It is 1986. David Baddiel, a 22-year-old Jewish student from Dollis Hill, is about to perform a stand-up routine that will earn him his first review in a national newspaper. It could be the making of him. “He tells two Jewish jokes and with the minimum of gesture indicates the difficulties of combining masturbation with bondage fantasies,” the review later reads. Despite the suffocating seriousness of Eighties comedy, Baddiel just wants to talk about himself.
That could have been it. Baddiel, by his own admission, is a limited performer. He can’t do accents. His characters are barely believable. “I don’t want to turn this into a therapy session,” he said, sinking back into a chair in his new office in Kentish Town, where I met him last month, “but there are considerably better comedians than me. What I do have is a good tuning fork.”
Content from our partners
