Comic reflects on his lad culture days

He may forever be linked with ‘lad culture’ – not least because of the 1996 football anthem Three Lions. But David Baddiel has insisted his work was never misogynistic.

‘I'm comfortable if you actually go and look at the work,’ he says on today’s Desert Island Discs, ‘because truth is always in the detail.’

His comments came after host Kirsty Young quizzed him about how he felt looking back at his past as something of a poster-boy for a ‘badly-behaved generation of men’.

Baddiel also recalled Alexei Sayle branding him and his Fantasy Football co-star Frank Skinner as ‘misogynistic’ – but says he when challenged his fellow comic over the comment, Sayle couldn’t come up with an example.

The double act did appear on the front cover of Loaded in 1996, with Skinner tugging at a female model’s football shirt, as she placed one hand over his crotch.

But Baddiel challenged Young’s description that he was ‘leery’ in the photograph, replying: ‘I’m not looking leery, actually.’

‘I'm not going to claim in any way that that Loaded thing was OK and great, but I'm going to claim that if you actually look at it, I'm covering my testicles in a terrified way, which obviously is a reference to being in the wall in football. 

‘But I would say, I'm not just going: 'Here are my genitals, here I am being proud of being a man in this situation.'

‘I'm being funny about it, as best I can in a situation which, I admit, is kind of like, not great.’

Baddiel chose Three Lions as one of his Desert Island Discs, saying that even thinking about the time it was sung at Wembley during Euro 96  brought him out in goose pimples to this day.

He also spoke about how his comedy had matured over the years, and now confronts bleaker topics such as his father's dementia

‘As you get older your life gets darker,’ he says. ‘You're faced with mortality.’ 

And he said joking about it wasn’t a denial, but ‘a bulwark’.

• Desert Island Discs is on Radio 4 at 11.15am today. 

Published: 27 May 2018