'I am not a very good actor,' says David Baddiel, who stars in Baddiel's Syndrome, a new sitcom, 'but there has been a tradition in America of taking people who have got successful stand-up personas and just giving them legs - putting them in dramatic and narrative situations. Seinfeld, Roseanne, Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby. That hasn't happened much in this country, rather oddly.'
But now it has happened. In Baddiel's Syndrome, David Baddiel plays David Baddiel, an architect in therapy who suspects he is Jewish. The first thing that strikes you about this sitcom, which Baddiel has written with journalist Pete Bradshaw, is that it doesn't look like a British sitcom. It looks like an American sitcom which happens to be set in Camden Town. It's about middle-class people in their thirties, mostly idiots, who sit around talking rubbish. They muse about the nature of pistachio nuts, or pipe-smoking, or whether it's possible to sing a karaoke version of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. The punch lines, crafted by a team of writers, as well as Baddiel and Bradshaw, come at you every few seconds. And just in case you hadn't made the connection, the scenes are linked with peppy, Friends -like guitar music.
Baddiel and Bradshaw are sitting in Baddiel's large and elaborately furnished house in Belsize Park, north London. 'I think Friends is brilliant,' says Baddiel, 'and it was massively underrated in this country for a very British reason, which is the assumption that because the cast is beautiful, it must be vacuous. Whereas in fact, it's brilliantly, brilliantly written. I've seen episodes of Friends which are as funny as any sitcom I've ever seen.'
Bradshaw, too, is excited by the American comedy model. 'It's more intensively farmed,' he says. 'I mean, take a British sitcom like Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies. I've got no problem with it; I think it's quite amusing. But it's very gentle, and it just lies there, and you just have to go up and cuddle it, basically. Whereas with American sitcoms like Friends or Seinfeld, every line has been crafted to punch or gouge out a laugh. Here, there's a kind of gentleman amateur school which sometimes creates wonderful things, and often creates rather watery and dull things which can go on forever, like Last of the Summer Wine which has always made me want to commit suicide.'
In Baddiel's Syndrome, Bradshaw plays Lord Peter Harrington, a fey aristocrat who has been at a loose end since he lost his seat in the House of Lords. Morwenna Banks, Baddiel's real-life girlfriend, is Eva, a Slovenian cleaning lady; the American actor Demetri Goritsas plays an idiot savant along the lines of Woody Harrelson's barman in Cheers. It is a story of deluded and whimsical people being put in their place, often curtly and abrasively, by the Baddiel character, which he plays more or less as the persona he employed as a stand-up comedian, or alongside Frank Skinner in Fantasy Football. At the beginning and end of every episode, we see Baddiel on the couch, being analysed by the voice of Stephen Fry.
'Artistically,' says Baddiel, 'this has been the hardest thing I've had to write. Harder than a novel, definitely. The physics of it is really difficult. You think you've got enough storylines. But they run out if you use three or four an episode.' He held auditions for writers, asking them to come up with ideas, and organised weekly sessions with a group that included Jonathan Ross and his wife Jane, and Jack Barth who has written for The Simpsons.
Baddiel's Syndrome was commissioned by Sky, for an estimated £5 million, which works out at about £250,000 an episode. Some reports wrongly suggested that the £5m was Baddiel's personal fee. ITV had commissioned a pilot episode but thought it was, in Baddiel's words, 'too sophisticated'. He says: 'There's an episode which begins with two people going into a cubicle to take drugs, which some people would say is too alienating. But actually that's bollocks. Working-class people in Bradford are not going to say, "What's going on?" One of the things that people in TV seem very frightened of is this sense of, "Oh, but you'll alienate them because you're talking about something they might not know about." I think the people that don't know about this stuff don't really exist.'
Elisabeth Murdoch at Sky was keen to buy the series. Baddiel recalls: 'She had this big visionary idea that Sky was going to turn into HBO, and would do really quality programming. I remember her saying, "I want to get away from the idea of dishes on council homes and Rupert Murdoch".'
Like his character, Baddiel has been in therapy, but he doesn't like to talk about it - he thinks comedians trade too readily on their depression. 'When they play the depressed card,' he says, 'they're really saying, "I'm a genius".' He grew up in the suburbs north of London; his father collected Dinky toys and his mother was a hoarder of golf memorabilia. His house, he says, was 'wall to wall covered in either toys or pictures of toys, or golf memorabilia, or golfing scenes, in a mental, mental way.'
Bradshaw, the son of a retired photographer, has never been in therapy. 'I'm terribly frightened of what I might find out about myself,' he says. He first met Baddiel in 1979, at Haberdasher's school in Elstree, at a school election. The earnest Baddiel stood as the Socialist candidate; Bradshaw was a Satanist. 'He won,' says Baddiel, 'and I got about four votes.' Later, they performed together with the Cambridge Footlights.
