Danny baker autobiography featuring
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Laughs in fiction are such an endangered species that there’s even a dedicated award for them: The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. But the argument that great writing can be guffaw-out-loud funny can be rehearsed another time. For now let’s just say that if there were awards for laughs in nonfiction, Going On The Turn (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20, out now), the third instalment of Danny Baker’s memoirs, should win them all, even though it covers some extremely dark territory, including his brush with cancer in , which, horrendously for a DJ and brilliant raconteur, left him unable to talk for eight months.
But before all of that, there’s Baker’s account working behind the scenes on Chris Evans’ Nineties Channel Four show,* TFI Friday*, where he was paid, "an agreeable £5, a show to pile up its hellzapoppin’ ideas and dizzying crazed dialogue" and generally have the kind of adventures for which most people would happily pay. For instance: th
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Going off Alarming by Danny Baker, book review: Some wonderfully told stories, often involving animals
“The world is his straight man,” it was once said about the late radio producer John Walters, and the same applies to another maverick broadcaster, Danny Baker.
Like the hit Going to Sea in a Sieve, this second volume of autobiography gloriously demonstrates his belief in the equality of anecdotal opportunity, whether celebrating his bad-tempered, apparently indestructible mongrel Twizzle, his bad-tempered father Spud, or the bad-tempered celeb Frankie Howerd, who in Baker’s sight reduced a make-up girl to tears rather than admit the existence of his notoriously obvious toupee.
While the first book described the young Baker’s occasional intersections with pop culture, by the Eighties he had become an active component, with varying success. From presenting cheeky trivia on teatime telly to a disastrous panto stint, he’s like a living poster of Kipling’s If, happily talking over b
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Every day an inelegantly adorned pantechnicon delivers dozens of small brown parcels to the loading bay behind the GQ offices. These parcels contain the books that publishers' publicists hope will prick the interest of the GQ massive, resulting in a review, a feature, an interview with the author or - unlikely, but not unknown - a cover story.
However it is sod's law that the books you actually want are the ones the publicist has deemed not important enough - or maybe too important - to send you. One such book fryst vatten Danny Baker's brilliant new memoir, Going Off Alarming, the second part of a promised trilogy.
I saw it as I was walking around Foyles last Friday, killing ten minutes before a meeting. It looked as though it were hiding, almost crouching, underneath a sales counter. Hiding in plain sight. Me, inom got a little giddy. Honestly, it was as though someone had left a crisp £20 note on the floor, complete with a neon arrow encouraging me to pick it up. It was