The 12 Books of Christmas | David Baddiel on Family, Jewishness, and the Healing Power of Comedy
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Decisions. Come on, you've been at it for weeks. Just buy it already. You're right. Crossover it is. Decisions decided. Whether you know exactly what you want or like to take your time, buy your car the convenient way with Carvana. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our 11th pick of the year is an event we staged in October with comedian and author David Baddiel.

He was live on stage on the 21st of October 2024 at London's Union Chapel to talk about his hilarious new memoir titled My Family. Joining him to discuss it all was actor and writer Sanjeev Bhaskar, who is best known for his television comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me. Now let's join our host Sanjeev Bhaskar live on stage with David Baddiel. APPLAUSE

Welcome everyone to this Intelligence Squared event. Our guest this evening needs no introduction. He's already been named, so you know that's not going to be a surprise. But David is an author, he's a comedian, he's a screenwriter, he's written and performed in loads of successful TV shows, the Mary Whitehouse Experience, at the beginning of the deal in Skinner, Unplanned, amongst others. He's the author of several successful books.

children's books as well, but the best-selling polemic, Jews Don't Count, which was turned into a documentary by Channel 4. And his latest book is the subject of this evening's chat, an instant Sunday Times bestseller, My Family, the memoir. And also, I should add that David has done three live shows, My Family, Fame, not the musical, Trolls, Not the Dolls. And from November the 9th,

They're showing my family, not the sitcom, on Sky. And in subsequent weeks it will be the other two. So please welcome David Baddiel. Hello. Hello. So David, I mean, first of all, I have to say, I mean, you know this, but I'm letting you in on this actually, that I think I was about five chapters in when I contacted you to say I'm really, really loving this.

And you said, "Contact me again when you've finished it." And I loved it even more by the end of it. So, it's funny, it's really moving, it's incredibly insightful. I found a lot to get for it personally as well. But it's an unusual memoir in that it's not a memoir, it's not a celebrity memoir about your career. No. It's about... Or neither is it about your nuclear family in terms of your wife and your kids. No.

Although they're all mentioned. They are. So could you explain what the "my family" the memoir means? Yeah, so...

My family and I don't know if this is true of people in general But when I think of even though I have children and I've had children for 23 years When I say my family I kind of think of when I was a kid I kind of Instinctively think my default family is my mum and dad and my two brothers and to some extent my grandparents

parents. And that's just a sort of childish thing. I mean, one of the things I think about being a comedian is it reveals, I don't know if you believe this too, but it reveals a truth about adulthood, which is everyone is just winging adulthood. Like there's some, I'm going to say this, some older people in this room and me, and I think everyone at heart feels about 12 or 13. There's only one person in the world

whose age in his soul matches up to the age he in fact is and his name is Michael Gove, but everyone else in the world gets older but feels about 13 or 14 which might be why when I write a book called my family it is about my parents and my grandparents to some extent and my brothers and but that's also obviously because that's where the formative stuff happened and then the other reason is

I'm very obsessed with truth. I'm sort of massively, weirdly, annoyingly obsessed with truth. Now that's something else which in the book I'm... There's a lot of footnotes in the book and that's partly because I'm always trying to qualify what I'm saying. And one of the things is it's annoying, I think, when people, especially when famous people say, well, if I have one fault, it's just that I'm too honest. I mean, it's the sort of thing Prince Andrew fucking says, basically. LAUGHTER

He says honourable, but, you know, whatever. And it's annoying, but I'm not trying to claim it as a kind of absurd, like, moral plus. It's more like a type of incontinence, I think. It's a type of emotional and verbal incontinence that I've monetised in my life, and that's worked quite well for me, right? But the reason I mention it is I think the wellspring for this book, as indeed it was the wellspring for my family, not the sitcom when I did it as a show, was I went to my mother's funeral.

And at my mother's, it's good that I went, nice of me. It was good of you. I said that like that's odd, but I think people do generally. But when I was at my mum's funeral, a lot of people, many of whom I didn't know, were coming up to me and saying, telling me that my mother was wonderful. And the thing that bound all these people together was that they didn't really know her.

Not really. And after a while I started to think this is kind of weird because it feels to me like a sort of second and more profound erasure than her actual death. Because what we do when people die is we don't tell the truth about them.

We lie about them because we think we mustn't speak ill of the dead. But that does a profound disservice to the dead because it does not allow them to do the thing we're meant to do in memorialising them, which is sort of make them live again.

genuinely in the memory. And my mum died very suddenly, it was very shocking and it felt like, where is she? Where's she gone? And in order to try and preserve her, I felt this very strong urge to tell the absolute truth about my mother. I think I say in the book because the dead, despite what we might like to think are not angels,

And to tell the truth about my mother, and indeed my dad as well, and probably everyone, but certainly my mother, you're telling a truth which involves an enormous amount of sort of madness.

Weird, mad, fucked up behavior, which might be something which in a different memoir might feel like this is very angry and bitter and whatever. But I feel that because I'm sort of very, very comfortable in my own skin. You know this about me. And so whatever weird, transgressive damage happened to me when I was young, I don't see it as damage.

I see it as kind of sculpture, accidental sculpture, that has made me who I am. And so it's a celebration of all this fucked-up behaviour that happened in my childhood. And that's what makes this book different from Spare by Prince Harry. LAUGHTER Also, I don't recall in Spare a picture of a womble in it, I think. So those are the two major differences. It was there, but I think it was Prince Philip. LAUGHTER

You talked about the truth thing, and that was one of the things that I got from the show when I went to see the show several times. Yeah. Was that it was a celebration of the truth in all its kind of unvarnished glory. And you talk about in the book as well about your mum's funeral, that there is this kind of sanitised version which doesn't feel true. Yeah. And in terms of kind of accessing all of that, the unvarnished truth...

It strikes me as, for me, it would be quite difficult. Was it a difficult path to tread? No. I mean, that is to do with me. And I think that that might be fair. And I'm also asking because you've got two brothers. Yes. Who have a vested interest in the story. Yes. Okay. So that's two different things, but they're both relevant. So, like...

