The difficult second album sounds like the first one but you just somehow know it isn't quite as good. It's not just that the style is now familiar or the shock of the new has worn off, you know that if they had been releaed the other way round, you would have noticed an improvement.
It is still great stuff, though. Whereas Stephen Fry is routinely apologetic about his privilege and good fortune, Baker relishes the way that his life unfolded with fate just handing him one good turn after another. It surely takes a certain type to be brave enough to take advantage of it each time, nonetheless. If you were always too craven to leave your dull office clerk role then you weren't giving it a chance and that might be because you knew you didn't have it in you anyway.
This is another mixture of domestic chaos and celebrity encounters. Baker's father is central to much of the family action with his own way of dealing with finance, superstition and anybody who upsets him. It was a classic piece of Spud's uncomplicated repartee that made one of volume one's best anecdotes. Used sparingly and appropriately, the 'f' word can be a powerful linguistic effect. However, I don't remember Danny himself using it quite as often in the first book as he does here. Perhaps he is turning into his dad, as we all do, but it becomes tiresome and, all added together, they must add almost a page to the book's length. It doesn't add to the authenticity of an account of life in Deptford and we could do without it.
The celebrity meetings chosen to be included here are Frank Zappa, who is no more boorish than I personally would have expected him to be while Kenneth Williams, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd have equally convincing, but likeable, parts before we are treated to some Spike Milligan. However, it is the more extensive passage on Paul Gascoigne that is most entertaining, insightful and ultimately, moving. One would need the resilience and resourcefulness of Baker and Chris Evans to even attempt a day out in such company and Baker's account of one such is easily the highlight of this volume.
Perhaps one expects too much of a celebrity memoir although Danny Baker is a speccially unphased celebrity that comes from no known template, and to expect quite so much from London TV studios as one took from the NME and life with pop groups of the 1970's, well, realistically, it was never going to happen. But the story ends with the television career in front of the camera apparently drawn to an abrupt halt and very soon, the public assume you are finished.
You could, of course, spend a weekend much less pleasurably than catching up with the story to 1996.
