What is the first news event you can recall?
Chelsea winning the FA Cup in 1970 (after a replay with Leeds). I was six. My older brother got excited and jumped out of his seat, and because I basically copied him in all things at the time, that was how I started supporting Chelsea. The first serious news event was probably the UK going into the Common Market, which I remember because my dad had a sweepstake at his work about what the result was going to be and let me put 5p into it. I can’t remember if I won anything.
What is the biggest problem of all?
Unoriginally, I would have to say climate change. I also think that the way that social media promotes a very simplistic, binary, antagonistic notion of identity that destroys nuance and truth in all complex conversations is only going to get worse.
What is your favourite quotation?
The job of art is “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” John Updike.
Which of your ancestors or relatives are you most proud of?
My show My Family: Not the Sitcom was about my mother, Sarah Baddiel, and how she had a long-term affair with a golfing memorabilia specialist. That might not seem like a celebration of my pride in her, but in the context of her background—she was a refugee from Nazism and only just escaped with her life—it actually was. It was a comic hymn to a woman who’d managed against the odds to live an exotic life.
Is identity politics a force for good?
Good and bad. Unquestionably there have been, and still are, social structural inequities and conscious and unconscious biases which mean that minorities across the board have been less represented and included in our lives than they should have been, and identity politics has operated as a useful correction to that. At the same time, the idea that everything comes down to a fixed notion of identity and power—that all identities are bound by an absolute, normally oppressed status within society—doesn’t allow for individual variation in people’s lives, which isn’t helpful and in fact is in its own way, oppressive. The truth is always complex.
What have you changed your mind about?
Children. Not in a 360-degree way—I didn’t not want to have children, I just vaguely assumed I would at some point—but after I had them the idea of not having them, for me, felt absurd. It felt like while I had never realised it before, parenthood was something I was supposed to do. I didn’t realise how defining it would be for me.
Are you addicted to social media?
Yes. But not as badly as I was. I used to think I should interact with everyone who sent me a tweet—now it’s more like I broadcast but don’t necessarily respond. I do still sometimes, but then I get too many responses. More importantly, that’s where your attention and mental health gets degraded, thinking you need to be involved with every single conversation across this enormous map of mass communication.
What would people be surprised to know about you?
I’m Jewish. That’s a joke, by the way.
What is the last piece of music, play, novel or film that brought you to tears?
Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard.
What do you most regret?
We live in a weird no-regrets culture, where everybody has to always say that they don’t regret anything and would do it all again exactly the same. But I think any thinking person is constantly assailed by regret. It’s hard to pick the biggest one, but I certainly wish I hadn’t let my mother convince me she was OK and just needed to dose up on painkillers the day before she died.
David Baddiel’s “Jews Don’t Count” is out in paperback from TLS Books on 3rd February