Later on in this book, and to some extent it's perhaps its high point for some people, I do quite a deep textual analysis of my mum's erotic poetry. A book of erotic poetry that I found dedicated to her lover.

golfing memorabilia salesman that she became obsessed with in the mid 70s and the book I found it after her death when we were clearing out her sort of staff I found this book it's called feelings I think named after the 1970s song feelings is it by Charles Aznavour I'm not sure but anyway feeling you know that book that song and I opened the book and almost immediately there are these incredible

anatomical descriptions of my mother's vagina as acted upon by her golfing memorabilia lover and a lot of people I think would normally close such a book a lot of children would close such a book and think I must never see this again but I thought our material that's what I thought

And that is to do with the sort of sliver of ice, I guess, that is in a writer's heart. But at the same time, I did think this is fucking hilarious. And I think she sort of wanted this to be published, maybe not quite in the way that I've done it, but nonetheless, I think she did. And so in terms of like how you...

to speak about my brothers. That's a key issue because I am, I've written a book called The God Desire and The God Desire is about being a fundamentalist atheist, which I am, but sort of really wanting God to exist. But one of the things about being that type of person is I don't feel that I need to worry about the dead and what the dead think.

I think I used to do a joke years ago. I did a joke about People talking about what my grandfather would have wanted and I what he would have wanted I always imagine when people talk about what he would have wanted is if he was still alive But what my grandfather would have wanted if he was still alive was to be dug up quite well I thought I thought it died, but actually took a while. I

Anyway, so I don't believe in in the spirits looking down at me So the people who matter are the living and their memories do matter So I did speak to both my brothers about this. My younger brother said you're not fucking doing it And my older brother was much more. He sort of said look I could talk to you about this project this is before the stand-up show for hours, but I

I know you, you're going to do this, aren't you? And I said, yeah. And I kind of said, you'll just have to trust me. It's an act of love. It's an act of celebration. And it might not seem like that because he knew what was coming, but it is. And then this thing happened which proved that to be true, kind of

Empirically proved it to be true, which is I did the show It began it was in the West End for two runs But before that it was at a place called the chocolate factory some of you may know it's in borough market And it's a small theater and I do the first show and I come on afterwards for an encore the encore in that show was a Q&A and

ad lib Q&A because I knew people would have loads of questions and there's all these really important people in the first night in the room Michael Billington the drama critic of the Guardian and all these people and they've all got their hands up and I say I'm sorry I can't take any questions until I hear what my older brother is

And the book is dedicated to Ivor because my parents were so mad. The only reason I'm not insane is Ivor Baddiel. There's no question about this. Ivor, who is a bit insane, was the buffer. So anyway, I basically said, what do you think, Ivor? And he said, and his voice just came out of the darkness, oh, I loved it. And then he said, I loved it because it felt like she was in the room.

And that's moving, but it also is artistically job done. Because I wanted, as I said earlier, to recreate my mother in her actuality. Emotionally, I wanted to do that because she vanished in a way that felt to me like almost like made no sense. I don't know if everyone else feels like this when their parents go, but because my mum went very quickly, it just felt like to me this is not processable, how much of a gap there is in my life. And so...

I for saying that proved something about it which then proved to be true as I did the show and as people have talked to me about this book which is I feel like I've met your mother and I'm not sure you do that by saying oh what a wonderful person they were after they've died. No, I think that's very true. It's something again that you mention in the book which is about generational trauma and just a little bit about

Particularly your mum's background, which you have a lot more detail about. Yeah. I just wondered if you could just kind of illustrate some of that. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

My mum was born in Nazi Germany. She was born in a place called Konigsberg, which is now called Kaliningrad. She only got out, and my grandparents who also got out, by the skin of their teeth. And actually this is one of the reasons why I wrote a book. Because there were things I could not cover in a stand-up show. And one thing I couldn't cover, I think, was the enormous anxiety, I think, that my grandparents must have felt

Germany in 1939. So they had been quite wealthy and they'd lost everything and my grandfather Ernst Fabian and I'm not sure how many people know this because I think people think of concentration camps as only existing during the Second World War but in fact after Kristallnacht

lot of Jews, something like 30,000 Jews were sent, Jews who had basically had their houses and shops destroyed and synagogues destroyed were then sent to concentration camps. That included my grandfather who was sent to Dachau and he was there for six months during which time my grandfather basically sold, my grandmother sold whatever they had left which was very little in order to bribe officials to get him out of Dachau. Then they had a very short amount of time

during which time they wanted to get to Britain. In fact, they wanted to get to America, but they didn't get to America, but they wanted to get to Britain and to just enter Britain, they needed to have to show a thousand pounds in a British bank account, loads of money then. And again, I'm not sure how many people know this, but there's like, you know, it was very, very difficult, I think because of Kindertransport,

have a notion of Britain opening its doors to refugee Jews during the Holocaust. That's not true. It was really, really difficult for, you know, Jews who were not part of the Kindertransport to get to Britain and actually, sorry, I'm now slightly overdoing this information, but it is really interesting, I think, a secret part of British history, which I've written something else about, a novel is that my grandfather was interned

on the Isle of Man during, after 1940 when they got here. So what there is are these letters from my grandmother mainly because she learned English to things like the Jewish Refugee Agency which are so anxiety-creating for me to read because they make me think, what am I doing here? I can only just be here by absolute chance because they say things like,

right, we're trying to get you a visa card. This is in like March 1939. You've now had a baby. We didn't know you were having a baby. We're trying to get her an entry card as well. And if you hang on, we might get one. And it's all desperate. It's desperate. But they get in. They managed to get here in August 1939. And then my grandchild is interned in June 1940. Now, in June 1940, there was a lot of, a bit like there is now, migrant hysteria.

whereby basically the right-wing press, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, because the government was suppressing information about the Holocaust for essentially anti-Semitic reasons, people didn't know why there were Germans in Britain. There were by then like maybe 90,000, 100,000 German Jews in Britain

And ordinary British people and the papers were kind of like, what are these Germans doing here? They must be fifth columnists, right? Spies. Spies. So Churchill, who did know why they were there, just reacted to that and said, yes, arrest the lot. He said, collar the lot is what he said in 1940. And they got sent mainly to the Isle of Man. My grandfather got sent to the Isle of Man. I must just tell you something about that for anyone who doesn't know.

