David Baddiel - Whatever Love Means

London: Abacus, 2000

Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I used to own a copy of David Baddiel’s debut, Time for Bed, because Frank Skinner described it as having “at least one belly laugh per page”. I don’t recall any of those, if any, but nevertheless when I saw this for the princely sum of 50p, I thought it was worth a bash.

About the author - one of the UK’s best-known stand-up comedians, David Baddiel graduated with a double first class degree in English from Cambridge University and immediately began a career in comedy. As part of The Mary Whitehouse Experience team, Baddiel found fame, which only increased when he and partner Rob Newman broke away to write and perform Newman and Baddiel in Pieces. The partnership dissolved acrimoniously in 1993 following a headline gig at Wembley Arena. Baddiel then enjoyed a second fruitful endeavour with Frank Skinner, hosting Fantasy Football League, leading to a number one single, ‘Three Lions’. Baddiel has recently returned to stand-up alongside a highly successful career as an author, which includes a number of highly-acclaimed childrens’ fiction.

Plot - Vic, a morally dubious musician, finds himself starting an affair with Emma, the wife of his best friend Joe. Joe is a research chemist trying to find a cure for the AIDS virus, and begins to notice Emma pulling away from him, particularly over their opposing takes on the car crash and subsequent coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Though Vic has a long-term partner, Tess, who is suited to his personality, he finds himself drawn to Emma’s thoughtful nature. An accident forces them to redraw the boundaries of their relationships and morals.

Review - I remember precisely where I was when I heard that Princess Diana had been killed. I was standing on the car park of The Royal Oak, Rushall, in the Sunday morning mist. It was a damp and overcast day, not particularly conducive to watching a football match at the back of Oak Park Leisure Centre, but I wanted to support my mate Owain because being able to say I went to watch him play football was about as close as I was going to get to being picked.

So me, Owain, his brother Gaz, and our mutual friend Spider were stood around Gaz’s powder blue Nissan Sunny, waiting for the rest of the team to turn up. One of them pulled in, and although I don’t recall his name, I recall the first thing he said, which was, “lads, Princess Di’s dead!”. Our immediate reaction was to tell him to fuck off. No idea why, really – it was a mad non sequitur otherwise, but teenage lads are prone to daftness, and so that’s how I took it.

It wasn’t until I’d watched the match, stood with a load of other lads talking shit, and been dropped back off about midday that I discovered that the news had been the truth. The telly in the living room was turned to Sky News and my mother was in tears. She was prepping Sunday dinner and the BBC footage was on in the kitchen, in sombre black and white.

I didn’t react in anything other than surprise, mostly because I was a teenager and those things were not done, but also because I’ve never been particularly able to feel other people’s feelings unless I’m close to them. I suppose my main emotions were excitement that I was witnessing something big, and then boredom, irritation and impatience. I couldn’t wait for six o’clock when Sky would jump to The Simpsons and they would stop going over the same points again and again.

The first episode was ‘Rosebud’, the story of Mr. Burns’ search for his beloved teddy bear Bobo. In the episode, it transpires that baby Maggie has possession of it and won’t be parted from it, leading to various nefarious schemes by Burns to win the bear back. By this point, August 1997, I had seen every episode of The Simpsons multiple times and ‘Rosebud’ was no exception. Towards the end, Maggie is sat in her sandpit with Burns, and she gives him the teddy, at which moment a photographer leans over the backyard fence to capture the moment. In response, Burns shakes his fist and bawls, “damn paparazzo!”

Only he didn’t. Not that day in 1997. It was bleeped out.

This was because the accident had allegedly been caused by tenacious media ghouls, desperate for a picture of Diana and her fiancée Dodi Fayed, and because of that, an innocuous line from a cartoon written half a decade previously had to be erased, in case people lost their minds at the insensitivity. That’s when I knew, as if I hadn’t gotten the message from the wall-to-wall coverage, that Diana’s was no ordinary death, and it wouldn’t be treated like any other celebrity death I had lived through.

The country went mad. More or less everything seemed to be linked to Diana somehow, from sport to opinion to education. Stories about mass grief and what she represented were offered every day, along with a slew of jokes. And then the event was turned back on all of us: what did our reaction say about us? How could we be this way about somebody we barely knew and almost certainly never met? What did it mean to our relationship with the Establishment?

