was interested in you, as somebody who loves literature, and I think really respects a lot of Eliot's work, how you find that tension of this genius who wrote The Waste Land, but also is clearly an anti-semite. How do you find your way through that?

DAVID

Well, I can tell you a story which might help with that. Eliot was the first modern poet that I engaged with when I was about 15. Mr. Fitch, who was a brilliant English teacher at my school, read the whole of The Waste Land, doing all the voices, he was, it was a fantastic performance. And I became very into Eliot, and loved Eliot. And then read some of the other poems, and in his prose as well, he talks about it not being viable or something, for any nation to have a large amount of Jews. And I brought this up in class, and I put my hand up to talk and I said, sorry, this, there's a bit in this poem, where he says that Jews are like rats. And I said, it's really upsetting. And he just kind of ignored it, even though I was someone who he did sort of think was like a star pupil or whatever. Because that's, at some level, even though that was 1970 whatever, 8, and not like the present conversation, I think it's still indicative of a thing whereby, oh, yeah, but you know, if I take that on, then we have to sort of imagine that T. S. Eliot isn't a great poet, or what does it do, and how do I carry on teaching T. S. Eliot? And I don't even want to think about it.

CRAIG

Yeah, the reason I'm asking you is like, a lot of people would say, you know, there's no doubt he was an anti-Semite. End of, cancel, don't put him on the curriculum. But yet, he also wrote this amazing stuff about the human condition that I think anybody would say that well, that's just extraordinary, and that that deserves to be given attention.

DAVID

Yeah, my position is that I cannot bear the notion that great artists should also have to be saints. It's obviously not borne out by history. And, you know, if the notion of cancellation would involve obviously, taking all Caravaggios off the National Gallery because he stabbed someone, you know, he murdered someone. And Elliot was an anti-Semite, he was also a great poet; Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite, was also the greatest children's storyteller of all time. Those two things have to be held together in congruence and we have to allow ourselves to be complex enough to understand both those things. The problem comes - I don't really have an answer for this, Craig - the problem comes with other people being cancelled and being taken off the shelves to some extent for other types of unacceptable opinions. So I did a thing for the BBC, recently in their flagship show The Making of Us, I don't know if you saw that about Philip Larkin, and I just did it because I love Larkin. But obviously I was then confronted with some of the stuff in his letters, which is very racist. It's rarely in the poetry for Larkin, but it's in the letters to Kingsley Amis or whatever, private correspondence. And then when I watched that bit, it was very much about that, it was not much, the way they edited it, there was not much about Larkin the poet, it was a lot about Larkin the racist. I remember the producers of it, well, I kind of think Larkin is kind of cancelled, he's in at least a semi-cancel state. And then I think this is the problem for me as a someone who talks about anti-semitism. Because Eliott is not cancelled, Larkin is cancelled. And I don't know the answer to it, but I do know that I think there should be a level playing field for those things, I would prefer that no one is straightforwardly cancelled who is a great artist. But I do think that you can't have a situation where one type of discrimination is highlighted and one isn’t. Do you see what I'm saying?

CRAIG

I do see what you're saying. I've just finished your book called The God Desire, which isn't published yet, but I was lucky enough to get an early copy. And I really enjoyed it. Basically, you say in there that you're an atheist, who would very much like there to be a god? Can you explain that?

DAVID

Yeah, I mean, it sort of comes down to the childish thing, because I think I talk about in it as well, which is, I begin the book, I think talking about how I couldn't sleep. I mean, I’m somebody who couldn't sleep from the age of about six or seven, partly because I was worried about death. And my mom told me that death is like a long sleep in which you never wake up. And after that, I didn't want to go to sleep again. I sort of love life, I think life is amazing. It's full of bad things, but it's incredible and brilliant and fantastic. And I would, therefore very much like there to not be an end to it, or some, you know, I'd like to be some form of immortality. And I know that so much, I feel that so deeply, that I can feel the point of it where that desire tips over into thinking maybe it does go on, and maybe there is someone out there who magically will mean that I have a life after death. And that's what the book’s about because that feeling allows me to know it's not true. Because I'm so close to it.