The Isle of Man is an amazing thing. So basically the German Jewish refugees are, there's about 90,000 of them there on the Isle of Man and the British do a very British thing, right? These places are not like Auschwitz, right? They just basically in a slightly lazy way, they put barbed wire around all the B&Bs and then they just leave the Jews to it. And what the Jews do is within about six weeks, there's a fucking university on the Isle of Man. LAUGHTER

There is, like the Amadeus Quartet form on the Isle of Man. There's six Nobel Prize winners in Douglas in 1940. It's incredible, right? And there's like exhibitions and whatever. And my grandfather, it turns out, has a brilliant time, right? It turns out like he told me, oh, it was really nice on the Isle of Man. So that's one thing. But meanwhile, it's incredibly traumatic for my mother. This is the thing, in terms of what you were saying about intergenerational trauma. You have to imagine that my mother, as a

as a very young girl is taken away from Germany, arrives in Britain, they're in a hostel for about three weeks, then they get put in one room in Cambridge for some reason, then her father is arrested, then she's living with her mum who speaks German during the war and people think she's a spy so she can't get a job. You know, I mean it's unbelievably traumatic and also all her family beyond that is dead.

So the level of trauma is amazing. But one thing I try and say in the book is this is awful and terrible but I think it came out in not a tragic way but a tragicomic way. You do. And you know you do have letters that your grandmother sent

As you mentioned, them being told that they have to go to Berlin to talk to the British embassy or whatever to get the extra visa for the child. All of this kind of pressure. And also, once your grandfather was interned in the Isle of Man, the letters that your grandmother sent worrying about his kind of...

There's one incredibly really sad one where she says that she's worried because his anxiety has caused him to lose his voice. Yeah. And I can't remember, did I print the one about him losing his watch? Is that in there? No, maybe not. I don't remember the watch, the voice. Okay, yeah, no, there's one where she says he's lost his voice. I have another one where she says the only thing we got out of Germany was this watch. He can't even tell you where it is because he's lost his voice. I mean, all these things were news to me, by the way, because I...

I don't know if anyone else has been through this, it's a rather bleak thing to say, but it's true, is that when your first parent dies, you kind of lazily don't clear out their stuff, if they stayed together. Because basically my dad was still there in their house, so I thought, I'll look for some stuff. I found this book of erotic poetry, that'll do. Whereas obviously when he died, I had to clear out everything. And that's when I found loads, loads of more stuff, which is slightly what inspired writing the book. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

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So that was a bit about your mum's background. Your dad's family were settled in Swansea. Yes, so my dad... Sorry, I was going to say, was he the first person to go to university? Yeah. From his family? Yes. So my dad, I think, going back a few more generations...

they were also fleeing Jews, obviously. I imagine there's some Jews in this audience and they will know that one of the things about being Jews, if you do any kind of ancestry thing, if you do who do you think you are, which not that many people will have done, but I've done, is it's interesting because when I did who do you think you are, I don't know if anyone's seen that, it was 2004, but I actually had a bit of a breakdown in the middle of it. And the breakdown was because I got onto the Isle of Man and they said, oh, we think

this is the room that your grandfather was interned and it was a disused Chinese restaurant and there was just like noodles everywhere, right?

And I stood in the middle of it and I said, I'm pretty sure that Ian Hislop at this moment is standing in front of a 17th century manor house and saying, it's exactly the same as it was when my great-great-grandfather... But if you're Jewish, it's just people fleeing and sort of staying where they can and in hovels of one sort. And everything's broken. I went and saw the brick factory that my grandparents used to own, a brick factory in Königsberg, and now that's just stumps.

It's just stumps and syringes because it's basically where drug addicts hang out now. And that was my Who Do You Think You Are? It was not a beautiful episode with lots of lovely houses. It's places that have been bombed, essentially. And so, yeah, so my great-grandfather on my dad's side, he was fleeing from Russian pogroms.

In the 19th century and the story about him, which I think is an apocryphal story But I like it is that he got he was smuggling himself on a timber boat from Latvia And he was trying to get to New York as indeed my grant other grandparents were but he didn't speak any English and the boat stopped at Swansea He got off and I assumed ten years later. He had learned enough English or Welsh to say where is the Statue of Liberty?

It's a long way over there. And yeah, that's how he ended up in Swansea. And that's why like if there were about 2,000 Jews in Swansea. And one part of that, my family were ultra Orthodox, really Orthodox, and they still are. There's fromers all over that side of the family. But on my mum's side, on my dad's side, they weren't.

and he was very working class and Welsh. By the way, again, I know there are some Jewish people here, but my brother, Ivor, I sort of love this about, his wife is not Jewish, and his mother-in-law has always had problems with the fact that my dad was Welsh and Jewish.

She says to Ivor, sorry, did you just run that past me again? I know your mum was German and Jewish. They can understand that. Like American and Jewish. But Welsh and Jewish. It doesn't compute for some reason. But he was really Welsh, my dad. And yeah, very working class. He was an only child because his two brothers had died. One in childbirth and one when he was two years old. And he got out of poverty by becoming a chemist.

I don't mean like at Boots. I mean he learned chemistry and he got a PhD in inorganic chemistry and so was obsessed with science. I was like that's your salvation is science. Great. I just wanted that background just so we know where you've come from. Right. Would you care to read? I would like to read. Thank you so much. I mean you don't have to if you don't want to. I was just getting the impression that you might. Yeah.

Okay, so

I'm just going to read a few fragments. I'm actually not going to read a whole bit because I wanted to... There's something I have mentioned now, but it is really the central part of certainly my mother's story, and I guess the central part, the driving part, although there's lots of other elements, of this book. And one of the things I talk about on the way to this is I talk about various ways in which my mother was not a stereotypical Jewish mother, and that would include being frantically over-sexual.

like massively over sexual, telling you all the time about her sex life. There's one bit in "Who Do You Think You Are?" and I talk about this in the book, which was cut from "Who Do You Think You Are?" where she's supposed to be talking poignantly about her dad

his struggle to get away from the Nazis and she just starts talking about how many prostitutes he used to see every time he came up to London. And you know as I think I say in the book, you know, it's supposed to be tragic but it's a certain curveball to discover that he had a happy ending.

And she's very, very upfront about all this. And my mother's lack of boundaries and her frantic sexual upfrontness informs the central part of her story, which relates to this. And then I show you a picture of a book called Golf: The Golden Years.

which is written by my mother. This is Golf the Golden Years, the first and the most successful of four books my mother wrote about golf. Here's another one that's called Beyond the Links and she signed this one, Golfingly Yours, Sarah Baddiel. She signed all of her books

and all of her correspondence after the late 1970s in the same way. In case you're wondering, no, golfingly is not a word. And sometimes she would put little epigraphs, little poems that she would write in the front of these books. I'm going to read one of those to you now. What makes the sun shine all the year? What makes all cloudlets disappear? What binds in friendships strong, sincere? It's golf.

