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I'm very glad that this episode of Denseness History is brought to you once again by Hello Fresh and Fresh is revolutionizing, eating and cooking across the U.S. They send you fresh, pretty measured ingredients and mouthwatering seasonal recipes right to your door. I occasionally try and cook. I go out, I buy some things, I get home and the little recipes are just, yeah, just put some oregano. And I'm like, I don't have oregano. I'm not someone who just has these things in my kitchen.

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I have nothing in my kitchen. Just assume I don't have a kitchen. That's why I love fresh towels. They send you everything you need and that's why it's America's number one meal. You don't have to do the meal planning. You don't have to go to the grocery store 14 times to cook one bag. Everything takes 30 minutes or less. It gets delivered to your house. You enjoy cooking rather than want to kill yourself. And it takes 30 minutes or less.

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There are more than 23 recipes each week. She tried different flavors, cuisines. You're never going to get bored. And the best thing is the age now where I'm starting to think about my carbs. I'm trying to eat less meat. I want to do some more Pescatore and Vibe's. So they deliver all that they can do. LACAU It's all good. It's sourced from farmers. You just cutting out middlemen all over the place here. No more waste cut down on your bills.

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Welcome to Dance Knows History. Once a week we dive back through the memory banks, through the archive. That's what team history do. We were all history graduates. We love going to archives. We blow the dust off the filing cabinet. We route through it makes the team work for me. Wouldn't even know filing cabinet was as I thought. Anyway, we do that and we pull our backups of the podcast. And this week we thought we'd go for an interview with a very brilliant David Baddiel.

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He's a national treasure here in the UK. Everyone knows who is comedian, author, broadcaster. He's had a number one hit when I was young, the hot summer of 96. Who can forget England's run to a semi-final of year 96 on home territory in our own stadia. And David Gardel's song Brilliance was the soundtrack of that summer. I was young. My whole life was ahead of me. The weather was warm. It was innocent time when we can enjoy warm summers.

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Before it was obvious that those warm summers were a product of a climate crisis that threatened to extinguish life on Earth. And I was looking forward to years of excitement and opportunity. Here I am, 42 years later, talking to my phone. Strange way, an empty room. Anyway, David Deal came on the podcast couple years back. He was actually Berlin. He is on everybody's lips at the moment, everyone's thoughts, because David Baddiel has just published a new book.

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It is called Jews Don't Count. And it's remarkable contribution to the debate around anti-Semitism identity here in the UK at the moment. The reason is podcasting is you can see a lot of us thinking you could see he was ruminating on these subjects a couple of years ago when we talked. You end up writing a book and it's very brilliant. So well done him. If you want to go and listen to other back episodes of this podcast, you can do so.

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History hit TV. A lot of people ask me why straight TV is and I tell them it's like Netflix for history. It is a digital history channel where you get the world's best history documentaries. We're making new ones all the time, but there's also ones that we've licensed showcasing the best of the past.

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And you also get all podcasts, my podcast on the podcast produced or without ads on them. It's a very exciting proposition. The old history dot TV. We are in the moment in the middle of producing a couple of new documentaries. The people are going to like them. They're big, they're exciting, and there's lots of new and interesting material about well-known subjects. I think you a really fire up the old history subscriber's. So thank you very much, Trevor unsubscribing.

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If you're not subscribing, please go and check out our history TV. And don't forget, even if you want to come and watch me talking to people and recording episodes, this podcast in the flesh live for real. You get a history at Dotcom's to go and check that out. In the meantime, everyone, it was great to have you on the podcast.

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Enjoy. As ever, when two people meet in this age, we start talking about Trump, so let's get let's get the do the podcast. Let's keep the conversation going.

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If history is happening now. But it is history.

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And we were just chatting before the microphones were turned on about Donald us one has to and.

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Well, because it was you, I started positing my theory that if you're in the discussion, is Donald Trump a fascist after you've had all the discussions about what fascism actually is or what fascism means now and how, you know, there is a cult of leader around him, if not a coherent political agenda, you think which fascist?

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And he's not really Hitler, is he?

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And he's not really Franco. And I personally think Stalin basically a fascist just on the left. He doesn't sort of have the self-discipline of all that. But what he is like, I think, is Mussolini. For what I know about Mussolini, you'll know more about Mussolini. And I've noticed that when Trump does a speech or is any kind of public, I think he's sort of resting face, not his bitchy resting face on, you know what that is.

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I remember that big thing about a year ago, but he sort of faced that he does in between saying stuff.

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So he'll say is incredibly Mussolini, like he'll do a thing, he'll say a thing, and then he'll look right, especially at the rallies with a kind of like grim lip out looking around sort of stern face.

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And Mussolini did that. And I wonder if he nicked it from Mussolini. I mean, one nobody knows with Donald whether he's ever read a book or watched any history or whatever. But it's really similar to to Mussolini. And it's like a strange rhetorical sightly comedy technique. I mean, that's the other thing about Donald, which makes him like Mussolini. Mussolini is without doubt the funniest fascist, isn't he?

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I mean, you know, they're all they're all quite funny. I think this is quite an important thing.

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I think until Donald Trump emerged, I was fairly convinced that the reason why we couldn't really have that kind of leader again in the Western world was because of comedy, because I think that with modern comic sensibilities, you can't have Hitler because he is ridiculous. I mean, he's totally absurd. It doesn't I don't want to get into cliches about the German sense of humor, but the truth is that always everyone else then, including Charlie Chaplin and of course, the British cartoon cartoonist realized that this bloke with this absurd start, an absurd haircut and shouted it was a clown at some level.

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And there was something innately ridiculous about him, as indeed that there is certainly about about Mussolini, but there is about Donald Trump as well.

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I mean, he's sort of like without knowing it, I think a brilliant comedian. And if you ever saw there was a gift going round about two years ago of him barging through at the G9 conference, various leaders without sort of noticing that he had a sort of like was upsetting other people's personal space.

