The first thing that greets the audience in the foyer for Danny Baker's new show, Good Time Charlie's Back!, which I saw at Princes Hall in Aldershot, is the merchandise stall, selling various items; T-shirts for £20, programmes at £10 (pre-signed!), and mugs for £8. But despite this naked determination to relieve punters of their wads, no one can accuse Baker of not giving value for money, as the show last three hours, and counting. Boy, can this man talk.
On stage there is a large acreen, straddled by two smaller screens with what turns out to be a list of the subjects in his seemingly endless store of stories about his life and 40 years in the media and showbusiness. “Lizards!”, “Marc Bolan’s T-shirt!”, “The Burglary!” – he does love an exclamation mark, does Baker – are just a few of the subject headings, some of which have only a tangential relation to a story.
Crikey, Baker has what south Londoners call a heavy dose of the verbals
Most of the stories will be familiar to anyone who has read the three volumes of Baker’s autobiography or who watched Cradle to Grave, the excellent sitcom the first book spawned, which covered his south London childhood as part of a close family; his dad worked on the docks and his mum loved music. Fans of his television and radio work will also be familiar with much that he talks about here, too.
This is essentially part two of his first live tour, From the Cradle to the Stage, which was intended to tell his complete life story but barely covered his childhood. So he’s back on the road with this show, and much of the first half of Good Time Charlie’s Back! is taken up with a recap – or repetition, if you will – of the first show’s material.
Despite Baker repeatedly telling us he’s going to “whizz through” this section, it's 90 minutes in before we reach a point where the last tour finished – when he wrote for the iconic punk magazine Sniffin' Glue, and then at the age of 21 he joined NME, nirvana for the keen and knowledgable music fan he was and still is, and where he met and interviewed people such as John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Ian Dury and Paul Weller.
In the second half, he charts how he entered television and, not for the first time, says his success is as much due to luck as talent which, fine broadcaster that he is, is unduly modest.
Many of the stories are funny and often memorably phrased. Talking about having lots of friends at school, which he loved, he says wryly: “It was when I went to work on TV that I realised I wasn’t universally popular.”
But, crikey, Baker has what south Londoners call a heavy dose of the verbals. No detail is too small to be shared, and he keeps going off into unnecessary explanations and down memory lane, which frequently turns out to be a blind alley.
And there is a limit to how many slides of people that he uses to illustrate his anecdotes – of friends, family, celebrities – that we can see before boredom creeps in. Baker constantly walks across the stage and his presentational style is rapid – actually, it's non-stop talking – and the show needs some pacing, if only to give the punters a rest.
Despite the many fine stories here and the obvious warmth of Baker's personality, this is a show desperately in need of a director; running to at least three hours (plus a Q&A some nights), it's strictly one for the fans.