Bradshaw is a revelation in the show; he is a natural clown. His character is always trying, and failing, to find a purpose in life. In one episode he grows a moustache, believing that this might be the answer, and finds himself under siege because people think he's a pervert. Baddiel says: 'I forced him into situations that, in a way, he'd rather not confront.' Like Bradshaw, his character, Lord Peter, is blind in one eye; Baddiel wrote a storyline in which he injures his other eye. A lot of the humour is edgy. Baddiel puts in frequent references to the Holocaust, and one set-up requires you to laugh when a door is opened to reveal a room full of Ku Klux Klan members.
Baddiel says: 'I remember watching an episode of Seinfeld in which George can't understand why security guards can't sit down. He gets obsessed with it and eventually buys a chair for a security guard who sits down and goes to sleep. The shop gets robbed. That's a brilliant extrapolation of what is essentially observational comedy. And that's where we've pitched the show.'
'Also,' says Bradshaw, 'it's topped and tailed structurally in the same way that our show is topped and tailed.' 'Now you're making it sound too much like Seinfeld ,' says Baddiel.
Kathryn Flett: My life as a TV cow in Baddiel's sitcom
'Er, this is a bit of an unusual request...' said the voice on the phone, 'but we wondered if you might be interested in screen-testing for a part in Sky's new sitcom, Baddiel's Syndrome?' It had taken a while but finally, last summer, my Mrs Trapes in the 1981 Old Vic Youth Theatre production of The Beggars Opera had been recognised as the groundbreaking work I had always known it might be if I ever got extraordinarily lucky.
'Shall I bring my own sheet music and tap shoes?'
In the cramped Soho casting office, I read the script for the benefit of a video camera. It included the line 'cherry-wood olive-oil drizzlers, £149.99' and took about 90 seconds. After a second reading, I was offered the part. Outside the room, rows of real actors were huddled together on school assembly chairs, clutching scripts and wearing convincing expressions of extreme hopelessness - though perhaps this was merely a Method. Could I really take work from struggling professionals when I already had a regular job and a pension, even if it was with Equitable Life?
After extensive contractual negotiations ('We'll pay you X.' 'Really? Wow! Thanks!'), I turned up for rehearsals at a church hall in south London. It was just like donating blood: reasonably painless and over very fast, plus free tea and biscuits before you left. Admittedly, I hadn't yet learnt my lines, but I reckoned I could pull it off with the help of idiot boards, just like Brando in Apocalypse Now. Hopefully, I too might be shot in flattering gloomvision.
Back home, I pondered my motivation. I hadn't dared ask why I had been chosen to play the microscopically small, but frankly pivotal role of Martina Chatwin, though I had a big hunch: 'Martina' is a broadsheet hackette who writes a first-person confessional column, and given that I hadn't done that sort thing for, ooh, years, the Sunday Times 's Liz Jones must already have turned it down. Then there was the undeniably worrying fact that Martina was, in the words of David Baddiel's character (an angsty thirtysomething called David Baddiel): 'a cow'.
I think it takes balls to say to someone, 'Would you like to play a complete cow whose character is, in fact, not terribly loosely based on you...', and so I should have the guts to prove that - ha!ha!ha! - I could laugh at myself, or at least the me they humorously perceived me to be, while also bringing something extra to Martina: a level of humanity and grace that was, admittedly, not altogether evident in the script. And all of this in roughly 90 seconds of airtime. Who wouldn't leap at that sort of challenge, given that there are so few good parts for journalists in their mid-thirties? Hey, Martina might be a cow, but she was a well-written cow.
At Teddington Studios, I had a dressing-room with my name on the door and a horrible costume on a hanger. This came as no surprise because if Martina was going to be 'a cow' hidden inside the Versace-clad body of a love goddess, then they would have given the part to Liz Hurley. Indeed it is, I think, fair to say that I eventually emerged from hair and make-up looking like Olive from On The Buses. I enjoyed the whole experience very much but there was no escaping the fact that, even as my heart said, 'You are Uma Thurman', the TV monitor said, 'You are in panto in Wolverhampton playing the Ugly Sister's slightly uglier banjo-strumming cousin'.
So, after several fraught months on a rigorous high-collagen/low-carb diet, last week I again summoned the courage to speak to Peter Bradshaw - Baddiel's Syndrome 's co-writer, co-star (and memorably, in episode six, Martina Chatwin's boyfriend), not to mention the Guardian's film critic, who once sensibly turned down a part in a production of Cyrano de Bergerac directed by some bloke called Sam Mendes but has finally got himself a proper acting break.
After some polite obfuscation in response to my inquiry about the genesis of Martina's character ('well, obviously, it was based on your book and column...'), Bradshaw admitted that:'If we get recommissioned, you may have to clear your schedule.' Sweet! And if they allow Martina to wear the sort of frocks that reveal both her inner and outer beauty and then spin her off into a Frasier -style series of her own, Ms Chatwin and I might even think about it. In the meantime, however, I urge you to enjoy the series - an entirely unbiased review of which reads: 'I laughed out loud and corpsed twice! Pure televisual Temazepan!' - Martina Chatwin, The Observer.