David Baddiel: in conversation with William Crawley

David Baddiel is a comedian, author, screenwriter, television presenter and activist, and has been a prominent name in comedy for over thirty years. As a stand-up comedian, he performed to a Wembley crowd of 12,500 in the UK’s first ever arena comedy show in 1992 and was credited with turning comedy into ‘The New Rock n Roll’.

David returned to stand-up comedy in 2013 with his critically acclaimed show, Fame: Not The Musical. In Spring 2016 David premiered My Family: Not the Sitcom, which ran on London’s West End for 15 weeks and was nominated for an Olivier Award. His latest show, Trolls: Not the Dolls, toured in 2020 and 2021. In March 2024, David performed all three of his stand-up shows again across three dates at The Royal Court Theatre which were filmed for TV specials.

He began his career as writer and star of numerous hit comedy television shows including The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman and Baddiel in Pieces. Alongside fellow comedian Frank Skinner, David later created and presented Fantasy Football and Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned. The pair went on to write the seminal football album Three Lions together with The Lightning Seeds, which has been a UK number one a record-breaking four times. More recently he has created and presented several acclaimed documentaries, including The Trouble with Dad (Channel 4), Confronting Holocaust Denial(BBC2) and Social Media, Anger and Us (BBC2).

Following the publication of his bestselling polemic Jews Don’t Count, David has been at the forefront of tackling antisemitism in the media, sport, and more broadly, the progressive left. The book became The Sunday Times Politics and Current Affairs Book of the Year, 2021 and enjoyed critical acclaim in the UK, Europe and US. He has been invited to speak on antisemitism for audiences in Berlin, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Sydney and around the UK. In 2022, the book was adapted into a documentary for Channel 4.

His following book, The God Desire, was published in April 2023 and his most recent, My Family, is a searingly honest, funny and moving family memoir in which he exposes his mother’s idiosyncratic sex life and his father’s dementia to the same affectionate scrutiny.

David has also published eleven hugely successful children’s books as well as four critically acclaimed adult novels.

William Crawley presents Talkback on BBC Radio Ulster, and Sunday on BBC Radio 4, and won the Speech Broadcaster of the Year Gold Award in the Irish broadcasting awards 2022 and 2024. On TV, he has written and presented more than 30 documentaries on subjects ranging from politics and history to science and religion, winning RTS Awards for natural history broadcasting, and was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy for contributions to journalism.

Part of Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics>>