CRAIG

And one of the key quotes is ‘I don't believe that God doesn't exist. I know he doesn't. I know it like I know that a stone is hard’. And I'm really interested in the absolutism of that, you say that you're a fundamentalist atheist. Talk a little bit about that.

DAVID

The book is a weird little book in that it's the nearest I've come, I mean, Jews Don't Count has a bit of this, but it's more of a polemic to a sort of work, sort of philosophy, I suppose. Because in, I say, I know that God doesn't exist like I know that stone is hard. Later on, I say, of course, stone is not hard. Stone is only hard - those are concepts - and stone is in fact, energy. And the hardness of it is something that we perceive as a result of bringing our hand down on it, and feeling that those atoms are, you know, energetically held together in a very strong way. But all of that is perception. And there could be a different perception of stones’ hardness, and I do that deliberately to, to some extent, undermine that idea, because I want to keep complexifying it. But think about the fact that I have a sort of appreciation, obviously, I don't have a memory, but an appreciation of what life was like before I was born, which was nothing, which has nothingness, which has no consciousness. And I just have an absolute knowledge that that is what I'm going back to after I die. I mean, I've obviously, yeah, I mean, I kind of as I say, I kind of think like, it's sort of ridiculous that anyone might think there was anything else.

CRAIG

It’s interesting because I'm drawn to Buddhism, but I'm not a Buddhist. But I am quite drawn to Buddhism. And I think that they have some interesting things and perspectives that in the West we haven't really thought of. And one of the things that they teach is that I could be wrong. And I think that that's about, don't close things down completely, and accept that there is so much we don't know. But more importantly, I think what they're also trying to say is that being right is kind of like a self-defence mechanism.

DAVID

And I’m aware of that. But there's no self-defence of being right because I want to be wrong. I desperately want there to be a God. Right. And it depresses me enormously that there is no God. So there is no self-defence in it. If someone could show me tomorrow, prove that there were a God, I would be overjoyed. And this is different from most atheists, most atheists are, you know, they dismiss the idea of God, they dismiss the need in human beings for there to be a God. They dismiss religion, which I don't do at all. I think religion is key to understand what it means to be human. And because I'm part of an ethnic minority, I also understand how close religion is to identity. And all those things are very important. However, I know there is no God.

CRAIG

Let me come at it a different way then. The philosopher Karl Popper wrote a really influential essay which was talking about the limits of human knowledge, and how there are moments in human history where we have something revelatory happens, which makes us shift our understanding so completely. Does that give you any compose for thought?

DAVID

No, because that's what's happened throughout the years with religion historically, I think I say this in the book as well, is that the argument you're putting forward at the moment is one you do get quite a lot with sort of more modern, as it were, believers, people like Russell, who's a friend of mine, Russell Brand, who talks about the limits of perception, which is why I say stone is hard and then I say, stone is not hard, because I'm aware of the scientific limits of perception. And it's why I talk about dark matter in the book, is that 94% of the universe, we don't really know what it is. And historically, what happens is, is that people who are in control of the discourse of truth will tell us that that is God, and over years and years and years, some of that has been eked away at, and it's become science. So what used to be told us like, we don't really understand what causes the rain, it's God, no, no, no, we do understand it's, this is how it works, science-wise. But here's my problem, is there are many, many things we don't understand. Why should any of them be God? Clearly it's a narrative we've created, why should any of it be God? There's really no sense that it should be. So I say in the book at some point, and I say it causes me anxiety to write it because I'm frightened of death, that we don't know what lots of things in the universe are. Here's a space for, in 300 years’ time, there's books [unintelligible] this for someone to tell us what it is, because they will, we will find out more about it. That's how history has worked.

CRAIG

So I think you will probably write that when we die, we don't continue, certainly not in meaningful way, and I certainly don't think we go and sit on a cloud and start worshipping God for all eternity. But I think what I slightly struggled with in your book was the sense that you seem to be rejecting the spiritual, you know, you seem to be saying, we can explain the rain, or we can explain the sunset. So there's nothing spiritual that would be found there. Except it does do something to us sometimes, doesn't it? And that there are things that we can't explain. When I was a kid, I always used to wonder about consciousness and like, why is it that I am uniquely inside here? And why do I uniquely understand the world from my perspective and who I am. And as I've got older, and I've read around the subject, there's this thing called the hard question of consciousness, which science massively struggles with, that we're not just a series of biochemical reactions that create thought and emotion and feeling that actually there is something other there that we can't quite explain. And again, I don't think that that means there's some kind of Judeo-Christian God, but it does mean that you should tread carefully.

