I don’t win many awards. I have spread my career over many genres, perhaps in an attempt to win a few more, but it’s not worked out. There’s a few. In 1992, I was, with Rob Newman, the Best Comedy Newcomer at the Radio Times Awards. In 2015, my first kids book, The Parent Agency, won a Laffie, the slightly naff name, short for the Laugh Out Loud Awards, which goes to the funniest kids book that year.
As a footnote, I should add I was annoyed at the time that the award had just changed its name from the much more impressive-sounding Roald Dahl Award, but that was before I’d read a number of things that made me realise Dahl was an antisemite, so thank heavens they did change it as otherwise I’d by now be thinking about returning it.
In 2011, my film The Infidel won best screenplay at the Cluj Comedy Awards (it’s a place in Romania — who knew?) And Three Lions, the thing for which I am best known, very much didn’t win a Brit or an Ivor Novello Award, but sitting on my shelves somewhere is a bronze fist with a raised finger, which is my NME Brat Award for Best Musical Moment of 1996 — but that isn’t really mine, it belongs to 87,000 now quite old football fans, for the singing of it that year at Wembley.
I’ve been nominated for a few, which when you lose often makes you think you’d rather not have been. My one-man show about my parents, My Family: Not The Sitcom, for example, was nominated for an Olivier Award but when it lost to a ballet — Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes — I sat there in my stupid tuxedo feeling hyper-aware, suddenly, of the absurdity of it all. Although no doubt I’d have somehow put that epiphany behind me if I’d won.
There aren’t, in the UK, many Jewish awards, although to be fair, my great-aunt Freidel Radbil did win the Unsung Hero Award for her work for Kosher Meals On Wheels in the Wembley and Kingsbury Area in 1984. And then there is The Wingate Prize. This is a prize, worth £4000, which is, according to the website, “awarded to the best book, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader”. My run of bad form with awards has already included this prize.
In 2004 my novel The Secret Purposes, about the — let’s be honest — very Jewish subject of the internment of Jewish German refugees on the Isle of Man during the Second World War, was, according to the journalist Matthew Reisz who interviewed me about it for the Independent, “a shoo-in for the Wingate”. It wasn’t even nominated.
So I basically forgot about it, until last week I saw that the short-list had been announced. One thing I hadn’t realised about The Wingate is it’s anything, really, about Jews, fiction or non-fiction. I thought it was just novels. But there on the short list was a book called Judaism For The World by Arthur Green. Which means that general books about Jews, perhaps even short polemics about Jews and how as a minority they are neglected within the progressive discourse around identity politics, would seem to be eligible.
You’ll know where I’m going with this by now, so let me be clear: I’m aware it’s vulgar to write about this. I’m aware that when you get a bad review, or, as in this case, you are passed over for an award, it’s better to, as my literary agent advised, rise above it.
But there are a number of issues there. Number 1. I am vulgar. Number 2. My dad died recently, and I feel in his honour — a man who when he was pissed off about something would always let the whole world know about it without inhibition — I shouldn’t hold back And Number 3, There’s something funny about it.
There’s something funny about me being so shite at winning awards, that when I write a book with the actual word Jews in the title, one that — hold on for the vulgarity — has sold almost 100,000 copies, been named the Sunday Times Politics Book of The Year (not an award – no trophy) been endorsed by Howard Jacobson, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sarah Silverman, Stephen Fry and the present Labour party leader as the text that inspired him to wipe out the stain of antisemitism from the party — a book that according to Jews and non-Jews who write to me every day, has shifted the dial about Jews and how they are perceived in the cultural and political conversation – it is not even short-listed in the one book prize for Jews that exists in the UK.
But I don’t win awards. It’s because the great and good find me annoying, and this annoying column is more proof of it.
It’s also because of course, this particular Wingate panel just didn’t like it that much, which is something if I can’t rise above, I should at least suck up. Because the really galling thing about this particular exclusion from the glittering prizes is I can’t even blame it on the judges being antisemitic.
The paperback of Jews Don’t Count is available from all outlets now, although obviously, not for prizes.
