This comedy legend pushes the limits. Will his bizarre new showbiz podcast cause more trouble? He talks about the Giuliani sting, enduring ‘paedogeddon’ with Chris Morris – and David Bowie’s frozen dinners
For a quarter of a century now, Peter Baynham has been one of the writers behind Britain’s sharpest comedians and satirists, including Sacha Baron Cohen, Chris Morris and Steve Coogan. In 2005, however, he began to wonder if he had forgotten how to be funny. “I thought, ‘Whatever I had, I’ve lost it,’” says the 57-year-old. “It was gone.”
Around a decade earlier, he had joined the most original comedy team since Monty Python when the producer Armando Iannucci brought him in to co-write the television news spoof The Day Today, with a cast that included Coogan, Morris, Rebecca Front and Patrick Marber. He teamed up again with Coogan and Iannucci for the gloriously excruciating sitcom I’m Alan Partridge; Coogan later credited him directly with making the grotesque, washed-up Norfolk DJ more human and sympathetic. He also served as Morris’s partner-in-crime on the Channel 4 series Brass Eye, with its savagely funny “Paedogeddon” special, a send-up of tabloid hysteria that caused its own media outcry.
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