David Baddiel
Comedian
David Baddiel is a a comedian and author.
Baddiel was first known as one of the stars of The Mary Whitehouse Experience and then Newman and Baddiel In Pieces. In 1992, with Rob Newman, David performed to 12,500 people in the UK’s first ever arena comedy show. He is credited with making comedy “the new rock and roll” although no one is really sure who said that…
In 1994 David and Frank Skinner created Fantasy Football League allowing them to talk about football for a living for over 10 years. The pair, along with The Lightening Seeds, wrote the iconic unofficial England anthem ‘Three Lions’, which has been number one three times and is still heard at games around the world. I guess this would been seen as the ‘new lad’ phase.
In 2000 David and Frank created the hit ITV show Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, going out live and unscripted for over 60 episodes. They joined up together again in 2006 and 2010 to record one of the first hit podcasts, Baddiel and Skinner’s World Cup Podcasts, live from Germany and South Africa. The show was downloaded over a million times and was one of the first podcasts to be nominated for a Sony award.
Away from the screen David has been writing for nearly 20 years. He has published seven books to date; Time for Bed (1996), Whatever Love Means (2002), The Secret Purposes (2006), The Death of Eli Gold (2011), The Parent Agency (2015), The Boy Who Could Do What He Liked (2016) and The Person Controller (2016).
In 2010 David wrote his first movie with the hit indie film The Infidel, starring Omid Djalili, Richard Schiff, Matt Lucas and Miranda Hart. Following its success, and a Kickstarter campaign, a stage version premiered at Theatre Royal Stratford East in autumn 2014.
After nearly 15 years away David returned to the stage in 2013 with his critically acclaimed show FAME: Not The Musical. The show discussed David’s strange relationship with celebrity and what it is like to live a life in (and out of) fame. In 2016 David premiered his new show My Family: Not The Sitcom at the Menier Chocolate Factory. A sell out, critically acclaimed run saw the show transfer to the West End at the Vaudeville Theatre.
Appears in
Podcasts
Death
Is there something peculiar to Judaism that makes us think about death differently? With no proscription for a definitive heaven or afterlife, how does that affect how we live our lives and think about death? Are Jewish rituals an effective way of dealing with grief? Are there better ways to think and talk about death with friends and family? In our final episode from season 2 we address these questions with British comedian David Baddiel (who you might remember from this season’s atheism episode), Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie from NYC’s Lab/Shul, founder of Death Over Dinner and DoD Jewish Edition Michael Hebb and Dan Crane’s 97-year-old nana.
Podcasts
Jewish Atheism
Can Jews be atheists and still be Jews? Hosts Dan Crane and Jessica Chaffin explore the question of Jewish atheism with Rabbi Susan Goldberg of LA’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple, president of American Atheists David Silverman, British comedian David Baddiel, and founder and president emeritus of the Secular Coalition for America Herb Silverman.