The aftermath of that accident in Paris, it seems to me now, was a notable trigger for our wallowing in sensation. These things had happened before, of course, because British people are addicted to gossip, but Diana’s death prompted a certain comfort with hysteria which didn’t seem to be there before. Diana had caused one such overwhelm of emotion with her fairytale wedding to Prince Charles in 1981, but by the time of her death was something of a sidelined figure, her narrative arc having passed through an acrimonious divorce and revelations about her mental state towards compassion and regular appearances in the diary pages. It was as if in death the British public felt a guilt towards her that they didn’t realise they had felt, but also that they could grieve for things in plain sight, whatever that may have been. Everybody was crying, so why not let it go alongside them?

It would be churlish to look down on that period as a moment of collective madness, because sociologically I’m not at all sure it’s been worked out what went on. Personally I never felt anything for Diana, or her family, or the Royals, but I did feel bad for my mum, because she seemed so upset. A chain reaction, maybe, of people being upset because people they knew were? If it had made Britain a more compassionate and forgiving society (like The Queen, which won Helen Mirren an Oscar, more or less argues happens within the House of Windsor) then the events surrounding Diana’s death may have been a long-term positive and not a short-term misery.

But I don’t think that happened. I think 1997 was a strange year for Britain, with the huge positive feeling of Labour’s election in May obliterated by the accident in the Pont d’Alma tunnel. Somehow Cool Britannia wasn’t the heaven we’d imagined it to be, and forced us to sober up. A princess went into that underpass and emerged as a tragically dead human being. 

What should have left us as mature and reflective after the surprise of our collective depth of feeling was exploited by the speeding up of media input. Channels had seen how we lapped up the tiny morsels of nothing and they liked it. Record companies saw a tweaked cover become the second biggest-selling single of all time and couldn’t wait to make us feel. And that’s the key – Princess Diana’s death rewired our ability to balance fact over feeling, and we’ve dealt with the consequences ever since: Brexit, Iraq, The X Factor.

Whatever Love Means is, of course, a novel steeped in the aftermath of the Diana sanctification. Its title was Prince Charles’ response to a media question about whether he was in love with Diana, which we now know that if he was, it wasn’t the kind of unconditional love we all crave. But that love rarely exists, and for the four main characters in David Baddiel’s novel , they are dealing with a much more human and realistic version of it.

Vic has an attack of hay fever in the middle of watching Diana’s funeral coverage, and simultaneously his best friend’s wife turns up on his doorstep. Thinking he too is overwhelmed with grief, Emma tries to assuage her own by sleeping with him, thus beginning an affair. Emma is married to Joe, as responsible and reliable as Vic is feckless and selfish, yet in this moment Emma needs something other than Joe’s dismissal of her surprising melancholy over Princess Di.

Joe, for his part, is unwilling to play a part in the national madness and somehow alienated by his wife’s absorption in it all. He and Emma have drifted slightly following the birth of their child, but even though the fairytale of their meeting and his proposal has given way to a more grounded reality, Emma’s artistic fancy balances his scientific rigour. He works on a cure for AIDS, she designs bespoke furniture.

Vic’s partner Tess, who seems to tessellate exactly with the former’s somewhat hard world-view, comes back from the continent into a Britain she barely recognises: businesswomen weeping on the Eurostar and friends debating the meaning of it all. Their coupling is the yin to Joe and Emma’s yang: she and Vic maintain separate flats and schedules, are open about their opposition to having kids and share an abrasive and laddish sense of humour.

Eventually, Vic sets he and Emma up a flat above a music shop, where they can maintain their affair in private. As the weeks pass, Vic finds himself being drawn towards the idea of idealistic love as Joe finds his wife moving further away with no explanation. Never guessing what the reason could be, all Joe can see is Emma turning away, complaining of headaches and pushing him further towards work to compensate.

Thus would the story end, were it not for the explosive end of the affair, in a literal way. Emma ploughs her car through the wall of a park, killing her instantly. Joe, consumed by grief, throws his energies into trying to find what could have caused her death – illness, suicide, a tragic accident? Vic, meanwhile, is working through a grief he can never externalise, as a person who unconditionally loves another is normally able to do. Tess is caught in the middle between a man she thought she knew overwhelmed by the death of an external friend and somebody she barely knows needing a mother figure to help him understand it all.