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But the brilliant moment for me was he barges through, he gets to stand in front of them, and then he looks round with the Mussolini face and does up his jacket.

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And if that was Oliver Hardy, I would think, well, once again, a brilliant example of the pompous man embodied in a clownish way because Donald isn't doing that, but he is there anyway.

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But you're but you're right about the funny thing. But actually, at the time The New York Times famously wrote Hitler off. This man's clearly absurd.

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And I think that it's a big problem. Not spotting that. Yes, not spotting that, but with the absurd is not noticed by quite a lot of people.

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But also, I think it's like religion and it's like baby talk, you know, stuff that's very intimate and special to us. But the minute you see in somebody else and it's absurd, you go, I'm Christian, it makes sense. But my associates are completely insane. Well, the stuff they believe and I think our politicians, other people's politics is so absurd.

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I mean, and yet and yet to us, you know, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson now they are saying, well, I agree, but the people in Britain obviously don't.

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There are people who clearly don't think most Americans to see.

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I see a sort of here's an interesting thing I hadn't thought before. I think for a long time politicians were pretty gray and not absurd.

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And I think that they were doing, you know, the 30s and obviously those who were during the war, there was a ridiculousness to them. But part of ridiculousness is largeness, you know, is cartoonish and it is grotesqueness and that has a very wide reach. And if if you are cartoonish and grotesque, then some people will not spot that or they will notice is the largeness of it. I'm saying it's very memorable to be like Hitler. It's not so memorable to be like Neville Chamberlain or John Major.

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So there is a sense in which just what I'm calling ridiculousness for other people will just translators very big in your imagination and your memory and your ability to apprehend who this person is.

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So what I would say is that after the war that sort of went away for a bit when people were perhaps frightened of those kind of people.

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But then I think that now that we have a 24 hour media and people could be on it all the time and you can see politicians all the time and hear them, the ones who we remember and the ones who rise to the top are the ones who could snag your imagination. So therefore, the ridiculous ones. You see what I'm saying?

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You know, I think it's much easier to remember Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage, what they talk like, what they look like than it is, I can't even remember. But I do know someone you know. David Miliband. David Miliband. Exactly. I think you're I mean, if I look back to the 90s, which is my formative years, when, of course, the summer of 1996, when your songs at number one, it was just the best thing ever.

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This is the kind of history I want. I mean, this is I mean, that's that's you know, it's such a.

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But the politicians it was clear Bob Dole and Tony Blair and John Major and these people on both sides think and I remember feeling as a young person, this system was ripe for disruption. I mean, it was so absurd. You know, the sound bites, they never said anything. And clearly, we are now just in another that we're lost. And as you say, there was a bit in the 30s. Then everyone got a bit worried about larger than life, charismatic leadership.

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So we went for quite, quite, you know, those that sort of line of British prime ministers, for example. I'm actually the American presidents were quite low key, pretty low key.

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Gerald Ford, unbelievably, and Clinton type of person, Eisenhower, all those guys. So and then it changes with Reagan and Thatcher. Yeah. Yes, you're right. I suppose it does with that.

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I mean, they're quite good example. I think the example is spitting image, like the reason that spitting image can exist, which doesn't exist anymore. I actually should do obviously now. But the more a politician can be made that kind of puppet, the more we're in that world. The spitting image is impossible. That Margaret Thatcher. Yes, to some extent I would agree.

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And Reagan and Russia. So it's not true, of course, that it's been just, you know, all bland and then there's Trump and blah, blah, blah, because we had Reagan and Thatcher. Thatcher in particular, I think is a very good example of someone who at one level is totally absurd and for other people is just incredibly clear and memorable and, you know, easy to process. You know what I mean? And we know what she is because, you know, she's much easier to remember than Jim Calahan at some level.

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But where is this getting us?

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Who are? Well, I mean, it's getting us you know, we're talking about I mean, one of the things I think, you know, you're at you're a you've got a great passion, the Second World War, for your own reasons and family resources reasons.

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I think it's fascinating at the moment, the people with an interest in the Second World War are divided into two camps. There are those historians go, don't be stupid people.

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You know that Godwin's Law, everyone's saying it's like the Rizla. Honestly, it's nothing like 1930s. Put us off together. And then there's people saying, well, hang on. The whole the whole point, the 1930s is the vigilance thing. We will spend our childhood go vigilance never again remember. Well, then, isn't this what when these alarm bells start to ring, albeit absolute, you know, on a smaller hopefully at the moment, quite, quite a scale.

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We're not seeing, you know, the march of dictatorship like we did in the 30s. But we should be quite alert to those things, those trends. I mean, where do you come down on that?

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Well, it's complicated.

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I think a complicated attitude to all that, because I agree with Godwin's Law that there's an incredible ease in argument to invoking the Nazis as a way of crushing all arguments and overexaggerating things. However, I've noticed that when, as I do more and more and this slightly turns the argument towards what you're saying, when I find myself more and more attacking anti-Semite or responding to anti-Semite on Twitter, I will sometimes invoke the Nazis in doing that and then be accused of using Godwin's Law.

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And I have to say no, no, when I'm talking about anti-Semitism, when I'm talking about people who think that you should be, you know, eradicated from culture or, you know, whatever the word is, extradicted or forced to emigrate from Europe or whatever, that I'm not is not Godwin's Law anymore.

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This is Nazi belief. So it's OK to talk about where this leads to. You know, it's when you're talking about, I don't know, argue about the rules of squash. And, you know, if they feel like a Nazi, that's Godwin's Law, you know what I mean?

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So but in terms of that particular vigilance, which is a particular aspect where you're talking about, there is no question that the technology really that we live with now has changed the discourse so that if I'm going to have to do something visual now, I'm sorry about the distance, but if the parameters of political discourse were this and I'm holding my arms up and my hands up, my palms fairly close together with this in recent and the recent past, there now this and I'm moving my hands further apart.

