David Baddiel – Fame: Not the Musical

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David Baddiel’s first solo standup show in over a decade is a delicate balancing act. On one hand he spends it sharing anecdotes about Russell Brand and Katy Perry’s wedding in India, blethering with Madonna whilst hanging out with Ricky Gervais, and communing with Peter Gabriel. It would easily sag into An Audience With… territory were it not for the other side of the scales.

Every braying name-drop is tempered by Baddiel converting it into a scalpel with which to deconstruct fame, and “the one thousand mundane ways it distorts your life”. It is like his early career—when The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Fantasy Football League were fatuously hailed as the new rock’n’roll—created a new-lad Frankenstein’s monster that he’s at once piggy-backing on, mouth agape, whilst simultaneously taking it apart.

Which is a relief, because after the first 20 minutes of jokes about Ryanair, bankers and Tom Cruise, it seems like Baddiel hasn’t updated his material at all from the last time he took to the stage. It is when he applies a novelist’s turn of phrase (he is the author of four books) to how the prism of fame bends reality that the show rises above average standup tropes. Fame, he says, “is something we all crave but no one wants to own.” Those who used to be on TV are treated with pity because “the assumption is that fame has given up on you, not the other way around”.

Forget rock’n’roll; on this evidence comedy could be the new sociology.