David Baddiel’s father and mother must be the most talked about parents in Britain

According to Clive James: ‘A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.’ In My Family: The Memoir, the famous comedian David Baddiel proves he’s also had a life. Or, at least, a family.

For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention – and Baddiel, as he admits, craves attention – or who has never watched television or listened to the radio over the past 30 or 40 years, Baddiel is famous as a stand-up comedian specialising in a ‘sweary and often not-very-nice-Jewish-boy style of comedy’, as a TV chat show host with fellow comedian Frank Skinner, presenting Fantasy Football League and Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. He also writes films, sitcoms, novels and non-fiction, including the recent Jews Don’t Count. Oh, and he’s famous for co-writing the football anthem ‘Three Lions’, with its irritating earworm refrain: ‘It’s coming home.’

The book chronicles Baddiel’s ‘strange mad damaging childhood’, growing up in a Jewish household in north London –though, as Baddiel is at pains to point out, this was not the Jewish north London of the goyish imagination. It was Dollis Hill. There are some nice bits about him attending the North West London Jewish Day School, chosen by his parents for him and his brothers as the school where they were ‘least likely to get knifed’. We also get glimpses of Baddiel at Haberdashers’, and at Cambridge, of him thriving in the Footlights, and accounts of his early fame and success.

But the main subject of the book, apart from Baddiel, is his mother Sarah, who died in 2014 and who was clearly what one might call a ‘character’. He describes her as a ‘fantasist’. ‘She was someone who, at various stages of her life, had adopted different – and obsessive – personas.’