Why Baddiel became an author

David Baddiel has revealed that he only became an author to compete with Robert Newman.

The comic confessed that he started writing his first novel, Time For Bed, simply because he was envious of the interest his double-act partner (right) was getting for his literary efforts.

The duo famously didn’t get on in the last days of their comic partnership, and Baddiel  pretended that he, too, was working on a book to  impress journalists.

Speaking at the Edinburgh book festival, Baddiel said: “The reason I started writing novels was because a long time ago – and this seems like talking about the war now - I used to work with someone called Robert Newman, who had written a novel.

“When we toured, journalists would ask me if I was writing a novel too, so I said, ‘yes’

“Then I got calls from some publishers saying they wanted it, so I wrote 20 pages and then thought, ‘I actually like this.’”

Baddiel was talking to promote his latest novel, The Secret Purposes, about a Jew who fled Nazi Germany to find asylum in Britain, only to be held in an internment camp on the Isle of Man – a story loosely based on the experiences of his own maternal grandfather.

Asked whether he worried about the response to a comedian tackling such a serious topic, he said: “I long ago stopped worrying about they way things might be perceived – you just can’t do that.

“I write what I feel I want to write. The fact it might contradict people’s perceptions of me didn’t really bother me. And I have quite a lot of confidence in myself as a writer.”

And he said the process of writing a serious historical novel was not dissimilar to creating comedy. “Comedy is a serious business,” he said. “It’s hard to write and has a lot of big, important things to say it its best. The comic and the serious are closely interlinked.”

Baddiel also said there was another advantage of becoming a novelist – the book readings are much less stressful than stand-up shows or his TV work with Frank Skinner.

“I like doing public performances, and this feels very relaxed to me,” he said. “It is a tyranny to go on stage and get laughs every 30 seconds.

“But I have no intentions of giving it up. I don’t really do stand-up any more, but I want to keep doing what I do with Frank, and other things.”

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Published: 20 Aug 2004