DAVID

Well, I don't know, see, I don't think consciousness is a hard question. It isn't. I mean l, maybe I should say this in the book, because maybe it's not clear. But I've talked a lot in the book about story and about narrative and about how what we do is we narrativise existence, we narrativise our own lives, we narrativise life. And that's what you're doing there. You know, our perceptions are designed to create a coherent image of your life, our lives, whatever, that is what consciousness is. And that's, seems like we have a complex enough neurological system to do that. And also, by the way, I absolutely love wonder, and I absolutely feel love.

CRAIG

I felt very sad at one stage, when I came across, you know, the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, you know, I have of late, I know not wherefore I lost all my mirth. And I remember just thinking, reading that, that it was almost extraterrestrial that a human being was capable of writing such amazing, beautiful language that encapsulated something in an extraordinary way. And of course, I'm bringing something to it. But to just say that, that's just us doing that, well, why are we doing that? And what is it, in essence, doing that? And I suppose what I'm saying is, I'm not trying to say there is a God who judges us and whatever. But there is a spiritual side to our nature and it felt to me like that in getting rid of God you got rid of that.

DAVID

But you see Craig, I'm afraid Craig that reduces it for me. Shakespeare's talent, ability with words, ability to understand human existence, to imagine that some kind of spiritual vibration is going on there between all of humankind, is to diminish his greatness as a poet, because his greatness as a poet is to do with his specific, incredible use of language and insight. And of course, it's beautiful, really beautiful, that that can touch you and me five centuries later, but it doesn't in any way mean that something evanescent is going on, something not real.

CRAIG

No, I don’t think it’s like, somebody creates a spell-

DAVID

No, but here's my point. Let me say it like this. They are just words of a page, and isn't it incredible what power just words on a page can have?

CRAIG

You are a very good writer, you’ve done some amazing things, and you love story, that kind of thing. It just seems to me like that, in a way you’re sort of reducing Sheakespeare to saying it’s just marks on a page-

DAVID

No, I’m not. How am I doing that?

CRAIG

But if you’re saying that a sunset is just something that we bring an interpretation to, it’s-

DAVID

No, that's exactly wrong, Craig. Sorry. That's exactly wrong. I mean, it worries me that you've misinterpreted the book from that point of view. But the sunset, objectively, is fire created by nuclear fission in the sky, a star. Shakespeare brings total magic to - oh, not Shakespeare, I can't think of Shakespeare describing- but actually, I can, ‘my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’… It's not a very good example. But someone who writes a poem, writes of the sun, in an extraordinary way, is bringing all sorts of magic and wonder to it, it doesn't change the fact that it's nuclear fission in the sky, objectively.

CRAIG

Yeah… I suppose what it is, is that there may be some point in the future where we can reduce and measure everything and break everything down to a certain degree and explain why it is that certain great artists are as extraordinary as they are, but it seems to me like that, that you're kind of losing something in the process there. And that there are definitely parts to us as human beings, which need to be moved and touched by sunset, which I guess I would call the kind of, I think spiritual is a difficult word because people start associating it with God. But it's definitely a side of our nature that when we spend time focusing on it, we feel better and engage better. So it seems to me that actually a lot of your book is coming at it from the perspective of how sad it is that we don't continue. And actually, I think a lot of Eastern philosophies would say you're looking at it the wrong way. It's extraordinary that you got to be here. It's extraordinary that you got to live and love and touch and write.

DAVID

Yeah, but again, you see… I agree with that, maybe. But you're not, again, understanding the wailing child at the heart of this book, even though it’s a clever book, it is written by wailing child, and the wailing child is saying, yeah, yeah, you know, brilliant, I got to be here. And there's enormous amount of chance, probability that I wouldn't have got to be here. And so I should just savour it or whatever. But I'm a wailing child. And I am refusing to accept the maturity of what you're saying. Deliberately. Because I think at heart, none of us completely, really believe what you’re saying. At heart, we all would wish to be someone who could say be happy and content with what we had and what we experienced, and live in the moment, like Eastern philosophies suggest, but it's a bit of a lie.

