Apparently David Baddiel’s parents liked sex. So do his cats. He shows two film clips of his cats to prove they like sex, though the second clip also illustrates the way the eyes of one of the cats looks quite disturbing when it turns its head towards David Baddiel. Perhaps even the cats were wondering if David Baddiel had any red lines about what he was recording for his show.
Most of his new stand-up comedy performance is an account of his late mother Sarah Baddiel’s sex life from her decades-long affair with the pipe-smoking golfer David White to the noise she makes during her late night sexual encounters with his dad, Colin Baddiel.
Before he gets into the sexual details of his parent’s life, he warms up the audience with a short review of some of the more ridiculous responses he has had on Twitter.
In the second half, he also tells us about his dad’s dementia. The condition leads Colin to swear a lot and get banned from a care centre. To illustrate this, he shows a film clip of his father swearing at David Baddiel’s younger brother Dan. He claims that his dad was always like this and that dementia just gave it a label and turned up the volume.
We briefly get to hear that Dan posed naked for the New York taxi driver’s calendar, and that he spent eight hours protesting outside Trump Tower against Donald Trump. That protest got a clap from many in the audience though David Baddiel didn’t tell us what the protest was about.
Instead he moves on to more anecdotes about his parent’s sex life, drawing on his mother’s e-mails, letters, photographs and unpublished erotic poetry. In the process, he comments wearily about her use of quotation marks.
Although Sarah Baddiel was supposedly telling everyone about her sexual contact with David White and even copied her son into an explicit e-mail she sent to him, it is claimed that his dad was probably not aware of the relationship. It may have been that Colin Baddiel was too busy with his own sexual interests, which we are told include visits to prostitutes and pornography.
The show is generally affectionate towards his parents. David White, who is still living, may not be happy with the part he has been given in the comedy performance, but then none of the characters are real. They are simply one-dimensional anecdotes for the purpose of a stand-up routine.