It would have been easy for Baddiel to make Whatever Love Means a novel of Diana rather than a book triggered by her passing. True, the characters occupy the spectrum of basic reactions to the event (grief, irritation, pragmatism, bemusement) but the use of her accident as plot device is more subtle. Diana haunts the book but not as background. We see the touchstones of her life show up: AIDS, car accident, affair, that somewhat simple fairytale we ascribed to her personality. A lesser writer would have pinned the story to the specifics of the aftermath, but this isn’t her story.

What put me off reading this for a long time was the expectation that Baddiel would be a showier writer than I enjoy from his stand-up, peppering his double first over his dirty jokes about boiled eggs. But his prose is not like that at all – yes, it’s lyrical but never boring, and Whatever Love Means is an example of the kind of book which makes an unpublished writer jealous. Although some chapters stick out as extended sections of stand-up, it never diverts the book into David Baddiel at the microphone. It’s also pleasing to see that he doesn’t recycle his stand-up within this story, unlike many other books by comedians you could read.

The premise of the changing nature of love (and lust, let’s be honest) is a well-worn tale and what makes Whatever Love Means different is its exploration of the raw love which lives beyond grief. Like I mentioned at the top of the review, just as the United Kingdom found itself grieving undercover, so does Vic. In a sense, with the words which give this book its title, Charles maybe had a more honest handle on his emotions than we expected him to have, but Tess reels in confusion when she sees the opposite in Vic. There is a large hole in his reaction she cannot explain, but then again maybe Vic can’t either: he may assume he loved Emma, but did he love the sneaking around, the fairytale they maintained once a week? Or maybe, and this is just as likely, his love is guilt. Guilt for a whole host of reasons, but for himself. Grief may offer him a different perspective, but will it change him the way it changes the country as a whole? Joe also changes, becoming harder and more questioning. Maybe, like Charles, love means something we can’t describe, and maybe it’s never pure in the way we hope it will be.

However, Whatever Love Means is far from perfect. While an excellent and absorbing read, it’s only after you finish it that you realise how threadbare the plot is, and at times, how farcical it is. The clues are there from the very start: an affair begins due to a comedy of errors, and they barely stop thereafter. Letters delivered to the wrong address, phonecalls to dementia patients, things mentioned in toilet cubicles under the influence of cocaine. You can almost see the post-it notes being moved around on Baddiel’s study wall.

The characters aren’t fully realised either. This is a problem mainly affecting the female elements, because Vic seems like a cipher for Baddiel himself, even if a particularly disagreeable one. A guitar legend in his own head, Vic is a witty, sexually promiscuous grown teenager who only discovers the limits of immaturity too late. It’s arguable that Joe is the neurotic Baddiel meant to balance the showbiz Vic, but it’s hard to argue that you’d have a better evening with the scientist than the musician.

As for Emma and Tess, there’s a fair amount of cliché knocking around: Emma is pixie-like, with her wild blonde hair and her Cork accent and her ability on the harp, while Tess is more or less a man in a wig. You feel sorry for Tess as a writer, as she mainly exists to push the plot from this scene to that, and she seems like a smart and interesting character who is underused. To be honest, I prefer her to Emma who, although there are reasons for this, seems like hard work.

It’s hard to believe the plot playing out in real life the way it does in a book, particularly an extremely weak ending – it’s an interesting conceit but you have to make huge allowances for the way grief might affect a person. I think maybe this is where Baddiel’s stand-up has an effect on his novels; I accept the structure but have a problem with the practicalities, but as long as you treat Whatever Love Means as a story and don’t ask a lot of questions of it, it’s worth applauding.

So what are our conclusions? About Diana, nothing new. She’s still a lightning rod for conspiracy and the unfairness of premature death, and a secular saint. About David Baddiel, he’s a fine writer – a so-so plotter but sections of this novel are as good as anything I’ve read and could hope to write. About Whatever Love Means, I’m glad I experienced it. And love? Christ alone knows. Be grateful when you’ve got it and try not to take it for granted. A lesson we, as well as Vic and Joe, probably learn far too late in life.

Will I move it from the floor to the bookshelf? - I’m a great fan of the prose, but not particularly bothered about reading it again. Maybe it’ll go in a box in the loft.