Danny Baker: ‘My first love is not the stage. It’s lying in bed’

Widely known for his extensive TV and radio work, Danny Baker still pulls in the listeners on his twice-weekly paid-only subscription podcast titled The Treehouse co-hosted by Louise Pepper.

Danny will also be coming to the Cambridge Junction in March with At Last... The Sausage Sandwich Tour and there are only a few tickets remaining.

The show is the third part of a trilogy that began with the sell-out Cradle to Stage, and then continued with the Good Time Charley shows.

Sausage Sandwich is a new, full-tilt, non-stop thunderous performance of unstoppable anecdote, and every night of the tour is different.

“This is the third in the triumvirate of stage extravaganzas that I have presented before the nation,” confirms the affable Mr Baker, speaking to the Cambridge Independent via Zoom. “This was meant to be a 45-minute one-off seven years when the first book came out.

“I’m not a stage performer; my first love is not the stage. My first love is lying in bed, but I had to promote the book.”

Danny, 65, who first started on television in 1978, having been involved in music long before then, has written material for “every comedian you can imagine”. He also co-wrote TFI Friday with Chris Evans in the 1990s.

But he never really wanted to do comedy live on stage. However, while doing an on-stage Q&A about the book to tie-in with its launch seven years ago, he stood up to answer a question “and sat down again about 90 minutes later”.

He adds: “The audience seemed to like it, and afterwards they said, ‘Would you do another of these?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, sure’. Then one and two shows became 10 shows, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, on what became the first tour, and by the end of the evening I and the audience had had a good time and I hadn’t even left school yet, in the narrative of it.

“So I thought, ‘We’ll have to do a second one’, which we did before the world all stopped, so this show, the third instalment, should have been four or five years ago but events overtook us.

“It’s called The Sausage Sandwich Tour because of probably the thing I used to do on Saturday mornings, and because it’s the showbiz-y years of it – although it flits backwards and forwards to me dad and everything else.”

The Saturday morning thing to which Danny refers is the Sausage Sandwich Game, which requires members of the public to answer questions to which only the guest knows the answers and culminates with the seminal issue of whether they prefer ketchup or HP sauce on their sausage sandwich, or no sauce at all (the game featured twice on TFI Friday). In what will no doubt be a delight to some, it will be played live at the Cambridge gig.

Danny, who says that the radio version of the Sausage Sandwich Game became “almost the most successful thing I ever did”, says: “So that’s what it is, and I’ll kick my legs up for the last time and hopefully this time I really will tip-toe into the shadows because it’s been a very long, strange trip so far.”

As befits the title of the show, there may even be free food available on the night. “We’ve been approached by a maker of sausages saying, ‘Can we provide them for the audience?’” reveals Danny, “so you may – I don’t promise this – get a sausage sandwich as you arrive!”

The performance is ‘officially’ 90 minutes long, although sometimes it goes on even longer. “It’s rather like radio,” explains Danny, whose father – a docker – also gets mentioned a lot. “It’s a stream of consciousness.

“There’s no script, there’s no point to it, other than out-and-out trying to make people just have a good time. When comedians say, ‘all comedy’s based on truth,’ no it ain’t. Some of the greatest comics in the world spoke the most wonderful nonsense.

“I just think you’ve got to keep relentlessly entertaining people, and I didn’t know that I could either do it, or people would want it.

“The last tour was 70-odd dates so here we go again with this, and as long as the audience are laughing and having a good time, rather like the old Ken Dodd approach, why not?

“Every night I’m loose on the stage and hopefully reading an audience to see what they want, and here we are in the third instalment of that – and last.”

Making his rise to the top even more impressive, Danny left school at 14 and went to work in a record shop.

“Then I was involved with punk rock, then I was writing for the NME, flying all over the world interviewing rock stars and soul stars and living in Los Angeles,” he recalls – I was 17, off a council estate.

“It was only then, because of that, that I got into television and fortunately I’ve always been a writer. I’ve written books, I’ve written screenplays, but I’ve also made a dubious career in television and all of that. So the point is I’ve always had that eye.

“I think I’m probably unique in terms of yes, I’ve worked with The Clash and The Sex Pistols and Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson and Prince and all these people, but also I’ve worked with Morecambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper and all the old comedians, as well as my generation’s things.

“I’ve worked on shows for Jonathan Ross and Chris Evans, and I’ve worked with Peter Kay, and so if I can’t get a show out of that, then I’ve not been paying attention.

“But it’s by no means just a reminiscence, it’s actually bringing people what it’s like to be dropped into the middle of this psychedelic landscape.”

[Read more: Harry Hill: ‘I’ll leave them punch-drunk with a very silly show’, Review: Cambridge crowd delighted to welcome back Reef]

Danny, who says he’s been receiving calls from people he hasn’t heard from in ages asking if he can get them Peter Kay tickets, will be bringing his own At Last... The Sausage Sandwich Tour to the Cambridge Junction’s J2 on Saturday, March 4.

Tickets, which are priced at £31.50, are available at junction.co.uk. For more on Danny, visit dannybakerstore.com.