Enjoy Celebrity Radio’s Comedian Rob Newman Life Story Interview…..
Rob Newman was one of the most successful comedians of his generation!
He was the first comedian to play massive arenas with is co-writer and performer David Baddiel in ‘Newman & Baddiel’.
Together they made comedy sexy & appear rock n roll!
He talks to Belfield about his life and career in showbiz….
Recorded 2007 by Alex Belfield at Capital Gold for Celebrity Radio.
Newman read English at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He began his comedy career as an impressionist in the late 1980s before gaining fame when he appeared alongside fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel, Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt in the BBC radio and TV programme The Mary Whitehouse Experience (1989–92).
The title referred to the main campaigner for “moral decency” on television, Mary Whitehouse. With The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Newman and Baddiel had become “unlikely pin-ups as, in the early 1990s, comedy was being fêted as ‘the new rock and roll’,” leading to their own series, Newman and Baddiel in Pieces (1993).
The partnership with Baddiel was widely reported as being fraught with tension.
Unlike most double acts, their shows (both on TV and stage) were characterised by the two alternately delivering monologues, rarely appearing together except in sketches (most famously, History Today). During the “Live and in Pieces” tour, relations deteriorated further, and the Wembley show was widely and accurately predicted to be their last appearance together.
After the break-up, the two men took wildly differing career paths. While Baddiel became part of the “new lad” phenomenon of the mid-1990s, fronting shows like Fantasy Football League, Newman largely disappeared from public life, reappearing with solo work marked by a clear social conscience and anti-establishment views.
He covered the anti-globalisation Seattle protests of 1999 for the UK’s Channel 4 News.
He has been politically active with Reclaim the Streets, the Liverpool Dockers, Indymedia and Peoples’ Global Action.
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