CRAIG

But let me have one more go on it. I was trying to put my finger on, you know, something that I felt uncomfortable with in the book. And as I say it, people should read it, it is a great book, and it's certainly incredibly stimulating and thought-provoking. But there's a bit where you start telling the story of a pig, who had been separated from its owner. And then many years later, the pig rushes up to the gate, and there's this connection there. And what I thought was quite interesting was that your conclusion from that is, that man, you know, is wrong not to occasionally see that animals are quite similar to us. And that there's a kind of slightly pompous scientific look of things that say that any anthropomorphization is completely wrong. And you say, clearly, animals are closer to us than we would like to admit.

DAVID

I mean, we're just looking at this on different sides of the coin, really. You're saying, why doesn’t that prove to you that there is, you know, something extraordinary going on? I think it just shows me that we are all animals. And we're all capable, within ourselves, within our consciousnesses of thinking lovely and wonderful things, including love and empathy, and humour, and language and whatever. Animals have those things, too, because we are strands of DNA.

CRAIG

I agree that we're looking at it from two sides of the same coin. I guess what I'm interested in is the fact that you're basically arguing that there's something special in the pig that deserves respect that we haven't traditionally given it because there's just something more there perhaps than we've perhaps acknowledged in the past, and why is that worthy of respect. If it was just an animal that just existed and didn't really matter, then why not just dismiss it? It's because it's got a kind of consciousness and intelligence and an ability to connect, that is what is actually interesting and special.

DAVID

I don't agree,. I guess if you want to reduce this, is quite complex argument with, nuanced thing we're having here, that what I'm seeing in the pig is something spiritual. The pig has a brain that is quite similar to ours really. And that therefore can feel things that are similar to ours, some of which we consider to be spiritual - I consider them to be part and parcel of what it means to be human, which is love and empathy and concern, you know.

CRAIG

And there were so many arguments, you get hooked on semantics and that kind of thing. But anyway, look, I mean, let's agree that there is a coin, and we can come at it from two different sides. The one thing I just wanted to talk about, we're coming towards the end, and you've been incredibly generous with your time, we just been through the death of the Queen, and we're approaching the coronation of King Charles. And I thought what was interesting was that your reflections on her death, with a lot of respect for the queen, that there was actually something more interesting in her humanity than her superheroness. And I thought that that linked back to the beginning of our conversation.

DAVID

Yeah. That's a really interesting point. I haven’t really thought about that.

CRAIG

That we almost treated her in her death as a kind of superhero, rather than acknowledging her as a very interesting, thoughtful, capable human being, who certainly had lots of screw-ups in her life, and children messing up in public and a wayward husband and all that kind of thing.

DAVID

That's a really interesting point Craig. Yes, it relates to how I think about my mother is what you're saying. And that's true, because what I'm talking about with my mother, and what I’m talking about with the queen is deification. I use the word idealisation earlier. But yes, it's a type of deification, particularly after death, with the Queen, of course, it would be happening while she was alive as well, because that's part of her being a monarch that people want to project otherworldly notions on and an idea of her as being sort of 100% good. And you're right, which I hadn't completely considered how that links up, but you're right, that relates to my refusal to deify my mother, when people come up to me at a funeral, and say that she's wonderful. Because it's lesser to her, it's lesser to her as a complex human being.

CRAIG

And it's also that we feel that we can't actually face up to things. So a lot of things in this conversation, like the nature of death, then the reality of who people were and are, it's interesting that we feel that we have to try to sort of hide that or cover it over or gloss it over. But actually, I think, this is a podcast about wisdom, that the more you're just open and just talk about it, then it goes easier.

