Danny Baker

Danny Baker (born 22 June 1957) is an English comedy writer, journalist, radio DJ and screenwriter.

Throughout his career he has largely presented for London's regional radio and television.

Baker was born in Deptford to a working-class family and raised in Bermondsey.

From 1977 he wrote for the punk zine Sniffin' Glue, and from there was hired by the New Musical Express, where he worked as a writer, reviewer, and interviewer.

In 1977, Baker started writing for the punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue which was founded by his old schoolfriend Mark Perry which in turn led to an offer from the New Musical Express, then edited by Nick Logan.

Baker began working as the office receptionist, but was soon contributing regular articles and reviews before progressing to interviews.

He often refers to these times during his radio shows, regularly citing examples of the ridiculous behaviour exhibited by his rock star interviewees.

The episode on the Top of the Pops audience includes a clip of Baker leaping around to a performance of "Ooh What A Life" by the Gibson Brothers in 1979, captioned as "Danny Baker's first TV appearance".

Baker also began a BBC Saturday night chat show, called Danny Baker After All which borrowed its style from Late Night with David Letterman, but his style and guests (Rick Wakeman of prog rock band Yes was a regular) did not attract the mainstream audience the slot demanded.

Film critic Mark Kermode's band The Railtown Bottlers were the show's house band.

Later he fronted television adverts for Daz washing powder and Mars bar confectionery.

Baker parodied his Daz ads by appearing as himself on the sitcom Me, You and Him.

Moving into television in 1980, he began presenting London Weekend Television's Twentieth Century Box and reporting for The Six O'Clock Show.

Baker started his TV career in 1980 at London Weekend Television (LWT), as the presenter of Twentieth Century Box – a series of regional documentaries on elements of youth culture in London, produced by Janet Street Porter.

One edition in the first series documented the burgeoning new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) scene, including an early TV appearance of Iron Maiden performing at The Marquee Club and interviews with "air guitarists".

Other editions also featured early appearances from the likes of Spandau Ballet and Depeche Mode.

Baker's first mainstream break was as roving reporter-presenter on the Michael Aspel LWT regional magazine The Six O'Clock Show alongside former Mastermind winner and former London black cab driver Fred Housego.

Paul Ross (brother of Jonathan Ross whom Baker had as his best man) was his researcher.

During his stint on The Six O'Clock Show, Baker was filmed having an altercation with a British Rail press officer.

This clip is often resurrected for clip shows and can be seen on YouTube.

Baker appeared regularly on LWT's regional output during the 1980s and early 1990s - working on such programmes as Six O'Clock Live, Danny Baker's Londoners, and in 1991, The Game - a six-part series which featured coverage of teams involved in the fourth division of the East London Sunday Football League.

The series was later released on DVD.

During this period, Baker began presenting on BBC Radio 5's 606 football-related phone-in programme as well as the job of presenting Match of the Eighties, a six-part BBC series of football during the 1980/81 and 1985/86 seasons.

Baker was a writer on Chris Evans' TFI Friday show, as well as contributing material for presenters such as Angus Deayton and Jonathan Ross.

In 1989 he began radio presenting for BBC Radio London and in 1990 joined the newly established BBC Radio 5.

In the later 1990s, Baker wrote a weekly sports column for The Times and was briefly a columnist for early issues of film magazine Empire.

During the late 1990s he made guest appearances on comedy shows including Have I Got News for You, Shooting Stars and Room 101.

Baker began writing for television programmes in 1992 after being asked to prepare a piece for one of the first archive clip shows: TV Hell, which was a collection of the worst TV programmes ever.

Since then he has presented television shows such as Win, Lose or Draw, Pets Win Prizes and TV Heroes, which was a series of 10-minute homages to some of Baker's entertainment idols including Fanny Cradock, Peter Glaze (from Crackerjack) and the Top of the Pops audience.

In 1997 he was dismissed from the latter, accused of inciting threatening behaviour toward a football referee.

That decade, he also began writing for television.

From 2002 to 2012 Baker presented the daily morning radio show on BBC Radio London and in 2007 also presented the channel's all-day podcast, the All Day Breakfast Show.

Between 2012 and 2017 he published a three-volume autobiography, which was used as the basis for the 2015 BBC sitcom Cradle to Grave.

In 2019, the BBC dismissed Baker after he posted a tweet that depicted Archie Mountbatten-Windsor as a posh costumed chimpanzee being brought home from hospital, in reference to his birth announcement.

Baker denied any racial motivation for the tweet.

Baker was born in Deptford in south-east London to Fred "Spud" Baker, a dockworker, and Betty, a factory worker.

He grew up in Bermondsey and attended Rotherhithe Primary School and then, instead of taking up a grammar school place, went to the nearby West Greenwich Secondary Boys' School, Deptford.

He played truant from the age of 14 to the age of 16 when he could legally leave school.

He initially worked in One Stop Records, a small but fashionable record shop in South Molton Street in the West End of London.

The youngest of three children, he has an older sister, Sharon, and had an older brother, Michael, who died aged 29 when Danny was 24.