Baynham writes men who do not know they are the joke, then builds them a whole world to be wrong in. Alan Partridge at the Linton Travel Tavern is his finest work; Borat is the loudest, and not quite the best.
Fi1m perspective
A man in a roadside hotel insists it is equidistant between Norwich and London. He has lost his chat show, his wife and his house, and kept his opinions. That is the whole of I'm Alan Partridge (1997), and it is the clearest place to see what Peter Baynham does. Credits on collaborative comedy are hard to pick apart, and we will not pretend to know which line is his. What we can say is that the character arrived as a news presenter and left as a fully built human being with a hotel, a radio slot and a day to fill, and Baynham, with Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, was one of the three people who built him.
He came to it late and sideways. Five years in the Merchant Navy, then London in 1987, stand-up and radio sketches, and the circle around Iannucci and Chris Morris that produced The Day Today (1994) and Big Train (1998). Those shows share a straight face: the joke is played as news or as documentary, and the audience is left to notice. From 2005 he took the same habit to Sacha Baron Cohen, first on Borat (2006) and later Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020). In between there were animated features with Sarah Smith, including Arthur Christmas (2011), a return to Alan in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013), and one series, I Am Not an Animal (2004), that the BBC gave little support. We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here.
Borat is credited to Baynham, Anthony Hines, Cohen and Dan Mazer, and the surprise is how carefully it is organised under the pretence of a camera pointed at whatever happened. Real people supply the sharpest moments, but someone decided where Borat stands and what he says first, and that is writing. We laughed at the running of the Jew and then felt ashamed of ourselves, because the character's innocence gets the laugh out before the hatred registers, and that timing is the film's nastiest and best trick. The obscenity is more reliable than the politics, and some of the embarrassment is cheaply bought, but the machinery holds.
The Partridge series is the better work, and the one we would send a stranger to. It is as funny as British television gets and sadder than it needs to be, and the sadness is the point: a man broadcasting to nobody in the small hours, filling a day. The second series is louder and lesser, as if everyone had noticed the sadness and decided to shout over it. Baynham has called writing the first "my happiest, most fun writing experience ever really", and it shows.
He has spent a career writing for other people's faces, chiefly Coogan's and Baron Cohen's, and his is the name on the credits that fewer people read. That suits the work. The men he writes never notice the camera, and the man who writes them has not made much fuss about it either.
Biography
Peter Baynham is a Welsh screenwriter, stand-up comedian and performer. Born in Cardiff in 1963, he served in the British Merchant Navy after leaving school before pursuing a career in comedy, beginning with stand-up and moving into writing and performing for radio and television.
His television work includes writing for I'm Alan Partridge (1997) with Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, and for series such as The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam with Chris Morris. He created the animated series I Am Not an Animal (2004).
In film, Baynham has collaborated with Sacha Baron Cohen on Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), Brüno (2009), Grimsby (2016) and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020). Other credits include Arthur Christmas (2011), Hotel Transylvania (2012), Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013) and Ron's Gone Wrong (2021). He received Academy Award nominations for the two Borat films.