DAVID

Yeah, but then it comes back to what you're saying about Eliot to some extent, which is this sort of fear that if you say, actually, he was anti-Semite, then you might have to end up censoring his entire [unintelligible] rather than thinking, okay, now we have to fold that complex truth into the other complex truth, that he was a great artist, and some or other had wisdom and insight and great linguistic skills to portray that about humanity, but had, and yet was this thing that is evil, and obscene and whatever, how do we make that make sense. And when Mr. Fitch refuses to talk about it, that's the wrong thing to do. Similarly, you're right, the Queen was not a deity, and to make her into a deity is to, in some way, do a disservice, because it's more interesting to think of her as this complex woman with all sorts of issues and all sorts of problems, than bowing to her coffin.

CRAIG

Yeah, and I respected the Queen and felt sad when she died, but I did feel that I wanted to turn the television and the radio off because I said, look, can we just have sensible conversations about a human being? I want to bring up one final quote, which I think, my favourite quote, I've been reading a lot of your stuff and listening to a lot of stuff. And you said, life, for all its crapness, is brilliant.

DAVID

Sounds like me. Somehow I did a game the other day on the radio, when people were saying, did you say this, or did someone else say it? And I couldn't remember about half of the things that I said, but I sort of based on whether they sounded like me. And that does sound like me. Life has got many terrible things. But even the terrible things are life. And so as people say about growing older, it's better than the alternative.

CRAIG

Yeah and I think, it’s in danger of becoming a cliche I think of these kind of conversations, but I do think that when I stop and pause and feel grateful, despite all the trials and tribulations, and sometimes difficulties, that’s when I feel better about things in life in general.

DAVID

It's social media partly, because social media bends to the negative, because I think it's part of the way that people create identity on social media is to be angry, because it allows you to champion you know, how things should be. And whatever side of the political spectrum you are, you can find something that's wrong. But there are a lot of people out there who actually really respond to something funny, witty, positive, and, without wishing to sound, you know…

CRAIG

Pollyannaish?

DAVID

Pollyannaish, that's the word I'm looking for. Without wish to sound Pollyannaish about it, I am often cheered by how much people are into the small details of existence, that comes back to comedy to some extent that sometimes I say something on social media or on stage or on TV or whatever, but it's just a little thing I've noticed about life and people respond to it. And that is when I think all people who live on this Earth share quite a lot of stuff. And it's always quite joyful to share it.

CRAIG

The one question that we always ask at the end of these interviews is, if there was one piece of wisdom that you could share with people, what would it be? What would yours be?

DAVID

When I've been asked what my motto is, don’t know if people have mottos anymore, do they really, but if I did have a motto, it would be ‘the truth is always complex’. I think we live in a time where people look more and more and more for simple truths to explain the world. I personally would put God into that, even though there are many complexities with the imagination of him. I'll call him ‘him’ for the moment. But I think he's a simple truth, conspiracy theories are simple truth, people being wholly evil or wholly good, is a simple truth. But the truth is always complex.

CRAIG

In a way, that for me feels like an appeal, to be grown-up about things, like we talked a lot about the complexity of your mother having an affair and being born in Nazi Germany or T. S. Eliot, brilliant, amazing poet, but also an anti-Semite. It is complex and messy and sludgy. And when you try and look at it in a grown-up adult, balanced way, I think that that also contributes to things going easier in the world rather than a very binary approach to everything.

DAVID

Yes. It's interesting, though, because quite a lot of this podcast I've also said that I am a child, and I want to be able to throw off the shackles and the pretence of adulthood. But then again, the truth is always complex.

CRAIG

And that's a good place to end. David, I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for taking the time. And I really did enjoy The God Desire, it's a great book and people should read it.

DAVID

Thank you very much, Craig, great to talk to you.

CRAIG

Huge thanks to David Baddiel for being able to share so much and occasionally disagree agreeably. I learned a lot. Our next guest is the film and TV star Jack Davenport.

Jack Davenport

I have lived and worked in a world for three decades in which people have to be a weird combination of an open wound and bulletproof.

CRAIG

If you want an insight into what it's like being in the middle of some of the biggest productions, and how to stay balanced when you're at the centre of attention, you don't want to miss it. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, please do, and why not leave a review? Desperately Seeking Wisdom was produced by Sarah Parker for Creators Inc. Until next time, goodbye for now.