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And so things that you would not really hear of at all in normal discourse like, say, Holocaust denial. Now, you hear that all the time as like, you know, something which is normalized by the fact that we have a technology, which means that those people who believe that can be mobilized and can have their own beliefs confirmed by other people and it can be ratified, it can become a real, proper thing, whereas before it was just something you didn't really hear about.

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So I think there is there is definitely a truth in the fact that I mean I mean, I just it just happens to me I don't know how much these people actually present a threat in the way that they would in the 1930s.

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But I do spend a lot of my time and only yesterday today in The Times, Hugo Rifkind, who I know is a journalist who writes a piece about how he got into a long, long, long, long, long discussion with a a sort of one of these people who I said in my last stand up show, the conspiracy theory, which is very prevalent now, is how idiots get to feel like intellectuals. And so there are two types really of sort of Nazi for want of a better word online, which are the idiot ones.

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I mean, the complete idiot ones, the ones who are just, you know, shouting and screaming. And then these people who consider themselves the philosophers and thinkers of that ideology, and one of them was a guy called I think you saw Evan McLaren and he runs something called I think it's called something like some posh name, not the National Policy Institute in America or something like that.

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And he has a belief called Identity Arianism.

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Have you heard of this guy on Twitter during the speech? Yes, I didn't. Terrorism. And he uses phrases like ethno nationalism.

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And therefore, this language is the same thing, really. It's how idiots get to feel like intellectuals. But Hugo ended up in a very, very long and restrained as he could be, discussion with this guy about his beliefs and specifically about how are you different from the Nazis. And this guy was sort of saying, well, we're very different cause we don't believe in the repossession of Danzy, stuff like that.

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You know, and I don't know what your parameters are for swearing, but after about really what would be considered 10 pages of discussion between these two guys, I said, Hugo, have you tried this fuck off every idiotic Nazi cunt? And that got retweeted about 3000 times and obviously some complaints and all the rest of it.

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But I do think that what it proves is that there is a similarity to the 30s in the sense that there's clearly there's people out there, they are able to reach each other and mobilize in ways that they couldn't do before, which is also true of the far left, of course.

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And now we're seeing what also happened in the 30s, which is a sort of intellectual intelligentsia coalescence around it.

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So that, of course, Ezra Pound, a T.S. Eliot, are sort of intellectuals of the far right in the 20s and 30s, Wyndham Lewis, you know, people like that.

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And there's a sort of element of that with people not quite the same, but people like Evan McLaren.

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Does that resonate? Are you particularly wary of that because of your your family's history?

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Well, there's no I mean, again, if you actually read the thing with Hugo, the emotional thing that's actually going on is he's doing his best. He's made a decision to go and have a look at if you can if you can see it, if you Google Hugo Rifkin's Twitter account, you'll see it. You'll see this, I think went viral.

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He brings up every so often members of his family have been murdered.

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I think his family actually came to Britain in 1896, but nonetheless, they had relatives in Europe who were murdered.

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And actually, he also brings up other relatives who were murdered by Stalin because this guy, in a veiled way, which he immediately picks up on, accuses Jews of being Bolsheviks and therefore responsible for the war. I think he's I think is what he's saying. Yeah, all the old classics. And he points out, well, I'm not on that team either, because this other relative was killed by start and of course, because Jews are always killed by either side.

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So it's always there. When you're having these arguments, there's always a sense in which this is an argument. But for me, it's a very clear emotional narrative involving people in my family. In my particular case, it's not 1896.

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My grandparents came here in 1939, three weeks before the war broke out with my mother. My mother is a refugee, was a refugee. She died two years ago and she was brought here as a three month old baby and they just got out. I mean, you know, really where from? Well, originally they were from Koenigsberg, which is now called Kaliningrad. I did. Who do you think you are in the first series? And I was the Jew.

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They always have one or two. Who do you think you are in the first series? And Kaliningrad is now part of Russia. It comes mother's from there or something.

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You. Oh yes. That's why he was.

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What is such a weird place, you know, because in 1945 after the beautiful Immanuel Kant town university town of Koenigsberg had been razed to the ground once by the Germans and then by the Americans, it was rebuilt as a kind of weird little province by Soviet Union. And they bussed in all these Russians so and tried to eradicate any German sort of culture there. There was there at all. Even in the 60s, they were still blowing up German churches in Kaliningrad.

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So it's a very horrible place, to be honest.

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And it's also really weird.

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Thing is, when I was there a few years ago filming this quite a while ago now, I became aware that there's a kind of nationalist movement, a separatist movement within Kaliningrad, because it's sort of it's in a weird part of Russia, connected the rest of Russia into the Baltic Sea.

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And it's strategically very important over the years. But I thought the separatist movement for essentially a place that began in 1945, you know, what history is that that you're clicking onto?

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But it's a very it's a strange place. Anyway, my grandparents were from there. My grandmother was actually from Danzig was from Gdansk, but she married my grandfather, Ernst Fabian, who lived in Koenigsberg. They were very, very wealthy. They owned a brick factory. They were sort of Jewish, semi aristocratic family.

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Abhra, I think Abraham Abramski, Abramsky and Fabián. Anyway, they had a massive construction firm. I have seen the brick factory as it is now.

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I mean, a few stumps in a terrible, horrible field at the back end of the end of the Soviet Union.

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It's still there and. They lost everything, obviously, it was all taken away by the Nazis over quite a long period of time with different laws and different whatevers, by the end, they had none of this money and various members of their family were already in camps. My great uncle was in the Warsaw ghetto, you know, and what actually happened was, was my grandfather apparently the British government is not really known this.

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If you weren't Kindertransport it or you weren't a person of note like a Nobel Prize winner or whatever, what you had to do was show a thousand pounds in a British bank account to get any chance of residency in Britain, asylum or whatever. And he didn't have any money. So but he did have some friends who had already gone to Britain.

