list.co.uk/festival David Baddiel | FESTIVAL FEATURES
THE FAME GAME
Twenty years ago, David Baddiel was one of the biggest names in British comedy. As he makes his long-awaited return to the Fringe, he tells Jay Richardson that being misunderstood is almost part of the job
E ven after selling out Wembley Arena with Robert Newman in 1993, initiating the era of massive comedy gigs in the UK and prompting Janet Street-Porter to famously declare comedy ‘the new rock’n’roll’, David Baddiel ‘never really felt in my soul that I was Robert Plant’. Becoming a rock star or footballer had been his dream growing up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Cricklewood, north London.
Unfortunately, as he explains, self-mockingly quoting Martin Amis, every writer needs a wound to write from, and his is ‘that I can’t sing, as anyone who’s heard “Three Lions” will know’. His chart- topping single with the Lightning Seeds and erstwhile flatmate and Fantasy Football co-host Frank Skinner permitted Baddiel to indulge his sporting and musical fantasies for a while. But even at the height of his and Newman’s popularity, he never truly embraced the lifestyle. ‘I wish I had gone for it a bit more,’ he opines. ‘Because for a start I might have had sex with more women. I remember watching Rob rather take the lead in that department.’ Chatting in a pub in Hampstead, where he and his long-term partner, Absolutely star Morwenna Banks, have a house and two children, the 49-year-old is deliberating about whether to share with audiences of Fame: Not the Musical how Russell Brand’s Sachsgate scandal was essentially his fault. Bemused by, rather than envious of his friend,
Baddiel explains that he and Brand had been trying to develop film ideas at Brand’s London home while the lothario continued to entertain a couple of young women. Yet it was Baddiel who inadvertently discovered that Georgina Baillie was Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter. The rest, as they say, is history. Or at least notoriety. For him, it demonstrates ‘how when you’re famous, every little mistake becomes magnified’. Striving to scrutinise celebrity in a detached, analytical manner, Baddiel says that he’s ‘unbothered by whether I’m famous or not’ and is content talking about being less famous than he once was. He maintains that regardless of fame, he has an ‘almost autistic rock-solid personality and an obsession with self-knowledge. I can’t bear the idea that I might be in any way deluded about myself.’ Although he insists that he is ‘unfiltered’, ‘incapable of lying about who I am’ and has ‘a slight problem with a lack of self-censorship’, the main reason for his return to stand-up after 15 years appears to be a desire to confront the many misconceptions about himself.
It’s no coincidence, for example, that The Infidel, the 2010 film he wrote and produced, starring Omid Djalili as a Muslim who discovers that he was born Jewish, was derived from his own experience of being ethnically ambiguous. He’s been beaten up twice, once for being Jewish and once for being Pakistani. ‘When I first started on telly, I used to get quite a lot of fan mail from Indians saying it’s great that an Indian
1–8 Aug 2013 THE LIST FESTIVAL 13
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