Be honest, who knew that was the answer? But my mother never really played golf.

In all the time she was obsessed with golf memorabilia, I was aware of her having visited a couple of pitch and putt courses, maybe the odd beachside crazy one, and that's about it. And then I talked for a while about the strangeness of golf, in particular in our house, because we were a very football-based family, and also because golf at the time was still basically barring Jews.

from being in golf clubs. But then I mentioned this man and I don't know if you can see him here but it's a man smoking a pipe and wearing a lot of golf stuff with a golf club and I say David White first appeared in our lives, that's his name, David White

first appeared in our lives in the mid-1970s, at which point he suddenly became very, very present. Here's a website called Dating Guide, which happens to have a section called How to Tell If Your Wife is Having an Affair. And it includes an interesting pointer. If your partner suddenly has new interests, such as golfing...

bowling or any other hobby you've never seen before, beware. This may be a sign that the other person is interested in this hobby, so your partner is taking it up. Perhaps we should cut to the chase. When she met David White, my mum fell madly in love with him and they went on to have a torrid affair that continued for many years. Being my mother, however, this affair involved an obsessive sidebar. In essence, she took dating guys' notion that if you're having an affair,

you might begin to show some interest in your lover's hobbies and pastimes, not as something she needed to watch in herself so as not to alert her husband, but more like a very literal instruction.

Then I show a lot of evidence of the various massive multitude ways in which golf started to completely I'm going to use the word infect our house and this time This is David White's car with a number plate 66 par my mother's car with the same number plate and

There we have the it's a sort of wall with a the British Golf Collector Society all the names the British Golf Collector Society in it with my mother and David White put together but the most importantly however is David White didn't just play golf he ran a golfing memorabilia business called Golfiana.

So did my mother, right? That's their two cars together, which is one of the strangest parts of this story. My mother's way of showing this bloke that she loved him was to set up a rival golfing memorabilia business with the same name.

I'm not sure that's even allowed under corporate copyright law. And Golfiana was a massive success. Here's a big article about my mother and her collection in Golfing Illustrated. And I mean, I'm just going to cut through it, but there's loads and loads of pictures here of the way every item in our house

every light, every picture, every ornament suddenly became a golf thing. Every bit of jewellery that my mum wore became a golf thing. And then I say, my mother's affair with David White might seem like a complicated thing to write about publicly, which it is, but one thing should be clear, my mother was not ashamed.

her affair with David White. On the contrary, she was proud of her affair with David White. She considered in a very 1970s way that having an affair was glamorous and so she would basically tell everyone about it and

Absolutely everyone including her children about it And I think one of the ways in which this need to tell people about it can be shown is in a subconscious slip Well, not that subconscious that happened later in life so round about because it this defined her life for many years and it carried on for many years and round about 2008 my mother is getting on a bit and

and she has a number of ailments, which also she was quite keen to let you know about in quite a Jewish way. But she also was very, very keen that she should be remembered as still a sexually adventurous person. And both these sides come out in an email that she writes to David White at this time, around about 2008, that he's going to be in New York. And she contacts him and she says to David White, the leukemia and now also the Crohn's disease

make me very tired, but perhaps you can join me to make the naps more interesting. It is perhaps the least enticing come online in the history of come online. So at this point some of you may be thinking, hold on, this is a private email. Is this legal to reproduce? What about the ethics of all this? How did you even get hold of it? Well,

If you look very closely at that email again, you'll see that it was cc'd to me and my older brother. C fucking c'd, not bcc'd. Oh no, nothing so discreet.

I asked her about this, I phoned her, I said, why? Why would you copy me on this email? And she said, oh, it was a mistake. A mistake, right. Oh, I've accidentally CC'd my son. Oh, and my other son, butterfingers. No, she wanted us to know. Thank you very much. I mean, I know this is a question that has been asked of you before. This was an affair that...

ran for about 20 years? Yeah, I mean, I think it had its absolute white heat sort of in between about 1975 to 1980, 81. But I definitely picked up again, normally at sort of golfing events, I think. Yeah, with the David White heat. Yes, David White heat, exactly. This is the question that's been asked, actually, and I don't know what the answer to it is, but

your dad didn't know? Yeah, well that's something I say in the book and people are confused about it, as am I, but I mean, so there's another bit for example where I tell a story that my brother tells, Ivor tells, about how one of his first girlfriends was called Tracy and he brought Tracy down to meet my mother at her stall that she had in Gray's Antique Market in Bond Street. Her stall was called Golfiana

It was opposite my dad's dinky toy stall, because by that time my dad had been made redundant from Unilever, where he'd been a chemist, and was running a dinky toy stall down there. Opposite was the Golfiana stall, but he wasn't there. And my brother introduced Tracy, and my mom started talking, mentioned David White, as she often did, and just turned to Tracy and went, my lover of 20 years, and carried on talking as if...

as if nothing had happened. She was always doing that and yes, there were a lot of red flags or indeed white ones on putting greens but

I think, and the way to put this, or the way I put it in the book, is that my dad somehow managed not to notice it. And the reason I use that construction is I don't mean that he was like a sort of cuckoldy man who was too frightened to deal with it and in denial with it. What I mean is that my dad was so male...

and so Colin Baddiel-ish that it was just a sort of, and I'm going to use a Yiddish word here, a kind of mishegas of my mother's that he couldn't be fucked with. And she had a lot of these and he wasn't bothered. I described my dad at his funeral. I said of my dad that he was a man who liked food, football and shouting, who the fucking hell is this now, every time the phone rang. And...

He was just a very, very cross, aggravated man. He had the saving grace of being really, really funny. He was a very funny bloke. And also, in his own incredibly male way, he did really love his children, I think.

But he was just not bothered about my mother and her various madnesses and he just tuned them out. And it's incredible to tune this out because it was really a loud tune that my mother was playing. And everyone knew about it. I knew about it when I was... Okay, so I'll give you an example of how I know that my dad didn't know. And this is quite late on. I'm living with Frank Skinner.

in our flat, we had a flat that we shared together when I got friendly with Frank and my dad came round to my house, so this is like late 90s

and said, "Oh, the mother," which is what he always called my mum, "left this," and it was an envelope, "left this on her desk for you." And it was an envelope with the word "David" on it, right? Nothing twigs, just the word "David." So I think, "Oh, that's a bit weird." And he's standing right in front of me. I open it, and there's a golf card. There's like a card with an old golfing scene on it. I didn't think anything of that. My mum sent everyone golf cards. My birthday, not interested in golf. She'll send me a golf card.