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And so they deposited little bits of money, 20 quid, whatever, and he managed to get a thousand pounds with three weeks to go before the war broke out.

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He did have the papers, although that came and went. My grandfather was actually in a concentration camp, a pre-war concentration camp after Kristallnacht got out of there and then said, we've really got got to leave. And then they managed to get out. My mother was she used to tell me on the whatever the the training is, where the baggage is, what you call the luggage rack.

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Luggage rack. Thank you. My my mother was on the luggage rack on the train from Hamburg or wherever however they came, they came down to Hamburg, then up into, you know, through France and ended up, you know, with a bunch of people in wherever escaping Jews were kept. I think somewhere in Whitechapel, they ended up for a long time in a sort of hostel there and then settled in Cambridge. And then my grandfather was interned on the Isle of Man in June 1940.

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And I've written a novel about that, which, again, a secret or not very well known part of British history, which is that in 1940, after the fall of Holland in France, there was great panic in this country, a little bit like this sometimes is now about migrants and you know about the sense that who are all these people doing here?

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But during the war, there was a sense that I can make out that, well, the progress of the Germans through Europe can't just be about the blitzkrieg. There must be fifth columnists in all these countries who are destabilizing the country. And that's probably happening here. And people looked around the Daily Express and the Daily Mail and said, well, I'll tell you, it probably is all these Germans that we seem to have taken in, because the government, of course, was suppressing information about atrocities already happening in Eastern Europe.

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The Ministry of Information was suppressing that because they didn't want the British people to think we're only fighting this war on behalf of the Jews. This is what my novel is about.

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Part of it is set on the internment camps that were set up on the Isle of Man. Is that in the Ministry of Information?

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And so under pressure from the tabloids in June 1940, Churchill just said Colleyville, not quite a famous phrase.

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It was a headline. And by that he meant, let's just arrest.

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And in turn, every German president in Britain, 98 percent of whom were Jewish refugees and therefore not supporters of the current German state. So that's how ridiculous.

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Anyway, they were all interned on the Isle of Man. How long for? Well, my grandfather was there for eighteen months.

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Here's here's the brilliant thing. He loved it that he actually loved it there, as did most people, because this is what happened.

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It's a combination of, I think, a very fantastic British trait and a very fantastic Jewish trait, which is that unlike similar places in Japan or whatever, these internment camps, all the British did, there's a sort of laziness which I sort of love to the to Britain, I think.

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And that's one reason why we've never had, I think, a fascist culture or proper dictatorship in Britain or even really a violent revolution.

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People sort of can't be bothered in this country. So these were not extreme camps. They requisitioned the seafront in Douglas, other places chucked out anyone who was in the Bambis at the time, which are not really running as businesses anyway because it was the wall put barbed wire around the streets and then just put the Jews in there and left them to their own devices. And of course, the Jews within seconds have made it into Vienna.

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So within three weeks, there's a university on the Isle of Man. There are cafes, there are lectures. You know, and I have a quote at the top of the of the secret purposes, my novel about this from a historian whose name I can't remember, but which says that the centre of European intellectual and social life in 1941 is Douglas.

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And that's true because partly because although there were people like my grandfather, there were also and it was easier to get out of Germany in this case. There were, I think, six Nobel Prize winners on the Isle of Man, the Amadeus Quartet. Ah, on the Isle of Man. Kurt Schwitters, a great artist, is on the Isle of Man, Nicholas Plevna. I mean, these incredible people are all there and they think, well, OK, let's have an intellectual, interesting time here.

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So my grandfather, I know, was sort of like, oh, it's brilliant. It was a bit disappointed when he was released. So back to the hostel in the East End. Well, no, he went back to Cambridge. But I know he I mean, there were other issues which were problematic because, you know, my mum was born so, you know, didn't see his baby for nearly two years.

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And I think I think just what really happened was that part of it wasn't too bad, what was bad.

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And my grandfather was in and out of mental hospital after the Second World War with clinical depression was his whole family had been murdered, of course. So apart from his immediate family, but brothers and sisters and cousins and all that had all been murdered, so that when that when that became clear to him after the war, he became intensely depressed.

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When you've got pictures of people you know were killed, when you hear a Holocaust denial.

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How does that feel? It's very it's complicated. I mean, that novel I started to bang on about it. I'm not.

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No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What's the name of the secret purposes? The secret. And it is about the internment of Jewish German refugees on the Isle of Man. But it ends with the main character who's based on my grandfather doing something he never did, which is going on a day trip to Auschwitz, which I did with the Holocaust Educational Trust.

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Somebody is for I wrote that novel and it becomes towards the end sort of about the incredulity of the fact that this thing, this extraordinary thing of which there is an incredible amount of evidence is being denied and how even if you lived under a sort of shadow version of it, so you were interned on the Isle of Man, which was not being in Auschwitz.

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Nonetheless, you know, it's the thing that has to be done at all costs is resisting the idea that the figure itself did not happen.

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And I don't know, as I get older, I get more and more angry about it. It's the truth. It's interesting because there is the straightforward emotional reason to do in my family.

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But I'm very obsessed with the truth anyway. My show, my family, not the sitcom that I'm about at all, is about my family and does have some stuff in it about my mum, for example. A lot of very important feature of the show is something not very well known. And I only had a sort of vague understanding of entertainment now, which is that my mum was called Sarah Baddiel and I always knew her ceremonial, but I did also know something about her, which is that her real name real is a complicated word there was from it.

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And the reason for that was she never used that name I say she never used.

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I'll come back to Caveat for that in a minute that that name is after 1935 in Germany following the Nuremberg laws, all German Jewish children born after then their parents had to choose the name of their child from a government proscribed list. And all the names on that list were shit. I mean, incredible. One of one of the names. I mean, slut. You know, there are names like that on the list. So from it was the best of a bad bunch, really.

