David Baddiel has never shied away from honesty but he is more brutally honest than ever in My Family: Not The Sitcom. Not about himself so much this time, but about his parents.
This “massively disrespectful” celebration of their lives is a brilliant cocktail of smutty revelations, smart insights and hilarious nitpicking about grammar.
One theme is the way life gets reduced to platitudes. When Baddiel’s mother Sarah died in 2014 he recalls people saying she was wonderful. She was more complex, he adds. Obsessed with sex and golf and in love with a man who was not her husband. In the first half we discover the real Sarah, “Dollis Hill’s very own Erica Jong”.
Clips of her upstaging her son corroborate her tendency to overshare, craving attention even at the opening of his film The Infidel.
After the interval we get a candid, comic account of Colin Baddiel, suffering a form of dementia which makes him rude and sexually inappropriate.
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No change there then, jests his stubbly son. But the story builds to an affectionate, touching note as we see a sensitive side to his father.
This is a rare production that boasts side-splitting laughs and also moves people to tears as Baddiel reminds us his mother was more than just wonderful. So is this show.
Until June 25, Menier Chocolate Factory (020 7378 1713, www.menierchocolatefactory.com)
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