And so I open it and I read out loud what's written inside the card and it says, "To David, in memory of the masters where you were my master. Love, Sarah." And it's hard to say when exactly in the reading of that card out loud in front of my dad I realized it wasn't for me.

But I was not the David to whom it was addressed. Probably round about the words, the master, by the way. And by the way, I looked over at Frank and Frank fucking knew what it was about. I can tell you. He absolutely knew. But my dad said, what does that mean?

He said, "What does that mean? Why is she saying that?" And I just said, "Oh, I don't know." And that seems like... I now think back on that. I think, well, maybe that was the moment to tell him, to be honest. But I didn't because also I was a bit thrown by it because it made me think, "Oh, dear, did their relationship involve BDSM as well? Were they dressed in like, you know, Pringle Gimp masks or something?" Because, like, when you were my master at the Masters, it sounds a bit like something else might be going on. So, I think my dad...

Genuinely didn't know about it or he did know about it He he just didn't like deal with it, but not in this kind of like terrible frightened in denial way well also because I mean you've got a bit in the book where he he answers the phone Yes to David white. Yes, I should explain that. Yeah, I

That sounds like what you were there. No, I have recordings of that happening. So you might think, well, how the fuck can that be? But because my mother, I talk about my mother, both my parents were hoarders. My mother was an incredible hoarder. And by the way, I think you need to see that in context. Because hoarding, you just think, okay, that's a crazy thing to do. No, this is someone who lost everything when she was young, everything. And so therefore, I think she held on to things in her life. And one thing she held on to absolutely was her

David White obsession. And one way she did that was by every single time he rung, she would press record on her answer phone. Now, old answer phones used to be basically just cassette machines, right, that you could set to record. Now, they were supposed to flick up so that you don't record, but she would keep it pressed down and she had hundreds of cassettes with David White, with DW written on them, and these would be piled up round the house. Another red flag, I would say. But

Nonetheless, I've listened to those and before we get to that particular conversation, they are brilliant by the way because they are an audio time machine. I bought an old cassette player to listen to them and there are things in them. One thing I really, really love is discovering just how successful

golf memorabilia dealer my mother was because I sort of knew that but in this finding out the archive there's a letter from Willie Whitelaw saying thank you so much Mrs. Baddiel for sending me this golfing book and there's a phone call on one of these cassettes from Peter Alice

Right? Now, some of you will know Peter Alice was the foremost BBC golf commentator for about 30 years. There's a phone call saying, hello, Sarah, this is Peter Alice. I've got some friends around for dinner and they want to read my autobiography. I wonder, do you have a copy of my autobiography? I'm sure you will. And I'm thinking, is this fucking J.R. Hartley made flesh? I promise you, a different demographic would not laugh like that for this. But

But it's really brilliant. Anyway, there's also a phone call. Most of the tapes are David White. She deliberately kept all the messages from David White. Some of those are quite hard listening, not because I'm not bothered about the sort of slightly sexy talk, although some of it is a bit difficult because my mum puts on a sexy voice, which is slightly like the posh voice she put on for me on the phone anyway. But also, some of that stuff is just, like, annoying me.

but there's a weird bit where he gets my dad. David White calls and asks to speak to my mum and they have a long chat about the fact that my dad has one of those newfangled phones that you could walk about the house with.

And David White says, oh, I haven't got one of those. I must get one. I'm sitting in the hallway. He goes, oh, don't worry. I can take it up to Sarah. And she's asleep. So they don't get it. She doesn't get to hear about it. And it's sort of amazing. I mean, there's also another bit which I hadn't read before, which I also really love. So David White is a kind of slightly shadowy figure in many ways, although he's really in the book. And I found a letter from him. Now,

My mother and David White had a number of business dealings that went wrong, right? And they're having a big row about this by letter and David White says, in response to something my mother says, "I see in your last letter that you suggested that we have a big, you know, meeting where we sort all this out and the umpire, the sort of referee between us, should be Colin." And I'm thinking, "What?" Right?

And then he says, but I don't think that's possible because every time I've met the dear doctor, which is what he called my dad because my dad had a PhD, the dear doctor, he's been rude and boorish to me. And I think, well, you are fucking his wife, David, so maybe that was reasonable. But then I say, actually, to be fair, he was like that with everyone. So this was the only time it was right in terms of a stop clock being right twice a day. Anyway, so yeah, there's a lot of weird shit going down.

One of the things that comes up a lot in the book, actually, are things that your dad describes as aggravation. Yes. And so one of the reasons you kind of suggest that

he didn't know and couldn't be bothered with it because it would just be aggravation. Yes, that's absolutely true. And that extends to other things as well, right? Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, so I think that was my dad's main thing in life is that my dad wanted to avoid aggravation. Almost everything was aggravation. His children undeniably were aggravation. His wife was aggravation. His job was aggravation. Losing his job was aggravation. I mean,

He was a very clever man, my dad, but he was kind of an animal at some level. He was like a very clever animal. Like when he sneezed, I have never heard a sound like my dad sneezing. He actually would say a 'chew' but he would say 'ahoo' without the 'c' unbelievably loudly. And then sometimes he would sleep for no reason in the middle of the front room. He would suddenly go to sleep as a sleep on the floor.

So he was like a sort of wild animal who was very clever, I think, my dad. And, yeah, aggravation was the thing that he was trying to avoid. I mean, there's a bit in the book, but I can't even remember it exactly. Oh, I'd have to find it where... So my mum thinks he's having an affair. Well, that's what I was going to say. Right, is that the bit you referred to? Yeah, yeah. I would have to find that bit, because I can't remember the exact details of it, and I would like to be able to if I can. Do you know where it is? I don't. It's kind of...

hang on so it's basically your mum held on to one car yeah okay that's the bit i mean i love that bit but i don't i don't know if i can find it oh here it is i found it all right okay so there's a weird bit where my mom i actually hear my mom having a conversation with her lawyer where she's talking about getting possibly getting divorced from my dad and she says that he's like

Having affairs or whatever and I don't think this is true. I think that fitted in with my mum's version of her Jilly Cooper life basically and I because my dad it was too much aggravation for him to have an affair and then I do find this thing which I'll read to you Which I do love so much because I found this in my mum's stuff

So I think my mum kept this as truth that my dad was having an affair. It's a card that says to Colin, greetings and best wishes for Christmas and New Year from Rita. Rita Verma, brackets, sorry, Unilever. That's it, right? So...

