Run for your lives - it's Danny
Baker
There are few people of
whom I am an unashamed fan. People who I recommend to strangers, people
whose work I follow rather than simply let come to me. People who make me
watch and listen to things that I would sooner eat my own legs than have
on. Such people include the peerlessly lovely Sir Stephen Fry, the
indescribable Eddie Izzard, the magnificent Mel and sexy Sue and the
subject of today’s thesis – Sir Danforth Baker.
Better known as Danny Baker.
I used to think he was just another loud and obnoxious cockney. “Loud”,
“obnoxious” and “cockney” are three words that go together so well. They
are almost the Groucho, Harpo and Chico of the language. It would take a
feat of imagination to conceive of one without the other two. But Danny
Baker isn’t like that. I don’t even think he’s a cockney.
Lets rewind to the golden era of bland television – the 1980s. Maybe the
very early 90s but decades don’t change dead on the stroke of midnight so
the early 90s was as much a part of the 80s as the early 80s were a part
of the 1970s. Saint and Greavsie were the oracles of football because ITV
had match rights and they could only be arsed showing a match every couple
of weeks and highlights were the preserve of people like S&G. To deviate
for a moment, those who say they want top flight football back on
terrestrial telly like it used to be do not remember how it used to be. It
was free but it was crap. Ok?
S&G broke the rules one week and had a feature on Danny Baker’s Radio 5
show. What was this heresy? A BBC show being mentioned on ITV? Had the
world run mad? It was in many ways the first proper football phone in.
Certainly the first I ever listened to. It was certainly the first good
football phone in. You see, the boy Baker wasn’t interested in doing what
local radio had been doing ever since Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea
of the telephone from some poor penniless inventor and made himself famous
the world over. He wasn’t really bothered – in his own phrase – whether
Coggins should play instead of Boggins. It took a couple of years for
things to evolve but he made the football phone in fun. Sod what happened
at Old Trafford – this was people playing football with the head of a pig
or on a pitch with a railway track running across it. This was what you’ve
seen in a footballer’s house and foreign players with rude names. It
wasn’t brain surgery but it was funny. Danny Kelly came on board and –
just when the show was reaching its peak - the BBC sacked him for daring
to deviate from the party line and denounce referees as being rubbish in
specific terms rather than just in clichés.
It was off to Talk Radio and even more Baker and Kelly. They sandwiched
the main live football show (which was so cheap they had fans on mobile
phones reporting on games) with a total of three and a half hours of comic
gold. I loved those shows. They were the perfect antidote to David
Mellor’s pompous 606 on Radio 5. But then Talk Radio sacked him and he
moved to Virgin who sacked him when his mate Chris Evans left. He’s now on
Radio London and I could listen to a few minutes in the morning online but
there is no point. This is a chapter in his long career that I won’t be a
part of.
But he does still feature in my daily routine. His spot on Terry and Gaby
is well worth asking TiVo to record. You will have noticed (I hope) the
Spoon’s Derisory Miscellany section on this website. Inspired in part my
Schott’s Original Miscellany and partly by Danny Baker’s daily segment,
this part of the Vervoid seeks to preset the kind of fascinating info that
I so love. I love the stories behind things. The explanations for things
that most people take for granted. It’s easy to get out of the habit of
asking “why?” When we’re children we never stop asking why. Why do birds
fly South for the winter? Why are traffic lights red, yellow and green?
Why why why. Like many childhood things we eventually put the whys away in
a cupboard with imagination and realising that today is as good a day as
any for doing whatever you want to do. Danny Baker still has that Why?
spirit. His conversion to adulthood expanded the Why? into questioning AND
answering. To dismiss him as a loud and ignorant cockney is to do him
great disservice. He is a self educated man in the most part and such
people should never be under-estimated. Paul Merton is the same, ditto the
late Kenneth Williams.
So if you’re around in the late morning and at a loose end, flip Channel 5
on and watch Danny Baker because not only will you learn something that
will fascinate your mates in the pub, you might even catch some of his
enthusiasm. You will also see a fantastic entertainer and someone who
doesn’t compromise for television. He’s fat, balding, his glasses are
crooked, he doesn’t always shave, he wears some really ugly shirts, he’s
got a cockney accent and he talks too much. He is, in short, real. We need
more people on television like him.
His influence over me
reaches further and deeper than that - he has certain mannerisms of speech
that I have consciously or unconsciously adopted. The most obvious example
of this is "stolen mannerisms? By all means stolen mannerisms..."
Others would include the use of the prefix Brer, the "run for your lives"
which adorns the top of this column and I am on the verge of adding his
new catchphrase to my repertoire. But before that happens, it's back to
my friends...
We also share a birthday and a love of Wodehouse which are a couple of
little trivia facts of no importance.
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