Cultural Life: David Baddiel, writer
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Your support makes all the difference.Theatre: I don't go much. I never got taken when I was young and it still feels a bit of an alien experience. I did, however, see 'Hair' in the West End recently, which I thought was great, and 'Red' on Broadway, which had some brilliant acting in it but dramatically was simply Rothko's essays put into dialogue.
Music: I listen to Spotify all the time. I like mainly obscure singer-songwriters from the early 1970s: Barbara Keith, for example. Of recent stuff, I quite like The XX album, Fyfe Dangerfield's 'Fly Yellow Moon', and Diane Birch, as she sounds a bit like Laura Nyro.
Television: Football, 'Flight of The Conchords', 'Curb Your Enthusiasm', 'Modern Family', 'Miranda', 'Peep Show', and documentaries on BBC4. I like watching old clips on YouTube, too – there's a famous edition of 'Monitor', the BBC arts show from the 60s, where John Betjeman follows Philip Larkin around his favourite places in Hull. Someone has bothered to put that up in its entirety, in four parts.
Books: Just finished 'Freedom', Jonathan Franzen's new one, which is great – more quietly great than 'The Corrections' but still, as I say, great. Presently reading Elizabeth Taylor's (no, not that one) 'A Game of Hide And Seek'. She's a magnificent and – for the idiotic reason that she's very middle-class – underrated mid-20th-century writer, the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike.
Films: I really liked were 'Kick-Ass' and 'The Hangover'. 'The Hangover' contains the best man-to-man dialogue in an American film comedy since 'Swingers'. I'm a big Charlie Kaufman fan, too, and am one of the seven people who enjoyed 'Synecdoche, New York'.
'The Infidel', written by David Baddiel, is out now on DVD
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