I say, again, context is everything. It's the fact that I found this card buried in a basket of letters and cards and poems written by my mother to David White, all of which are overflowing with extreme idiosyncratic eroticism that delights me.

I think it's possible its placement there is because she wanted to think of this as something she'd found that confirmed that my dad was indeed the Lothario he needed to be to fit into her model of her life. Except it so isn't. It's not just the lack of passionate words, it's the lack of words. Almost all the words beyond "to Colin" are expended on one thing, which is identifying who sent this letter.

You can, I think, sometimes read Sarah Baddiel's love letters to David White and wonder if he really gave her much thought. But if Rita Verma was Colin Baddiel's lover, then really something has gone awry in the you-were-always-on-my-mind paradigm. Because plainly, when writing this card, Rita thought, will he know who I am? She got to Rita and thought, I'd better put my surname. And then thought, still not sure, better put where I work.

With him that'll probably do if it's a love letter It's either a fabulous double bluff designed to thwart discovery or there was very little actual love in the love affair If it is a piece of erotica it is as the great Sean Locke phrase has it a challenging wank

I just say, I've never read that bit before and you've chosen the bit that probably delights me most in the entire book. I love it. I found that bit just marvellous. It's the little increments. It's from Rita to Verma to Unilever. It's a build. It's brilliant. I love it.

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How aware of that dysfunctionality were you when you were that age? Well, I think that one of the things about

You know, one of the things about families is that everyone accepts what their lives are, what their universes are when they're a kid, right? And so I accepted a lot of weird stuff. I did accept that my mum suddenly became really interested in golf. I mean, it seemed odd to me, but then my mum had done odd things before, like, for example,

My mum was someone who I think couldn't relate to people on a normal level only by what they liked.

and she used to focus on this. I think I talked at one point about how I once said that I liked Marilyn Monroe having seen an old film, even then it would have been an old film, and she suddenly bought me endless pictures of Marilyn Monroe to put on my walls and was still, well up to her death, sending me first day covers of Marilyn Monroe stamps and stuff like that, even though I wasn't actually from the 1950s.

And similar to that, this is something that's quite important in the book, is that my first books that I read when I was a kid, children's books, were Billy Bunter books. And that was because my mum used to collect children's books before she collected golf stuff. And she gave me one of those. I said I quite liked it. Next thing I knew, there were hundreds. There were hundreds in my room. And then she enrolled me without me asking in something called the Old Boys Book Club.

Now the old boys book club still exists and it's a place where they discuss Billy Bunter books which were written by the way in the 1920s by a bloke called Frank Richards and I was taken when I was 11 to meetings of the old boys book club left there by my mum I was 11 everyone else was 70 I mean God knows what might have gone on to be honest, but nothing nothing terrible happened except I was extremely extremely bored

And I mean, I might as well tell you, shall I tell you how the book ends with a reference to that? I feel it's a bit of a spoiler. Yeah, let's save that. All right, we'll save that. Let's save that and see where it goes. But yeah, it's a lovely end to the book. But no, just in those terms, it's like in terms of answering your question is I knew, I mean, there's a book also, the book opens with David White in our garden trying to teach me how to play golf.

and it's deliberately written to sound as if something really terrible is going on, and then it is. Because he's teaching me how to play fucking golf, which is a sport that even then I thought, this is for twats, this sport. But he really wanted to teach me how to play it.

And I, you know, it was a weirdly transgressive moment, but comic, because there's a football goal in our garden over there. I'm playing golf. He's sort of behind me showing me how to do this. There's a fucking football goal over there, David. So our dad had bought that for us. So it is weirdly transgressive. But I don't know that I, you know, really thought about what was going on. I think I just accepted it. But also because you, well, it wasn't that you weren't allowed friends.

Round but it was frowned upon. Yeah, that was for a different reason and not to do with so that was yeah something else I talked about in the book is so my dad was made redundant in the early 80s and He then became very very obsessed with money He hadn't been not obsessed with money before that but he became totally obsessed with money So much that he would say you can't have any friends back and this is a quote in case they eat some toast. I

He did say that. So we weren't allowed to have friends back and I mean that made things quite difficult and there was another thing that made things difficult which was

So when people talk about an affair, I think they assume that the marriage, the main marriage from which the affair is branching off is probably dead, especially sexually. That is not the case with my parents. And I have insomnia. And the reason I have insomnia is that I was woken up every single night by the sounds that my dad especially was making in the bedroom next door. And for years, I thought there was a wounded walrus in my parents' bedroom.

I've watched a lot of pornography, I mean really, a lot. And I have never heard another orgasming man make that sound. The only man, the only person or being who I think might is Chewbacca. And

This is a true story. It's a true story. I managed to get a friend of mine round. I managed to get a friend of mine round, also called Dave, to stay the night. I don't know, maybe he didn't eat any toast. But he was staying in our house and I said to him, I was sleeping in another room. He slept in my bedroom. I said to him, just so you know, my parents might have sex and they make very, very weird noises. And he looked at me in a kind of like...

I'm 16, I know what fucking sex is like, mate. And I was like, okay. And went off to sleep in the other room. And then, this is totally true, at 3 o'clock in the morning, Dave came into the bedroom I was in, knocked on the door, white with fear. This is what he said, he said, Dave, I think your mum's died. LAUGHTER

And I said, "What?" And he said, "I think your mum's died because your dad is making noises like I've never heard anyone make. They're like the noises that my uncle made at my auntie's funeral." And I'm like, "They're having sex." He went, "No, no, no, no, no, no. These are terrible noises." So I said, "All right." I got up. We went and stood in my bedroom in my boxer shorts. We waited about four seconds. I said, "They're having sex," and went back to bed. So it was difficult, yeah. It was difficult having people around.

