danny baker to return to 606

Stevie H · May 22, 2008

Baker's return can only be good news for 6-0-6

We should all celebrate the BBC's decision to restore Danny Baker at the helm of 5 Live's football phone-in

Barry Glendenning

May 21, 2008 10:06 AM

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/05/...ly_be_good.html

Tune into BBC Radio 5 Live football phone-in 6-0-6 any evening and you'll invariably hear the same voices offering the same opinions. The pompous golf club bore pontificating indignantly about yet another Cristiano Ronaldo triple axel with pike. The slow-witted Big Four flat-earther who thinks the relegation trapdoor is a thick black line above Everton. The barely sentient Liverpool fan, whose inarticulate opinions are so moronic you're left wondering how it was that somebody so evidently in need of community care could possibly have been let loose on the national airwaves.

The listeners who call in are often worse. If being subjected to the tedious bluster of presenters Alan Green, Tim Lovejoy and the byword for haplessness that is Spoony doesn't convince you that getting in among your radio with a claw-hammer is a good idea, then the echoed insanity of Gavin on the A38 who forgot to turn down his car stereo almost certainly will.

It wasn't always like this. Having quickly realised that broadcasting a successful football phone-in show without input from the kind of cranks who like to call football phone-in shows was always likely to be a non-runner, BBC suits opted for the next best scenario by installing Danny Baker as the original ringmaster of the 6-0-6 circus in the early nineties.

Fed up with missing Millwall's away matches, he left for a stint on Radio 1 in 1993, then returned to the relaunched Radio 5 Live in 1996, only to lose his job a year later. In the wake of comically savage attacks on Birmingham City managing director Karren Brady and the then Tottenham Hotspur chairman Alan Sugar, the straw that did for the camel's lumbar region was some rather robust midweek criticism of referee Mike Reed, who had just awarded Chelsea a penalty for a 116th minute Erland Johnsen dive that resulted in Leicester City being unfairly eliminated from the FA Cup.

Baker went ballistic.

Although the story that he gave out Reed's address and rallied his listeners to exact retribution could well be apocryphal, he did embark on a spectacularly belligerent rant that culminated in him describing referees as "the maggot at football's golden core", before angrily b******ing his producer for "putting through calls that are just smart-arses who want to be contrary". Pleading for the return of "my old producer", the contrary smart-a*** other contrary smart-arses call The Guv'nor was given his P45 instead.

Since then, Baker's been around the broadcasting houses, often in cahoots with his co-conspirator, Danny Kelly of NME and Under The Moon fame. The duo's obsession with obscure trivia and the excruciating minutiae of life as a football fan has resulted in some of the funniest football radio shows ever broadcast by two avuncular Londoners with the same first name.

They likened the Belfast teenager who had to walk up Belfast's Shankill road in a Celtic shirt as a forfeit to Bruce Willis wearing the sandwich board in Die Hard: With A Vengeance ("the retreat from Moscow was a doddle compared to this!"). They argued with a 12-year-old over whether or not the Grimsby Town mascot was a giant bag of chips or a midget in a yellow raincoat (it was a midget in a yellow raincoat). They pounded the desk in paroxysms of mirth as Gordon the middle-aged Dundee United supporter told them of the giant wooden "United" dickie bow his father made for him when he was a boy ("I wanted something other than a scarf. In the end it was two foot wide, tied round my neck with a big leather strap and by half time I was Quasimodo"). They regularly reduced their listeners and each other to tears of laughter.

Yesterday the BBC announced that Baker will be returning to the 6-0-6 studio for a half-dozen shows during Euro 2008. "Of course the problem is that latest figures suggest only 1,400 people in the UK have even a passing interest in the tournament, but I really believe that, come the latter stages, Radio 5 Live can double that tally," he said. "Leastways I've never been to Iceland before and am very much relishing getting to grips with the altitude and native songs as the tournament unfolds."

Undeniably funny, occasionally as boorish and rude as Alan Green, but with a better sense of the absurd, none of the pomposity and a lot less self-regard, this spiky Cockney's long overdue return to the 5 Live phone-in fold should provide a much-needed jab in the arm for a radio show that, through every fault of its vacuous incumbent presenters, has come to resemble a refuge for the mentally lame and halt. Listen up during Euro 2008 to hear Danny Baker spank all concerned with six of the best.

Woodsyla · May 22, 2008

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