David Baddiel

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[Lostinthestates]

Pretty good article and I guess I agree with old Baddiel

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David Baddiel: Now you see him, now you don't
The writer, comedian and original lad has moved in and out of the spotlight over the years. His controversial new comic movie will ensure he's centre stage once more
Vanessa Thorpe
The Observer,
28 March 2010

As cameras rolled on the set of the new film comedy The Infidel, the screenwriter could be spotted hunched over a state-of-the-art laptop in a dark corner. Director Josh Appignanesi was intrigued. "It is a bit late to alter the script," he called over. But far from refining comic dialogue for the actors working around him, David Baddiel was deep into his next project. "I am working on my depressing novel," came the reply.

For around 20 years now, the 45-year-old writer has darted in and out of popular consciousness like a restless moth. Here is a man who longs to shelter in obscurity just when he is faced with the glare of publicity and who, conversely, is never more keen to get back into the limelight than when he has been skulking around his intellectual hinterland for a while.

Well, Baddiel had better brace himself again. The publicity surrounding his new film, coupled with a plan to bring back his hit football song, Three Lions, for the World Cup this summer, are thrusting him to the fore once more.

The Infidel walks a tricky line between topicality and good, old-fashioned British farce. It tells the story of an adopted Muslim who suddenly discovers he was born a Jew. With Omid Djalili cast as the lead and with cameo roles for Matt Lucas and Richard Schiff from The West Wing, the film has already created enough fuss to have Baddiel twitching on Twitter about the outcome of a recent photo-shoot. "Looking again like a blind tramp," he tweeted last week. "It seems to be a look I'm cultivating." But don't be misled. Old friends at Cambridge University remember Baddiel as a student who was just as confident about his style as he was about his academic prowess.

"He was very Joy Division, sitting around in a long, dark coat with floppy hair," remembers one contemporary, while another speaks of his unique ability to be "hugely impressive while also being faintly ridiculous because he had huge hair, like the punk poet John Cooper Clarke, and yet took himself very seriously and was very left wing".

Performing as a teenage stand-up and eventually becoming vice-president of Footlights, the young Baddiel was clearly firing on all cylinders, gaining a double first in English. Even after graduating, well into his career, the comedian was studying for an as-yet-unfinished Phd on the Victorian sexualisation of children.

Baddiel grew up the middle one of three brothers in north London. His Jewish parents were from orthodox families and, although his father turned against religion, Baddiel was sent to a Jewish primary school and went from Hebrew lessons on to a conventional bar mitzvah.

Back then, his hairstyle also seems to have featured prominently. Some former pupils at Haberdashers' Aske's boys' school are fairly sure they remember him sporting a mohican. They certainly remember his part in the lower sixth's end-of-term revue. "It was vitriolic," said one. "It was particularly cruel about a head librarian I remember. It was chaos, in fact. And there was never another revue after that."

Although the adolescent Baddiel soon "got into punk and communism", his novels and his comedy have regularly drawn on his suburban Jewish roots. His first novel, Time for Bed, was a thoughtful contemplation on north London life, wrongly billed by publicists as a celebrity blockbuster. Critic Tony Parsons said: "One of the best things I have ever read about the nature of mad, obsessive love... funny, sad and horribly, painfully true." Baddiel went on to write two other books, Whatever Love Means, and The Secret Purposes, an examination of the wartime internment of German Jewish refugees on the Isle of Man.

The Jewish theme surfaces again in the new film where a burning skull cap is pivotal to the plot. Djalili was sold on the project, he says, after just a few words from Baddiel: "If brevity is the soul of wit, David must have given me the greatest film pitch ever. I think he used four words, 'Muslim becomes a Jew'."

Appignanesi was reeled in more slowly: "I moved in down David's road and he had seen a film I had made that he half-hated and half-loved. He showed me his script, which was called God's Windows then and was a little more serious, especially at the end. I effectively became the script editor first."

Appignanesi found Baddiel more generous and open than many writers, although there were tense times on set: "We had our moments inevitably. I used to lose my temper, but when you do that you are always the loser. David just looks all disappointed and sad. And there's nothing you can do. He speaks his mind very clearly and doesn't tend to change it."

Baddiel, who says he has been in therapy for eight years, claims to have a great fear of anger and confrontation. He has spoken of an unspecific dread of his father in childhood, which is hard to fathom when we learn that Baddiel Senior dealt in Dinky toys. (Curiously, his mother had a complimentary commercial interest in novelty golfing memorabilia.)

Whatever his abiding personal issues, the upshot is that Baddiel seems keen not to offend. Even when making a film that tackles attitudes to Islam and Judaism, the writer is hoping to please, asking a Muslim comedian to check his script for unintended slights.

"He is one of the nicest people I know. Very sociable," said Djalili, who has known the writer for four years now and describes himself as a jealous Salieri to Baddiel's Mozart. "He is either like my loving elder brother or else a 'high-status Jew'; if he speaks you listen. A lot of stars have attention deficit disorder and he is not one of those."

One working relationship that may never be salvaged, however, is Baddiel's one-time comedy partnership with Rob Newman. After finding fame with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis in the cult hit The Mary Whitehouse Experience, the double act played huge venues on their way to a high-profile Wembley Arena gig in 1993. It was the original "rock'n'roll" moment for comedy. But by this point the two stars were only speaking to each other intermittently and a blistering row over a ruined punchline ended their collaboration.

"Dave and Rob had met as scriptwriters on a Radio 1 cabaret show, hosted by Patrick Marber, and that's why they were put together," remembers Punt. "When we first worked on the radio version of Mary Whitehouse it was more of a team thing. Dave was easy to write with, though Rob had a more personalised style."

Baddiel was ambitious from the beginning, adds Punt, and enjoyed their success. "He mellowed a lot when he became famous and he moved into the celebrity world without any apparent effort. The BBC wanted a third series of Mary Whitehouse, but Dave wanted to go on to do Fantasy Football with Frank Skinner."

This was the television show, presented in a studio recreation of the bachelor flat Baddiel and Skinner shared for six years, that set the tone for the "lads' comedy" of the mid-90s. Stuck between the revolutionary era of alternative comics, such as Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton, and the current batch of Hollywood crossover stars, such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais and Steve Coogan, this "laddishness" now seems a pretty domesticated beast.

These days, Baddiel is relatively domesticated too. He shares his home with Morwenna Banks, the comic actress, and their two children, Dolly, eight, and Ezra, five, although a close friendship with the saucy comedian Russell Brand (now engaged himself) speaks of a continued vicarious interest in the bachelor world.Which lurid suggestion brings us back to the new book that was being worked on in a dark corner of the film set.

The Death of Eli Gold sounds like a mature approach to the author's proud preoccupation with notions of masculinity and male sexual appetites. It tells of the demise of a great cultural figure, a Bellow or a Roth, and its impact on his children and wives.

Due out in September, the thriller tackles primal urges the writer has often talked about. A former proponent of the joys of porn, Baddiel once confessed his strong desire to have sex every day and he still advocates a "fight against the dying of that light" in every long-term relationship.

But the demanding life of the priapic and promiscuous star is not for him. "There's always an element of emotional damage," he has warned. The lure of a bit of recondite literary research in a shady corner has proved much harder to resist for this on-again-off-again celebrity.