Okay, I just want to go on a tangent to a couple of things that are in your book. One of them, let's just go there, cats. Yeah. Your love of cats. Yeah. That was from the beginning. Yes. So there's a chapter totally about cats towards the end. It's partly, I think I say, that Alan Coram once said that the three things you need to sell a book are

Nazis golf and cats Did a book called golfing for cats with the swastika on the golf flag? And so I'm partly responding to that but also now I am very obsessed with cats and my dad

I felt always that the only real affection he ever showed when we were young was to the cat and that's definitely something I show affection to my kids all the time far too much and they're bored with it but I'm also very very obsessed with the four cats

that I have. One of the cats, the cat that I had that I was most obsessed with ever was a cat that me and Frank Skinner shared together. We worked on the name for quite a long time. It was Chairman Meow. And we were very...

very happy with that name and then I knew it was a good name because I took it to the vet, took her, she's a her, Chairman Meow to the vet and the receptionist said what's the name of the cat and I said Chairman Meow. It got a massive laugh in the waiting room, I was pleased with that and then I went into the vet, to the actual vet and I noticed that the receptionist had just written down on the computer just Meow, just like her surname and

Which means that when I actually, when the vet got the details of the cat up on the computer, I could tell he was thinking, meow, what a shit name for a cat. You're meant to be a comedian. Can't you do any better than that? Sorry, I will just tell another, one more cat story. I mean, cats are really important to me. So it's not just comedy, but I...

That cat, Chairman, I called her the Chairman, she used to go and get fed by another woman who lived around the corner from me all the time. And eventually that woman got a bit annoyed and decided to buy a collar for Chairman because I hadn't bought her a collar. And her point was, I don't want to carry on feeding your cat. And I was like, yeah, just don't feed her. But she would do it anyway. And then she said, well, I want the cat to go back to you. And so what she did was she put a phone number, my phone number,

my landline number at the time, on the collar. But she didn't put Chairman Meow, she put David. My phone number had David, which meant for years I was convinced that my wife, Morwenna, was going to get a phone call saying, I'm afraid David's been in a road accident. He's lying on the ground, shall we just hit him with a shovel? Because he was always shitting in my garden. LAUGHTER

But I am very obsessed with cats and I think it is to do with that and actually I talk about Zelda who is the cat I'm presently most obsessed with because Zelda was my cat that actually the daughter of my main cat Pip at the moment. It's all very confusing but anyway Zelda was taken away by my mum and

and my mum then died and then she lived with my dad the whole time my dad had dementia and then he died and then we just inherited her back and she's feral and mad mainly because she lived with my dad

But I feel this incredible connection with her and that must be to do with that strange history. No, it's lovely actually. The chapter in the book about cats is very funny but it's also very moving as well. It's lovely. The other area that you'd cover a little bit, which I did want to mention, was fame. And what were Sarah and Colin's reactions?

to you becoming famous? Were they interested? Was it aggravation? It's aggravation, I think. So my mum liked the fame. She liked the fame. She was not interested at all in what I was famous for.

I don't think my mum ever said, "Oh, I like that joke. "Oh, that song you do about football, that's good, isn't it?" Never. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing, isn't it? Cos that song, which they were totally both around for, this was well before my dad had dementia and she was totally still in my life, you know, people are singing at Wembley, like 80,000 people are singing at Wembley. At no point is my mum phoning me up and saying, "Oh, I just heard your song and that's good. How does it go?" No, right? It's not interesting. I show this, actually,

There's a bit that it's really a visual joke this although interesting enough you read the audiobook book So in the audio book quite a lot of it is me describing pictures because there's load of pictures in the book So I have to describe a totally visual joke. I mean a true thing but a joke which is I'm trying to show How much my mom wanted to be part of my fame even though she wasn't very interested in the actual work what I show is the infidel premiere and

And at the Infidel premiere, there's me and Omid Jalili standing there. So the Infidel was a film I wrote in 2010 about a Muslim who discovers that he's biologically born a Jew. Go and see it on Amazon if you want to. People think, oh, that sounds interesting at this particular moment.

But anyway, so I'm there on the red carpet and there's all these photographers and I say, "You can see all these photographers." And then I say, "Well, not all the photographers." And then I widen the photo and there's a picture of my mother with the photographers taking a photo. But I don't think she's doing that in order to get a really good photo of me. And I can prove that because the photo that my mother had up in her house of the infidel premier is not the one she's taking of me and Omid.

It's the one with her in it, right? Which is a press photo of her and all the photographers. So I don't think she was very interested. But I think the reason I include the chapter about fame is that I think I did a show about fame. It's one of the shows that are coming up. And as you'll know, I've had an incredible amount of really embarrassing experiences with famous people.

I mean, it's kind of amazing how much I've fucked up with famous people. And I think that is to do with my upbringing, because I think I had an upbringing which did not suit me for the sort of behind the velvet rope discretion of fame. And so I say things and do things with famous people that I think I'm not meant to. Sometimes it's just unfortunate what happens, because part of it is I look like a lot of other famous Jews, I think. Like, it's just a sort of Groucho Marx thing.

So, for example, Ronan Keating of Boyzone once said to me that he really loved all my work and I was very happy about that and he kept on saying it and it was very flattering and then he said, what I particularly like that you did was Blackadder.

And I said, I'm not Ben Elton. And he said, he got really pissed off, like I've been deliberately trying to trick him with my face. Shall I do this story? Shall I do this story? Yeah, I'll do it. Fucking hell. I'm sorry if you've heard this before, but it is a funny story. Andrew Lloyd Webber just thinks that I am Ben Elton.

And he does. There's a famous thing, there's an urban myth, or maybe it's not an urban myth, in showbiz, that when he was writing The Beautiful Game, which is a musical he wrote about football, he was sitting at home and Fantasy Football League was on, the show I used to do with Frank, and he said to one of his minions, called one of his minions, oh, get me that, because he didn't know anything about football, he said, get me that Jewish glasses, beardy-looking bloke off the telly, and they went and got him Ben Elton by mistake. LAUGHTER

And I thought, that cannot be true. But then Frank Skinner met Andrew Lloyd Webber and Andrew Lloyd Webber actually said to him, "I love that show you do on the sofa with Ben." This is after he'd written a fucking musical with Ben Elton.

One time I met Andrew Lloyd Webber at a showbiz party. It was the ITV summer party. And I met Andrew Lloyd Webber and I said to him, Andrew, you know I'm not Ben Elton, don't you? And he looked really frightened and confused like, oh my God, what's wrong with Ben? Is he having a nervous breakdown? What the fuck?

