You’ve read the autobiography. You’ve seen the sitcom. Now here’s the solo stage show of Danny Baker’s life – or at least, the bits of it he can squeeze into its two-hour duration. It’s billed as a “first ever standup tour” but really, it’s just one story after another from a man with an inexhaustible capacity for gossip and anecdotage. “There’s no script,” he says, then later: “I’m pretty good company, but that’s all this is.”
I’m not about to contradict him: Cradle to the Stage is less a show than a lucky dip into the grab-bag of Baker’s storied past. Having spurned his mate Jimmy Carr’s suggestion to preview it, he now jokes with his off-stage technician that he hasn’t rehearsed the show either. Act One ends abruptly at the behest of a downstage stopwatch, when – to Baker’s dismay – we’re only 15 years into his life story. From then on, he keeps alluding to all the great material he failed to cover in the first half.
What we’re getting, then, is a loosely curated miscellany of Baker’s chequered life, with a strong bias (tonight at least) towards his early years – growing up in Bermondsey, south London, the son of a charismatic wide-boy docker and a mum with a greedy ear for song lyrics. The first half slideshow traces Danny’s youth from kickabouts on the council estate to Uncle Godfrey’s wedding and epiphanies in the Spa Road record library. Cue Baker lip-synching to his old LP of Max Miller at the Met. It’s vivid social history of a largely vanished age, for which Baker is unselfconsciously nostalgic.
This is also the territory of his sitcom Cradle to Grave; several tales are introduced with Baker telling us: “It was just like in the TV show ...” If you missed that series, this will still feel like familiar terrain, a halcyon working-class age of cheerful community spirit, a functioning welfare state and sirens singing in the docks. Even in his audience Q&A after the interval, Baker can’t escape the 60s and 70s. His fondest stories are about Kenneth Williams, Tommy Cooper and watching Black Sabbath in the era of power cuts and the three-day week. Whereas today, “we’re in a pygmy era of entertainment”, he says, without elucidating. (Frustration with his current radio career, voiced again here, may have something to do with it.)
But Baker makes a compelling case for the liveliness of his personal golden age. The bare facts of his stories aren’t always remarkable, but his glee, and his love for their protagonists, bring them leaping to life. As a host, he’s entirely unpretentious and unfazed by technical glitches. He just steamrollers on, firing off stories as they come to him, with mounting urgency as the clock ticks down. It’s scattershot, it’s essentially cosy; but watching this part-geezer, part-geyser in action, it’s hard not to marvel at the flow.
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At Sheffield City Hall, Thursday 2 February. Box office: 0114-278 9789. Then touring.