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And that was my mum's name. Her full name is from it Sarah. Sarah itself was also a proscribed name because all Jewish daughters had to be called Sarah or Rachel, all men moisture or I can't remember exactly what they are, but, you know, Jewish names.

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And I talk in the show about how in my own sense of my mother's extraordinary, rather mental life, it was perhaps at some subconscious level a way of refusing the fact that she should be dead, that she should have had no life, and that instead within the confines of living where we are now.

[00:27:11]

By the way, this is being recorded in a place called Dollis Hill in London. Just my I grew up about 300 yards over there. My mum lived a slightly amazing life involving a long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman or whatever. I so within the confines of 1970s, Dollis Hill, she lived her life to the full.

[00:27:26]

And I think that's something to do with the fact that she nearly didn't have a life. So in terms of sorry, I know for a very long answer to your question, but the show is about truth. The show is about saying actually after people die or indeed in my dad's case, have dementia, don't idealize them, don't pretend that they were angels or whatever. The true act of memory is to describe them in all their idiosyncrasies and flaws and craziness.

[00:27:50]

That's pledge. I'm very obsessed with truth. I have a sort of almost, I think, on the spectrum pathology to need to be as honest as possible all the time. And therefore and this is for him to come back to it. Holocaust denial represents a very extreme affront to the truth. You're listening to Don Snow's history, it's there's an old episode with David Baddiel more after this. So social media is difficult place for you these days with Donald Trump and the course, it's difficult and it isn't difficult because I quite like fighting the lines, I mean, and fighting the trolls.

[00:28:32]

My next show, I think, is going to be called How to Deal With Trolls, because I think well, partly because I've built up an enormous amount of material through insisting on fighting the trolls.

[00:28:42]

Part of this pathology is that when people say things to me that aren't true at all, just, you know, abusive, I can't ignore them.

[00:28:50]

Early on, there was an Internet law, for want of a better word. Just don't feed the trolls. You just giving them attention. And whether or not that's a good thing.

[00:28:57]

I can't do it if I get slagged off or if someone says something to me, which is racist or fascist or whatever it might be, I reflexively need to bring them to the light and then put them down.

[00:29:09]

I mean, for some reason, for me, that's true of being a comedian.

[00:29:11]

That's to do with they are hecklers, in my opinion. And with a heckler, you don't ignore it. You repeat their heckle normally and then you put them down and then you get a laugh from the rest of the audience. And that's very effective, I think. And that's what I'm doing on Twitter when I'm retweeting a fascist or whatever, making fun of them and then my half a million followers or whatever, or enjoy that and join in.

[00:29:31]

Can I ask about you let me ask about your show, which reminds me the title of the show that I'm told at the moment called My Family, Not The Sitcom. It struck me. I want to talk to you about it because I very strict my my love of history. My interest in history comes from a kind of oral historical tradition of talking about members of my family in my grandmother's extraordinary, well, sort of matriarchal figure. And she'd tell about her childhood.

[00:29:52]

And and for me, history and the past was always people thought, oh, is it relevant to young people?

[00:29:58]

It was always incredible because she made it clear that I only existed because she'd been trapped on the other side of the Atlantic during by the Battle of the Atlantic. And therefore, she met a kind of jock called Robert Macmillan, who then became my grandfather. And my whole being was only possible because of these events that happened in the most important day of my life. And my mum and dad met in a press conference in Ottawa before I was ever born because otherwise I wouldn't exist.

[00:30:17]

So your show is about history as well, but it is definitely about well, it's about immediate family history. But actually, how far back do you go?

[00:30:25]

Well, I go back as far as the Nuremberg laws at one point, but it's really about the 1970s in those terms. It's history now. Now that it's totally history.

[00:30:34]

No, there's a social element to a social history on it, because a lot of what it's about is about parenting in the 1970s, because I think that my parents didn't have the word parenting. You know, that's a modern word. And they parented in the way and have quite an extreme version of the way that actually most parents did in the 1950s, which is completely not to stop their lives for their children, to just carry on living. You know, we have children.

[00:30:57]

That's just what you do. And now we carry on having affairs or what, in my dad's case, drinking and swearing, whatever. And there's no sense in which we're monitoring our children to make sure they're not damaged or whatever. And I kind of celebrate that actually in the show, I mean, in a complicated way where the damage is definitely acknowledged. But in general, it's a very feel good show about that. But I also make it clear, because I talk about my own children, that there's been a sea change now.

[00:31:22]

And that's the way that my parents parented, for want of a better word is very a historical thing. I couldn't agree more.

[00:31:28]

I am the most hands. I mean, I compared to previous generations of men in particular, I mean, my whole life revolves around the kids. I mean, tomorrow I'm taking my daughter to Bojangles, then I'm taking my little boy to tennis. You know where's. That's unimaginable, right? You're down.

[00:31:43]

But then what's that mean? Jerry Seinfeld does this joke in his most recent stand up set about how, you know, kids now, they're very, very looked after. When he was young, he thought of his parents, thought of him or their children in general is like a raccoon in the sense of like this one around here somewhere. But I don't know where it is. And that's very true.

[00:32:02]

I mean, I was out and about in London round here getting beaten up often or occasionally approached by weird men on the tube or whatever, all sorts of things that were dodgy. When I was ten or eleven, I was knocking about doing that. Now, you know, I wouldn't let my kids do that. I do. Well, this isn't a psychology podcast, but I'm going to say something about psychological, which is the part of my drive towards truth.

[00:32:25]

So do you see something like a as a pathology to some extent, is that I have a rather relentless, no doubt wearisome meanness in the sense that I have mentioned it once already said seems pretentious to do so again.

[00:32:39]

But I'm going to T.S. Eliot says in the Lovesong of Jail for Prufrock that we all create a face to meet the faces that we meet. That's a misquote. But he essentially says that.

[00:32:47]

And I think I don't actually I think I am always me in every situation I find being not me very, very uncomfortable.

