Author:Danny Baker
I’m sure many who hang out here would have received a copy from Santa, so I’d be interested to know what you think. For me, this was that difficult second album. Flawed, but still worth the pocket money.
I became familiar with Danny’s work through his All Day Breakfast Show podcasts, which I found enormously enjoyable and got me through some months of a commute that otherwise threatened to do for me, both physically and mentally. As with volume 1, some of the anecdotes were already familiar, although some weren’t. All are told with some panache – the Zappa and Dylan being for me great examples, but I do wonder about the process for deciding what went in to the book and what didn’t. I can’t help but recall a Baker and Kelly podcast where they talked with some amusement about how familiar they both were with stretching limited material gossamer thin on Radio 5 Live, and I get a sense something a little similar is happening here. Compare the limited insight we get into Chris Evans to the chapter long account of the exploits of DB’s dog Twizzle.
Danny makes it clear at the very start of the book that he prefers to accentuate the positive, and his brother’s death is related with little comment beyond the facts of what happened and no insight in terms of the impact on him or his father who is otherwise very visible throughout the book. Much of his career is described in a jaunty mildly depreciating tone swaddled in lashings of “how could this keep happening to me”. And yet there is a different Danny Baker that is only occasionally evidenced here.
The other Danny surfaces when he tackles a couple of subjects that he clearly feels passionately about and he takes at least one glove off. Whether it’s education, the state of radio or his relationship with Paul Gascoigne, it’s a welcome break from the cheery banter that dominates the book elsewhere. DB is an eloquent and powerful speaker when roused, and it’s a shame that it’s rarely allowed to show.
In terms of the “other” Danny what strikes me is that the easy come easy go happy go lucky approach he describes in the book is at odds with the public hissy fits he had about the end of the All Day Breakfast Show and his BBC London gig. Maybe the next volume will set the record straight on what the ins and outs of the end of the All Day Breakfast Show, and maybe it just proves Danny is human after. It would be interesting to hear how he reconciles the slating he gave Aunty at the time with all the work he’s picked up from them since.
So will I be buying volume 3? Of course I will.
Length of Read:Medium
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
I doubt this book will pull in the casual passer by. It’s a book for people that enjoy Danny Baker.
One thing you’ve learned
That there were (are?) plans to turn the books into a TV show. DB hasn’t said whether he would be in it or not. If he doesn’t I want to be the first to put AW favourite Danny Dyer forward for the part. Gertcha !
It was a good read but the first volume I found more interesting.
I agree with your comments on when he gets slightly more agitated, especially about the BBC so his version of events in the last volume will be interesting.
Most of my work colleagues have no idea why I would read this type of book…their loss!
That’s a really good review – it feels like you’ve articulated my own, previously disordered, thoughts about the book.
I really enjoyed it, perhaps even more than the first one, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being sold a line by an expert raconteur determined to avoid giving any glimpse behind the curtain. Still, a hugely enjoyable read – few people spin a yarn better than Baker and the stuff about his family life is in many ways more interesting than the career stuff, which he frequently just glosses over.
The bit about Gazza was hugely moving and gave what felt like a real insight into that most troubled of souls.
In terms of the TV show, Baker announced on Twitter this week that they’ve just cast a kid who will play him circa 1974.
Filming has apparently just begun with Peter Kay taking the role of Spud – rather an odd choice.
Also: the highlight for me was the story about him marching at the head of the brass band at some rain-drenched village fair. Absolutely brilliant.
The best anecdote in the second volume.
Still surpassed by the “look at my shoes” story in volume one to get some cash from a rural bank branch in Norfolk though.
It was good in parts. Too much of it was made up of huge build ups to pretty deflating stories, but I rattled through (with the exception of one interminable chapter about his dog, which I skipped to the end of when it became clear that if I couldn’t give a toss that his dog had hanged itself and come back to life then I was unlikely to care about anything that happened to it.) I liked the media stuff, though.
One real insight it did give me was about Paul Gasgoine. I have always been mystified by the affection in which he is held by so many people, and DB does at least give some clue why that is the case. But my highlight is probably still the dwarf on stilts lurching and groaning his way through the Bermondsey tunnels.
Isn’t the shoe story in volume two?
I so enjoyed the first book that I was inwardly salivating when I got Going Off Alarming for Christmas. In the end, I found it hugely disappointing to the point that I started to think, “That young Baker certainly has hidden shallows”. Lacking an identifiable sense of self-awareness to an almost alarming degree, Baker sets the tone in his introduction when he lightly touches on the awful death of his brother. Refusing to discuss how this may have impacted on him, he simply states, “How do you fucking think it felt?”. Well, I really don’t know, Dan; I was hoping you might tell us.
And so it goes on. Danny writes as he sounds on the radio, and I really don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the content. Danny gives the impression that life is just something that happens to him and he greets what arrives with a good-natured aw-shucks, with the expectation that everything will turn out for the best in this best-of-all-possible-worlds. However, as we all know from his on-air history, underneath the hood there can lurk a real rage that he is more than capable of venting. It’s the controlled nature of these rages that gives them their power: his careful use of language, using works like ‘dolts’ or ‘imbeciles’ as invectives rather than ‘wankers’ or ‘twats’, indicates that he knows where to hurt and when to do it. Nothing wrong with any of this, of course, but the reason I mention this is that Danny does not seem to acknowledge this side of his personality at all in either of his books.
A pleasant enough way to pass a couple of hours for sure, but like others here Bargepole found vlume one the better of the two.
Hugely enjoyed Vol 1. Hugely disappointed (and somewhat disillusioned) by the insubstantialness (?) of Vol 2 which really felt it was dashed off in a couple of afternoons just before deadline day.
Any reason why there’s no audiobook version of this second volume??
I’m halfway through the audiobook of the first book at the moment (it’s my companion on my weekeday lunchtime walk) and I can’t imagine how much it would lose to hear it in my voice rather than Danny’s. I’m enjoying it immensely and I’ll be waiting for the audiobook of volume 2.
The first book was much funnier; and there really aren’t many books that have made me laugh out loud quite so much as Going To Sea In A Sieve. The best bit in the second one was the insight into the real Paul Gasgoine.
The truth is that Danny is not really much of a thinker. His recent negative twitter comments about Wolf Hall saddened me. He simply couldn’t be bothered to pay enough attention to understand what was going on. His loss. His comments on football are alarmingly inconsistent too: occasionally perceptive but all too often borderline bigotted.
I loved “Going to Sea in a Sieve”. My favourite bit was Danny’s dad’s insistence that the only possible reason for a football manager being sacked was “skulduggery”. Marvellous.
I had been looking forward to “Going off Alarming” and was just about to buy it … but now some of the less positive comments on this page have made me hesitate.
just noticed it’s now £3.95 on Amazon for the Kindle version
God, yeah, that thing about the bloody dog. I skipped that too.
I’ll read volume 3 for sure but his editor needs to be a bit more ruthless. Some of the anecdotes in Going Off… are just way too long and not that interesting. And they need to get Baker to put more of his dad in the next one. My favourite line of the first book was where Dan pretended to be colour blind and the school nurse berated him with “Would your parents be pleased if they knew you’d pretended to be colour blind?” To which he thought to himself “Well I knew Dad wouldn’t mind if he thought there was a few bob in it”