Borat and Alan Partridge scribe at the BBC Comedy Festival

Acclaimed writer Peter Baynham lifted the lid on his illustrious career in a session at the BBC Comedy  Festival in Cardiff yesterday.

The comic spoke about getting his break on Radio 4 and going on to work with Steve Coogan on Alan Partridge, Chris Morris on The Day Today and Sacha Baron Cohen on the Borat movies.

But he had an unusual start for a comedy writer, not having gone to university but instead joining the Merchant Navy as a teenager.

He did not recommend other aspiring creatives follow in his footsteps.  To those thinking of a career in comedy, he said: ‘I'm here to say if you don't join the Merchant Navy if you're 16 and spend five years on a chemical tanker with tattooed racists. Stupid, stupid. It's just it's the worst idea.’’

Speaking about how his interest in comedy was first piqued, he said: At 15 my parents gave me this book From Fringe To Flying Circus and it's basically a family tree  from Beyond The Fringe through to Monty Python's Flying Circus and all these amazing people… It was kind of a roadmap to what I'm doing now, except I went to fucking sea. I think I wanted to see the world – and nobody told me about Interrailling!

‘Just don't make any big decision at 15. I was 15 when I was accepted, and I went off when I was 16. Very early on, I came to my dad and I said, "this isn’t for me". But there was massive unemployment at that time, so I stuck with it until I eventually – horrifically – became qualified to navigate a supertanker. Navigation is not my thing… I nearly hit a ferry, genuinely, the first time I was on the bridge.’

However, he said that with hindsight he didn’t regret doing that instead of going to university as ‘everything builds, every experience you have affects you’ to get him to where he is now.

Despite his interest in comedy said he never thought he could ever work in the field ‘I didn't think about any stuff getting written,' he said. 'I'm an idiot, obviously. I just thought that stuff just magically appeared on TV.’

After his stint in the Merchant Navy, he went to London with the ‘vaguest idea’ of doing something creative. He spent five years doing ‘terrible jobs’ such as graphic design and working in a call centre ‘and then eventually I stumbled upon a comedy improv workshop’.

‘It was at the Comedy Store and it just blew my mind and Mike Myers was there, Julian Clary and Paul Merton. But then I embarked on an equally misguided career trying to stand up for five years doing a character based on my old Welsh maths teacher. Mr. Hughes.’

But he said he wasn’t cut out for stand-up and the fact his act was ‘bombing 60 per cent of the time for five years’ but ‘I didn't have a plan B, I didn't have a career path’. Even now, he says he gets stage fright.. even just having to read in front of children at his daughter’s school in Los Angeles.

The turning point came with Weekending, the topical Radio 4 programme that anyone could write for. ‘Literally anyone off the street could walk in and pitch jokes, and then I was writing sketches for the radio.’

‘Being physically in a room, you can't underestimate that,’ he said. ‘Being physically with other people trying to write jokes…’

He said often comedians would come in with sketches, then storm off indignantly if they were rejected b. But he stuck around, getting used to the rejections as ‘ 99.9 per cent of what we say is just nonsense’.

‘I think early on my mindset was basically "Would you like this joke?"  "No." "Would you like this joke? Would you like this?" Just keep on, just being annoying. Like those tennis ball machines just firing stuff out.’

It was also on Weekending that he met Armando Iannucci, who became the producer of the show and a long-time collaborator.

Speaking about handling rejection, Baynham said: ‘I think you have to be a bit , a bit strange and sociopathic.

‘I don't believe in getting into this as a means to an end to something else, like becoming a presenter. You’ve got to be that annoying person who thinks you know what's funny, or you've said something and you've got a laugh and then you say ‘I just want to keep doing this’.

‘I'm so annoying. Like with Sacha Baron Cohen I’ll pitch a joke and he goes "no" and I keep coming back with it. The realisation is that if you pitch a joke and somebody doesn’t laugh, it’s probably dead. Because have you ever explained the joke and then someone’s then gone, "Oh my God, that's funny!"

He said he enjoyed writing rooms as ‘incredibly collaborative’ - but admitted: ‘I don't think they'll ever be a comedy writing guide based on how we wrote Alan Partridge. It was just chaos. But was just fun because it would just a room with three of us throwing ideas around.’

Speaking of working with Steve Coogan, he said: ‘This is the thing you can't really plan for. I must have hit something early on that he really laughed at – he’s a  very, very generous laugher – and I some par of my brain goes, "Oh, I've got more of that". And if people find you funny, it makes you funny. Just get with those people who find funny… there’s something in the brain that just reacts to that. I never felt funnier than when I was with those guys.’

He said that doing the improv course was probably the best decision he made, ‘even though you might never go on stage, I’d really recommend improv because what they teach is to not think about what you're saying.

‘So don’t try and think of something funny. Try to switch off that part of your because then you don't know what's going to come out – and hopefully it's not something terrible.’

He said that was the essence of Partridge; not that he was an awful man but simply he ‘hasn’t got a brake on his mouth’ so says things other people would filter out.

And speaking of his satirical work with Baron Cohen, Baynham described comedy as like a ’Trojan horse – if you make people laugh and come out thinking just a little differently about something, that seems, in my opinion, that can make a little difference.

‘But with Sacha, the first thing is "this has to be the funniest thing ever" No pressure!’

Despite Borat involving a lot of improvisation in real-world scenes, Baynham admitted he was riled by criticism that the film wasn’t written.

‘It's a lot of writing,’ he said. ‘We plan the story in great detail. I learned more about movie writing, doing that movie than anything I've done.

‘The story has to fit some basic rules. I'm with lots of people in my generation who didn’t really want to know about rules and principles and things like that. Don't talk about act structure to me! I've always been:  no, no. I remember not believing the rule that somehow a scene has to change the story or move the story forward, but it sort of does.

‘I say that, but Mary Poppins has got a 20-minute cartoon in the middle…’

He said he was still learning the craft: ‘I’m not trying to be false humble, but I sit in rooms and we're trying to crack the third act or something and I think "what’s an inciting incident"? "What’s the negation of the case?" All these different terms. Then you argue waste whole days arguing about it. But weirdly, instinctively, you could probably throw all those rules out the window.’

He also revealed that he initially turned down working on Borat as he did not want to move to Los Angeles – but them made a grovelling call back the next day to take up the job after his friend pointed out what an incredible opportunity he was turning down.

Asked by host Kiri Pritchard-McLean if he felt his comedy had particularly Welsh sensibilities, he said: ‘I think maybe it's just a lot of self loathing or something…’

Published: 27 May 2023