[00:32:54]

So I think that I didn't I haven't changed at all since I was quite young, really not in a very deep, visceral way, except because I've had children.

[00:33:05]

The only thing that has changed me in any kind of really powerful, my own psychological foundations, the way I see the world, my understanding of empathy, all that is because I've had children.

[00:33:15]

And that didn't happen to my parents sublevel. My parents, who were both quite solipsistic characters, only children dedicated at.

[00:33:22]

Some level to themselves and their own desires, that didn't really happen for them. I mean, not that they I mean, I wasn't I'd never terrible childhood.

[00:33:29]

It wasn't deeply neglected, but there is no way in which I was monitored for damage or for the bad things or whatever in the way that we do to our children.

[00:33:40]

How are your kids? Can be different. How are kids going to be different to us given their game? Well, I don't I don't know. I don't know that it's necessarily a good thing. Oh, come on now. That's something I talk about is certainly I think there's a certain amount of damage in my case.

[00:33:55]

And this is why the show is a sort of celebration of that. That is good for me.

[00:33:58]

I mean I mean, it's very common for independent thinking about as a 10, 11 year old probably gave you extraordinary independence and. Well, and also freedom of but also because my parents, you know, they didn't ever try and interfere with my life at some level. So by the age of 13 or 14, I'm quite a self-possessed, you know, know what I want sort of individual. And actually, I think personally, some people have an idea of me who do know about me, probably as they think, oh, you probably came from like a sort of bohemian sort of upper middle class Jewish background.

[00:34:25]

No, not at all. I came from this area. My dad was made redundant when he was 42. You work for Unilever. He had no money. He was unemployed for three or four years. Then he started selling dinky toys or whatever. I only went to haberdashers, a public school, because we had no money and they had a means tested Direk grant system at the time.

[00:34:43]

So the point about damage, I think, is that I think this sounds slightly glib, but both my my parents sort of letting me do what I want and living their lives in the way they did there is undeniably that's why I'm a comedian. This is what I'm going to say. You know, I might have it in a more straightforward family. I probably might have ended up in that Jewish cliche of, oh, he's an accountant or a dentist or whatever is so that's celebrated in my show.

[00:35:08]

And my general happiness with who I am is partly a result of the way that my parents bizarrely failed to parent.

[00:35:15]

You know, I hope I kids be unhappy.

[00:35:17]

Well, you know, this is a whole lot of other things we can get into, which is I don't think I don't think kids are going to be unhappy. I'm suggesting in this conversation, I suppose, that they are slightly overprotective, I guess. And, you know, there's a sort of self-consciousness and maybe anxiety that might be created in them by our suggestion that we need to watch them all the time or something terrible will happen. But of course, they have also particularly this generation, I think that we didn't have, which is they are under the cosh all the time of social media.

[00:35:45]

And I think, you know, again, I do want to say something unoriginal, but I know and I have a 16 year old and 13 year old and particularly with my girl, my daughter is 16. There is a deep concern that this hierarchy, they're sort of constant sense that, you know, how you are doing socially with your peers or out there in a wider sense, blah, blah, and you can compare yourself and find yourself lacking, whereas we grew up in in a more nebulous thing and you could tell yourself you were doing fine socially because you didn't have like a wide scale make it.

[00:36:18]

And you know that this is very, very powerful. The stabilizing of social life, I think is dangerous.

[00:36:26]

Well, I'm going to go home and lock my kids, our house without their phones to survive for a bit. Can I let's finish just talking about what you know.

[00:36:34]

You're a comedian, but you're also an activist in so many ways. Why not an activist? Well, you're you're you're pretty well. You take the controls.

[00:36:40]

You're oh, you're you're suppose in that sense I'm an actor. You're what's the word you are. Yeah, you're a bit I think that's important.

[00:36:46]

Sorry, but I the reason I deny it is I've noticed recently because I'm on Twitter that people are asking me on political shows. Yeah.

[00:36:54]

I was asked to do unspun with Matt Ford on it and he said, oh, do eight minutes of political material.

[00:37:00]

I don't have any political material and I don't I have no political agenda.

[00:37:05]

I think of myself as no wing, not left wing or right wing. I think the truth is always complex. And if the truth and I think that's the great fear is complexity is the casualty of modern discourse more than anything else. And if the truth is always complex, you shouldn't impose a political model on the way you think. So I think people assume that I'm left wing and I certainly was more left wing when I was younger.

[00:37:30]

I was briefly flirted with being a communist, but I think that was a sort of pose.

[00:37:34]

But now I'm not. What I am is someone who likes commenting on things and saying stuff about things and having hopefully insight or witty takes on things.

[00:37:44]

And the thing that's happening all the time and you're now able to comment on it all the time is the news.

[00:37:49]

And the news is primarily political.

[00:37:51]

So the fact is, I do make lots of jokes about, say, Donald Trump and at the expense of Donald Trump, but it doesn't really come from an agenda of even oh, I'd rather there was a Democrat in office. I possibly would, but at some level I wouldn't for the material.

[00:38:04]

It's a it's a rich time to be.

[00:38:06]

Well, I mean, that's that's part of the dark the fast impact statement. It's a good, good time to be a comedian. Is it now? And I think so. I it's a good time to be a historical podcast because people are interested in history.

[00:38:17]

Yeah, well, one thing, one very good feature I think of social media is without. An activist, I do like the idea that people are engaged, I like the idea that people are thinking about what's happening and are not just seeing politics and turning it or seeing the news and turning off, because even without an agenda, I think that engagement and getting people thinking about things is a good thing. It's tough, isn't it? In the 1990s, history finished.

[00:38:43]

Cold War was over. The 1930s felt indescribably distant at the end. And now I think it feels quite right.

[00:38:50]

It feels quite alive.

[00:38:52]

Well, the end of history thing for Francis Fukuyama. Yeah. That we think that was a conviction.

