'I've always been a terrible optimist': Danny Baker speaks ahead of tour coming to Aylesbury

Danny Baker likes to call his career “uneven”. That’s one word for it.

He got a job in a record shop and soon discovered that its customers included Elton John and Marc Bolan. Danny and a friend put together a scrappy little sort-of magazine about their favourite bands, unwittingly placing them at the forefront of British punk and helping define its look. Danny got a job on the New Musical Express, and ended up interviewing pretty much everyone. Then he brought his endless inventiveness, sharp subversion and linguistic pyrotechnics to television and ended up, among other things, selling soap powder and creating a vast chunk of ‘90s popular culture through his work on TFI Friday. Then there’s radio, which he essentially helped reinvent, especially in terms of sports broadcasting (he was the first presenter of the BBC show 606). Then there were the various high-profile fallings-out and fallouts. All this following a childhood so extraordinary it was made into an acclaimed TV series in which Peter Kay played Danny’s dad.

"Uneven”, then, like Everest is uneven.

Baker has already spoken about much of this, at great length and to widespread renown, night after night on two one-man tours. He’ll be coming to Aylesbury next year to present the third instalment. And then there will be no more.

"Here's the sobering thing,” he says. “In 15 years I'm 80. I'm 65 right now. I've never had that hankering to continue doing this. And for the third act I want to sit on a beach in Florida Keys somewhere, fishing line tied to my big toe.

"It's been a very peculiar pinball route that has led us here and if I ever did do a PhD in anything, it would be indolence. I'd have my mortar board after a month. People say 'oh, you couldn't do nothing'. Well, what do you think I do most of the time? I really can. Otherwise I wouldn't have gone into showbusiness.”

Some may question this. It is difficult reconcile Baker’s taste for lethargy with Baker’s effervescence. He is hardly lacking energy: this interview was the fifth he had done on this particular day, yet he still gave the impression of a man who had been starved of conversation for months and had just chugged half the world’s sherbet and washed it down with half the world’s coffee. But perhaps the answer lies in his generally breezy approach to life.

“I come from a generation that was never asked what you wanted to do for a career,” he says. “You had jobs. You didn't think of a career - you had loads of different jobs. And you never spoke about them.

"Now I thought 'this is gravy' once I was asked to do the NME, or working in a record shop, Elton John coming in. I thought 'this is good - the planets have aligned well for you, Baker'. I've always been a terrible optimist all my life, a euphoric. So I don't use this as a shield - people think you can't be that up without down periods and sitting on the edge of the bed looking at your shoes. I never have. I'm not entitled to be moribund or introspective. I can't do that anyway. It may be a side-effect of it, love it or hate it, this is my personality, this is what I'm like anyway.

"So I've been very very fortunate - although it has some worth in the entertainment business - to be able to parlay this up into a career. But other people worry about where their next job is coming from - I didn't have an agent for the first eight years. And then they suggested radio and that worked out all right. And I always think things are going to be all right. And they have. I'm always suspicious of people who say things like this but it's true in my case.

“If you come to it very very early, either you fade away as a child star or else you can think of nothing worse than not being on television. Well, to me, that's just not it. I still get asked to go on panel shows and things like that. No thanks - because that'll mean I'll have to stop flicking playing cards into a top hat for a few hours. I love being at home. I’m never bored. I've got tons of things around the house - books and records and all that. But if someone says 'don't forget you're doing that thing tomorrow' – I never want to have ‘that thing’ to do. So ideally, after this tour, that's it. I'm selling all my records. But that's all good. At least I can lie on the beach and think ‘my Black Sabbath album paid for all this’.”

Baker’s latest show is called At Last… The Sausage Sandwich Tour. It takes its name from a game played on his old 5 Live Saturday breakfast show; callers had to guess whether a celebrity took their sausage sandwich with red sauce, brown sauce, or no sauce at all.

"That sort of ephemera has always been front and centre of what I do,” says Baker. “The shows don't regard the news headlines or anything topical or anything at all. I've never been one of those who believes you've got to have some kind of dark truth at the bottom - some of the funniest nights I've had have been absolute spiralling nonsense, and that's all they are.”

He’s done a lot, then. Enough to fill three autobiographical volumes and sustain three enjoyably lengthy one-man shows. What lies at the heart of it all?

“I always think of myself as a writer,” he says. “Always have done. Writing is what I do. That's it.

"But that's highfalutin - ‘I'm a writer’. But you know what'll happen when I get run over by a steamroller? 'The man who sold Daz was found flattened and 17ft long in a high street in Lewisham'. That's the truth of it. And that's fine - I don't want to remembered as a great artist or a cad or whatever. I've had too good a time.”

Danny Baker comes to Aylesbury Waterside Theatre on March 24. Visit atgtickets.com/Aylesbury to book.