David Baddiel (comedian)

David Lionel Baddiel (/bəˈdiːl/; born 28 May 1964) is an English comedian, presenter, screenwriter and author. He became known for his early work alongside Rob Newman in The Mary Whitehouse Experience and later for his comedy partnership with Frank Skinner. He has written the children's books The Parent Agency, The Person Controller, AniMalcolm, Birthday Boy, Head Kid, and The Taylor TurboChaser. He is also a lyricist on "Three Lions", a song that has been described as the de facto "anthem" of English football since 1996. In 2024, he filmed his trilogy of specials "Not The" at the Royal Court Theatre for Sky Arts in February. He also launched his podcast, "A Muslim and a Jew Go There" with Sayeeda Warsi, Baroness Warsi and filmed a travelogue with Hugh Dennis, "Two Men on a Bike" released in 2025. David Lionel Baddiel was born on 28 May 1964 in Troy, New York, to parents from the U.K. who were living in the U.S. He moved to England with his family when he was four months old. His father, Colin Brian Baddiel, came from a working-class Swansea family, of Eastern European Jewish background; he worked as a research chemist with Unilever before being made redundant in the 1980s, after which he sold Dinky Toys at Grays Antique Market. His mother, Sarah (Fabian), was born in Nazi Germany, to a Jewish family. She was five months old when she was taken to England by her parents in 1939 after the family had fled Nazi Germany, where her wealthy father had been stripped of his assets as a victim of Kristallnacht. Soon after their arrival in the United Kingdom, her father was interned as an "enemy alien" on the Isle of Man for a year. Baddiel's grandfather had mental health issues, sometimes requiring hospitalisation, for the rest of his life. Baddiel said in 2022 that he had been parented by his elder brother Ivor, as "my dad was unemployed and angry, while my mum was distracted by her passionate affair". An episode of the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? investigated Baddiel's heritage in some detail, but failed to prove his theory that his mother had been secretly adopted from another Jewish family who had no hope of escaping. Baddiel grew up in the Dollis Hill area of London alongside his two brothers Ivor and Dan (one older, one younger). Ivor is a writer. Baddiel attended the North West London Jewish Day School in Brent, and the public school Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Elstree. He studied English at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Cambridge Footlights, and graduated with a double first BA. He began studies for a PhD in English at University College London, but did not complete it. After leaving university, Baddiel became a professional stand-up comedian in London, as well as a writer for acts such as Rory Bremner and series including Spitting Image. His first television appearance came in one episode of the showbiz satire Filthy Rich and Catflap. In 1988 he was introduced to Rob Newman, and the two formed a writing partnership. Subsequently, paired up with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, another comedy duo, they began writing and performing in The Mary Whitehouse Experience on BBC Radio 1, where the show ran for four series and a special. This success led the show to transfer to BBC2, where it ran for two series, after which both duos decided to end the show. During this time, Baddiel also co-hosted the Channel 4 programme A Stab in the Dark. After The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Baddiel and Newman re-teamed up for Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, which ran for seven episodes on BBC2, featuring character sketches, monologues, and observation routines. Despite a fraught working relationship, the show saw Newman and Baddiel find enormous success as live performers, held up as examples of comedy as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’, with their tour (Newman and Baddiel: Live and In Pieces) culminating in the first-ever sold-out gig for a comedy act at Wembley Arena, playing to 12,500 people. Despite this success, increasing tension between the pair led to them announcing the tour would be their last together. Their final tour was the subject of a BBC2 documentary, Newman and Baddiel on the Road to Wembley. Baddiel subsequently met and began sharing a flat with fellow comedian Frank Skinner. Both lifelong football fans (Baddiel is a Chelsea F.C. fan), the pair created, wrote and performed Fantasy Football League, a popular entertainment show based on fantasy football. Running for three series on BBC2, followed by a series of live specials throughout the 1998 World Cup and then again through the 2004 European Championship, as well as a series of podcasts for The Times from Germany at the 2006 World Cup, and another series for Absolute Radio from South Africa during the 2010 World Cup (amassing over three million downloads). During this time the duo also twice topped the UK Singles Chart with the football anthem "Three Lions", co-written and performed with The Lightning Seeds. The song was originally written as the England football team's official anthem for UEFA Euro 1996 and was re-recorded with updated lyrics as the unofficial anthem for the 1998 World Cup. The song continues to be popular with England fans and returned to the charts in July 2018, celebrating the progress of the England national football team at the 2018 FIFA World Cup with the phrase "it's coming home" featuring heavily on social media and television. Baddiel received criticism for his impression of black footballer Jason Lee in Fantasy Football League in the 1990s, which involved him wearing a pineapple on his head and using blackface. Lee said he considered this a form of bullying. Baddiel has issued a number of apologies on social media and in an article for The Daily Telegraph, saying it was "part of a very bad racist tradition". Lee said in 2020 that he had not received a direct apology from Baddiel or Skinner over the series of sketches, but in 2022, Baddiel met Lee to apologise in his Channel 4 documentary. In his 2021 book Jews Don't Count, Baddiel said that, despite apologising for the Jason Lee impression "on various occasions", people, particularly on social media, continued to share it in order to silence him: They want me to shut up, particularly about anti-Semitism. As far as they are concerned, the photo of me as Jason Lee is a trump card that means I cannot speak about racism, even the racism that threatens me personally. After ending Fantasy Football League, the pair took an improvised question-and-answer show to the Edinburgh Fringe which then became a television series, Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, which ran for five series on ITV, as well as a West End run at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 2001. The pair also appeared on a celebrity special of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2001, becoming the first celebrity contestants to reach £250,000 for their charities, the Catholic Children's Society and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. In February 2022, a clip emerged from Baddiel's 2004 guest appearance on The Frank Skinner Show. In the clip, Baddiel uses "pikey", a pejorative term used to refer to people who are of a Traveller community, to negatively denote his own appearance. Critics accused Baddiel of hypocrisy given his own polemic, Jews Don't Count. Baddiel has written four novels: Time for Bed (1996), Whatever Love Means (2002), The Secret Purposes (2006), and The Death of Eli Gold (2011). In June 2015, he published his first children's novel, The Parent Agency, which won the LOLLIE award (the successor to the Roald Dahl Funny Book Awards) for "Best Laugh Out Loud Book for 9–13-Year-Olds" and is set to be developed into a feature film (also written and produced by Baddiel) through Fox 2000 Pictures. His subsequent children's novels include The Person Controller (2015), AniMalcolm (2016), Birthday Boy (2017) and Head Kid (2018). He wrote The Boy Who Could Do What He Liked, a short story published for World Book Day in 2016. In 2001, Baddiel