[00:38:59]

And I think I probably without having read the end of history, I think when I was growing up or getting into my 30s or whatever, I think I was probably smugly convinced we're in a general upward trajectory of social progress.

[00:39:11]

The Berlin Wall has come down particularly. That's very important.

[00:39:13]

And, you know, religion seems to be on a downward stride. You know, no one believes those things anymore. That will never be important in global affairs again. Religion, you know, and it all felt like progress. And then that was all wrong.

[00:39:25]

And there's lots of reasons why it's wrong, economic, geopolitical. But I do think technology is really important in it. No one saw that. No one saw that the rise of a technology that would mobilize extreme opinion would have incredible impact, I think so quickly so that essentially an Internet troll is president of the United States.

[00:39:48]

Oh, God. Okay. Well, I'll let you go. Let's make sure that it. I think so. Yeah. We've you know, we've well, I feel I feel if I just go I know why. I don't want to. I don't want to. We could we could just keep going all day. Well we could keep going all day.

[00:40:02]

I just I probably should ask you the boring question I have to ask everybody, which is where does that love of history come from?

[00:40:09]

Well, it's a really interesting question that because I don't think of myself as having straightforwardly a love of history, because I think of myself in a slightly airy fairy way as sort of an artist, I'm going to say the use of the word artist.

[00:40:20]

And when you when you say that to me, I'm immediately an 18 year old doing my A-levels, which is English history and economics. And my primary subject was English. I mean, I was good at history, actually did alright in economics, even though I hated the subject.

[00:40:34]

But I did English at university. I wasn't going to do French history. No, but here's the thing. Not so much of a trait which you'll understand in a minute, which is so I go there, Cambridge I went to and then I went to a lecture by a brilliant woman who then became a friend of mine later on called Lisa Jardine to study. And one thing you'll know about this Jardín, even though she taught English at Cambridge, is that she was basically a historian.

[00:40:58]

And I went to a lecture of hers on Spenser's The Fairy Queen, which is I can't recommend it, very dull read.

[00:41:04]

But she said something in it.

[00:41:06]

She said that her basic belief in the fairy queen, which is about Elizabeth the first, was that it's a big poem really about chastity.

[00:41:17]

And her point was that poets and courtiers and people who wanted advancement and who were writing books at the time needed a way of framing the heroism of a female monarch different to the way they would have framed the heroism of previous monarchs or whatever. And the way they were to frame the heroism previously was valour.

[00:41:35]

Valor is the thing, obviously, that most poets and writers would have championed and eulogized in the past.

[00:41:42]

But when Elizabeth the first appears, they can't quite do that because she's not really a warrior.

[00:41:47]

It's not she isn't really botus here anyway. And she herself put her virginity forward, as you know. That's the thing about me.

[00:41:53]

That's my brand, you know, so suddenly you get a poem like the fairy queen in which chastity is the heroic quality in that poem.

[00:42:02]

So the important point is whether that's right or wrong is I'm listening. I think this is brilliant. This isn't just leave aside F.R. Leaves is what can we make of this poem with our own heads? This is truth about this poem.

[00:42:13]

It feels like truth.

[00:42:14]

It feels like a way of thinking about literature and culture that has weight and balance and truth.

[00:42:19]

So I became a historicist at that point and all as everything I wrote about literature whilst I was at Cambridge, it was always involved in some way with history.

[00:42:29]

I always wanted to put in a historic context. And in fact I wrote a dissertation about Jane Austen, which is called Propriety and Property and Jane Austen, which in which I discovered that the words propriety in property until I think the mid 19th century were the same word.

[00:42:42]

No, no. Yeah. In Johnson's dictionary, they are the same word propriety and property.

[00:42:46]

So the notion of propriety, of the rightness of things, of goodness, of manners, whatever is in the same root linguistically as property is ownership. And that that really explained something about why Jane Austin puts manners and the ownership of a house like Pemberley sort of together in her ideal of what you should be looking for in a man or indeed in life.

[00:43:06]

And anyway, I wrote this with a lot of other historical information about it. And then Tony Tanno, who at the time was the foremost scholar of Jane Austin, nicked it all and put it all in his last book about Jane Austin, although he did credit me on the last page. And so I've got some of this from student David Baddiel. I remember his. Got my name wrong. But but that was all historical and so so for me to answer your question, it's still about art primarily at some level, but it's about how the production of art, how cultural production, which is the word used a lot of the time by people like thinkers like Louis Altas there or whatever cultural production is always about.

[00:43:41]

History is generated by historical context. And that's why I became interested in.

[00:43:45]

But it strikes me there's lots of comedians are obsessed in history. I mean, not just because there lots of comedians I know now a middle aged blokes love history, but but lots of you guys draw a lot of material from and are fascinated by the past.

[00:43:57]

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I'm not like Al Murray, if that's what you mean. Al Murray properly likes history, military history in particular. And actually, I'm not like that. I get a bit bored by maps that look a bit like the opening credits of Dad's Army shelter made by those big arrows and over the Western Front was here. And I can follow it. Actually, I've never been very good understanding that, you know, the way that I mean, I remember starting to read in fact, he wrote Stalingrad and the Beaver.

[00:44:25]

Yeah. So I wrote a book about Berlin. You know, it's amazing book, but the bits I missed out the best, I always missed out.

[00:44:32]

It's when Marshall Zubkov was going down the Eastern Front and then all his troops were stationed here.

[00:44:37]

I can't get my head around that at all.

[00:44:39]

I like people, really, and I guess and I like to hear about them and great movements of troops or whatever I find quite difficult. But if there is an answer to your question, I don't know what it is.

[00:44:50]

For me. It's because I am interested in people. I'm interested in how humanity interacts. I'm interested in how they create stuff. And as I say, from an early age, that became also about, well, what's the context in which that is done? And that's always history.

[00:45:04]

You're a man of many interests. I'm probably asking about the football thing. Does that burn as bright now as it used to? Well, do I look for.