And he got so frightened and flustered that he left the little circle we were in. But before he left, and the woman he was talking about didn't know that he'd said this. She didn't hear him say it. He said to me, oh, this is Sarah. And then he went off. And I thought, that's odd, because I know that his second wife was Sarah Brightman. So I assume this isn't his wife. I assume it's unlikely to have two wives of the same name. So I say to her, oh, what do you do for Andrew?

And she looks a bit weirdly at me and says, well, I look after the estate and the horses. And I think, okay, some kind of PA. And then because it's fame and it's a world I don't really belong, a weird thing happens, which is Eamon Holmes, who I've never met before in my life, comes over to say hello. And I say, oh, hello, Eamon. This is Sarah.

And she looks absolute daggers at me and says, "Is that meant to be some kind of joke?" And then I realized in a flash what had happened. When Andrew Lloyd Webber had left me in a fluster, he'd confused the name of his third wife, Madeleine, with the name of his second wife, Sarah. And I thought, "That's too embarrassing to tell her." So when she said, "Is that meant to be some kind of joke?" I said, "Yes."

And she said, "Well, it's not a very funny one." Yeah, she's absolutely right about that, isn't she? Absolutely right about that. So I went and found Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was so embarrassing. I made my excuses and left. I went and found Andrew Lloyd Webber in another part of the party. And I said to him, "Andrew, word to the wise, you just told me that your wife's name is Sarah. It's not Sarah, is it?" "No." "That's really embarrassing because I introduced her to someone else as Sarah. Please never do that to anyone else again."

And he said, "I'm really sorry about that, Ben." He did. Absolutely true. I still don't know if that was a joke. So that's just one of many, many very awkward things that have happened to me in the world of fame. There's a few of them in the book, and each one made me laugh out loud, which is great.

I'm gonna ask one more question here and then we'll open it up to questions to David from the audience. So I just, I mean there are loads more that we could talk about obviously. I think that the way that you talk about

Both of your parents passing is incredibly moving and in your dad's case quite funny as well. And it is that thing about perspective, isn't it? I mean, I tell students at Sussex that if anything that's overwhelming kind of consumes you and you lose perspective. Do you teach at Sussex or do you just turn up and tell them that? No, I just turn up and tell them to hang about outside. I'm Chancellor. I'm Chancellor of the University of Sussex. Are you? Congratulations. It's ridiculous. It's...

And you know one of the things about humor and irony is it gives you instant perspective. So that one thing that's kind of terrifying or awful or frightening or whatever, if it's also ridiculous, it's not one thing anymore. And that really comes through your book, through all of it. Which makes, I guess, the most difficult parts of the truth palatable.

Yeah, but one of the things about that, sorry, I don't know what you were going to say, but I think this is the way you're heading, is that, and this is why this is a book that is slightly different, I mean, more than slightly different from the stage show, is that I can open up comic truths to be something a bit more. And so one good example of that, I think, is...

My mum was on Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. And I use it as another example of my mum's desperate need to tell people about her infidelity. And how she does that is... So I don't know how many people remember Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, but it was an ad-lib show that me and Frank did on ITV. And we always used to pick someone out of the audience to be what we called the secretary who would write down on a whiteboard the things we talked about that week. And my parents came one time.

and I sort of knew straight away because as I said earlier my mum liked to be in the spotlight and she liked to share my spotlight if she could that she was desperate to be the secretary and I put this to Frank early on in the show and Frank who knew my mother well was not keen but

Nonetheless she ends up being the secretary actually she ends up being the secretary because she does a very my mom thing which again I think I talked to said earlier like she's not a normal Jewish mom as in just taking pride in her child's achievement that can be seen from the fact that when we're discussing it Frank says to me look either I let down an old lady or the show will be shit and my mom shouts out it always is

And that's how she gets to be the secretary, because the audience love that and applaud. But then there's a really interesting moment, again a mad moment, but sort of interesting, which is my mum...

I might just read the bit towards the end of this, but anyway, my mum, she starts talking at one point about how I'm one of three, one of three brothers. And she just starts saying, oh, he's got a younger brother called Dan and an older brother called Ivor. And the audience go, ah, because she's being so mummish. And I say, I don't know why you're going, ah, that just means my mum had sex with my dad three times. And that gets a bit of a laugh, but not as big as the response when my mum says, how do you know they were all from your father?

She says that on telly with my dad in the audience. So I say, mother, that's not a comeback to me. That's calling yourself a slag. Now, I regret that now. I wouldn't do that now, even if my mom was a bit of a slag. I wouldn't do that. But she completely tops me. My mom says about herself saying, how do you know they were all from your father? She says, no, it means I had a good life.

What I think about that is that's really interesting because it's very 70s at some level at some level It's just again her saying in the kind of Erica young way that it's demonstrative that she isn't just a little housewife from Dolly's Hill Because she had this interesting sex life, but I think she means subconsciously something else which is what you have to remember about my mother is that I

had Hitler never existed, she would have married someone very royal almost, like some kind of Prussian prince or someone probably very, very wealthy in Germany and she would have had a gilded life. She didn't get that. She married a Welsh working class bloke who was always aggravated and was maybe having an affair with Rita Verma. From Unilever. From Unilever, that's the one. But...

She didn't get that instead she got David white who I think was the nearest thing she could get in like 1976 to the Prussian Prince with his smooth pipe and he's got you know golfiness and his club in us and his non-jewishness I think for her that represented this kind of Nearest thing to the Prussian Prince that she could get and that's all I think when she says no It means I had a good life. I think she means I lived a good life. I think she means

I lived in my own way my good life, the one that was stolen from me. I think that's what she means.

When I write that, I am moved by it. I don't think that's just funny. I think it's funny when I get there because it's about golf, it's about her shouting something transgressive on a comedy show. But then I find, and this is I think what the book's trying to do, a deeper and maybe more generous truth than I would have found on stage about all that. There was something that I did notice on Amazon that did make me laugh. That they're doing a package of your books that you can buy.

Birthday boy yeah for nine plus the Taylor turbo chaser teachers pick years one to nine and my family If you have a child that covers all of those three, you know where to go Please thank David

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Leila Ismail. Make sure to stay tuned for the next episode as we look back to 2024 and select the 12 best conversations from the year. With Eckrich, the official smoked sausage and deli meat of the college football playoff, it's super easy to score big flavor. Even when you have no time between the laundry, your laundry list of responsibilities, and kickoff.

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