David Baddiel Doesn't Count

Behind some paywall, Victoria Coren Mitchell has been gushing over David Baddiel's latest effort, without mentioning that he introduced her to her husband. As someone of roughly her generation, it comes as news to me that blackface was acceptable in the 1990s, even among the white people by whom I was almost entirely surrounded while growing up. It must have been a class thing. Certainly, the reaction of Fantasy Football League's studio audience to Baddiel's first impersonation of Jason Lee included an audible element of heavy shock. If blacking up was mainstream entertainment, then who else was doing it?

Baddiel has been in two comedy partnerships, and in both cases the other bloke has been the funny one. For many years, Baddiel hardly appeared at all except as a guest on one of Frank Skinner's shows. In his late fifties, he wants to reinvent himself as a public intellectual by taking up a cause that places him beyond criticism. He has therefore had to go through the motions of apologising in person to Lee. But even then, he still managed to present himself as somehow the victim.

Baddiel ostentatiously walked among visibly Orthodox Jews without ever asking them what they thought, and almost everyone who was permitted to speak in Jews Don't Count was a professional entertainer, mostly in comedy. Touchingly, the top of the bill was felt to be David Schwimmer, another one who had not been seriously famous since the last century, in something that was in its way just as racist as Baddiel's Lee routine, but who also clearly fancied an Indian summer as a sage. Let them form a double act, so that this time, Baddiel could be less funny than a man who had never even written his own lines.