[00:45:10]

Yes, I do like football. Whether England burns quite as broke for me is probably not the case in the sense that I used to really look forward to England Games. I used to really look forward to World Cups, European Championships, all the rest of it. And now I it's not exciting.

[00:45:25]

That isn't as exciting as it was. I wrestled with that at that age because obviously I was a kid. You know, it was the glory. It was ninety it was 96 hours. It was amazing how we didn't win that tournament, but it was just a bit old now. And therefore, I'm not interested in England as a franchise. Or is it that there is less interesting franchise because that's been so rubbish now for the last year? Yeah, I think it's a big tournament.

[00:45:44]

Yeah.

[00:45:45]

I mean, there have been rubbish for a long time. I mean, three lions. The historical point of three lions to some extent was that we decided me and Frank Skinner to write a song.

[00:45:54]

We had never really been done before, even though they've been many, many more songs have been triumphalist. They'd been this time more than any other time back home.

[00:46:01]

They're all about we're going to win it.

[00:46:02]

And so when we sat down to write those lyrics, we thought, you know what, let's embody the actual experience, which is we're not going to win or we're very unlikely to win. But we sort of hope against hope against rationality that we will win. So let's write it about that, which is what Three Lines is, is I've got a melancholy song about everyone saying we're shit, but, you know, well, never mind, we might still do it.

[00:46:21]

That's that's the point of that song.

[00:46:23]

And I think that worked obviously did work in 1996. But I think as time has gone on, we've lost Iceland and stuff like no or just not made it in various other tournaments.

[00:46:34]

It's become more difficult to have that magic moment where you think like, well, never mind, we might still make it. But I think also it's age.

[00:46:41]

And then one other thing, which is simply that the league football now Premier League football, you know, when I was growing up, you never saw any great, you know, foreign players until you were in the World Cup. And then it was really exciting that England and the English players were playing against these incredible people. Now you see them every week. And so I think there has been a concomitant lack of excitement about saying, you know, I mean, when England play Belgium, which will be exciting, I'm actually doing a gig that night in Stoke and we've put the the opening time back to nine o'clock so that the audience and indeed me can watch England, Belgium.

[00:47:15]

But the two people I'm interested in or worried about with that will be Eden Hazard and Kevin DeBruin, who I do see in Hazard.

[00:47:23]

I see every week because I still go to see Chelsea and of the Kevin tomorrow and I see on the telly. So it's not like the old days when you never saw Pele except at the World Cup is my point. So slightly less exciting.

[00:47:32]

But the 90s, the 80s, 90s were full of your song was so resonant because there were full of all those just missed opportunities and penalty, you know, penalty shootouts to get into semi-finals. You know, we that we were there and thereabouts.

[00:47:45]

And we had a brilliant side. I mean, certainly in 1990 and in 1996, we had very, very good side, actually, and we should have won.

[00:47:52]

But then there's a large, I think a historical question or perhaps a psycho historical question, which is I do think that the English psyche, especially in football, isn't quite suited to winning. But I think that when an Englishman goes up to take a penalty kick, there's a sort of self-consciousness and anxiety that comes into his head that isn't their fault.

[00:48:14]

Obviously not for Germans, but for quite a lot of other nationalities. And that to do, I think, with the weight of his.

[00:48:19]

I'll give you an example. So we should we end this. Podcast with a brilliant example, I think, of history, but in a context that perhaps isn't thought of as history when England plays Spain in 1996 and we beat them on penalties, on penalties, and you will remember, I'm sure that Stuart Pearce scored a penalty. Yes, I was there and it was absolutely amazing.

[00:48:40]

But in my almost and more importantly now is something that happened when I was away from the stadium, which was on telly.

[00:48:48]

Barry Davis, the commentator, as Stuart Pearce approaches that says his chance to erase the memory of Turin.

[00:48:55]

And the reason he's saying that for and he doesn't know is that in 1990 in Turin against Germany, Stuart Pearce had missed a penalty and thus we hadn't got in to the 1990 World Cup.

[00:49:05]

But here's the important point. What is Barry Davies doing with that turn of phrase?

[00:49:09]

He's making it history. He doesn't say Stuart Pearce's chance to get back and make it OK that he missed that penalty in the semi-final a few years ago. He says his chance to erase the memory of Turin. That's like Antony Beevor, isn't it?

[00:49:23]

He's a historian. He's making history alive and real. And I can't say that without getting goose pimples.

[00:49:29]

That's why I like history and look like Stuart Pearce was well aware of the weight of history. That is. Yeah, that's the point, is that. Yeah, I mean, he scored in that moment. He went berserk and in going berserk.

[00:49:43]

That's my point, is that, like, there seems to be a greater weight. And on the occasions when it's sometimes released and we, you know, we score, it's so enormous that, oh, God, we've got through. We scored the penalty.

[00:49:55]

But that, conversely means that, you know, it's very difficult to get to that point is more difficult than it should be. I basically I've never seen a German react like Stuart Pearce did after he scored the penalty against Spain, because at some level, we are a very emotional nation.

[00:50:10]

I think brilliant. I mean, we just keep going for hours, but we need to give any websites anything. Well, look, can I just say so you can do whatever you like. Yeah, I am touring with this show if you want to know more about my family and my family history.

[00:50:22]

In fact, I'm doing this show My Family, not the sitcom on tour all over the UK. Details are on David Baddiel Dotcom or you can follow me on Twitter on at Baddiel when I shall be certainly mentioning it from time to time.

[00:50:33]

Lovely. Thank you very much.

[00:50:34]

Thank you very much. It's really been very enjoyable.

[00:50:46]

I mean, just a quick message at the end of this podcast, I a little tiny favor to ask if you could go to get your podcasts, if you could give it a five star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review. I really appreciate that. They're from the comfort of your own homes. You'll be doing me a massive favor. Then more people listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things.

[00:51:06]

I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.