'We didn't even drink': how Baddiel and Skinner's Fantasy Football accidentally gave us laddism

When I joined the ranks of Loaded magazine in 2012 – more than 15 years after lad culture had peaked – David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were still hallowed names within the corridors of the soon-to-be-defunct lads’ mag.

The literal poster boys of laddism, Baddiel and Skinner’s Nineties cover shoots were blown up around the office, and memories of those glory days – back when being a bloke was the tip of the zeitgeist – were whispered about (by me, mostly) with teary-eyed nostalgia.

The complexities of how or why Baddiel and Skinner became laddism’s chief icons may be a mystery, even to the comedians themselves. “I’ve never drunk much and always been in a long-term monogamous relationship,” says David Baddiel. “Frank meanwhile is a devout Catholic and hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since 1987." But the simplest explanation, perhaps, is football. Or more specifically, Fantasy Football League.

As hosts of the game-changing TV comedy – which transformed how football was talked about on television, and led to their Euro 96 anthem Three Lions – Baddiel and Skinner were, if not the faces, then certainly the voices of football. When football wasn’t just part of the culture, but it became the culture.

Fantasy Football League went from the comparative lower division of late night BBC Two, to premier event television on ITV, where Brigitte Nielsen fouled Baddiel with a Danish pastry and Johnny Rotten was sent off at half-time (“One of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever met in my life,” says series producer Andy Jacobs).

Nostalgia for those Fantasy Football-led glory years extends beyond the (now empty) corridors of Loaded. During the 2018 World Cup – England’s most heart-swelling tournament performance since Euro 96 – "football's coming home" gripped the nation once again as an omnipresent meme. And now, as broadcasters search for feel-good, national pride-inducing programming for the Covid-19 lockdown, ITV has substituted the postponed European Championships for replays of Euro 96, which kick off today on ITV4.

Before it became a TV hit, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner appeared on an early Radio 5 version of Fantasy Football League. First hosted by Ross King and later Dominik Diamond, the radio show focused mostly on the fantasy league game, which was created (and imported from US fantasy baseball leagues) by Andrew Weinstein in 1991.

Something of a Nineties craze, there were few football fans who didn’t have a fantasy league team in their office or local newspaper (I managed “Bad Boys United” in the Bristol Evening Post, mid-table dynamos of the 1995/96 season).

At the time, Baddiel and Skinner were flatmates. Andrew Weinstein called their flat and asked if the concept could work on television. Baddiel told Weinstein that it would need to be more than just the game.

“Me and Frank talked about it,” says Baddiel, “and we decided that the game could be a peg on which to hang something we’d never seen on TV before – a comedy show about football. And then, in a remarkable bit of what-turned-out-to-be successful laziness, we decided to base the show on our actual lives, a fair proportion of which was spent on our sofa, watching football with friends, and making jokes about it.”

It came at a time of change for football. The Eighties were a dark time for the English game – stained by hooliganism, decrepit stadiums, multiple tragedies, and contempt from Margaret Thatcher. “It had become something of a leper, culturally,” says Baddiel.

Fantasy Football League producer Andy Jacobs – who now hosts a talkSPORT show alongside fellow Fantasy Football alumni Paul Hawksbee – cites the 1990 World Cup as a turning point, with the image of Gazza crying into his England shirt and the infectious summery sound of New Order’s World in Motion.

“Football was dying on its arse before Italia 90,” says Jacobs. “Thatcher was the enemy of football. It culminated in Hillsborough, a disaster in every single way. Italia 90 was a kind of rebirth, with Gazza and all that. I think David and Frank rode that wave.”

Baddiel credits Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby’s memoir about supporting Arsenal – and the fanzine When Saturday Comes for giving football a new voice. Baddiel himself had appeared on another early Nineties football show, BBC Two’s Standing Room Only, alongside former comedy partner Rob Newman.

First broadcast on BBC Two in January 1994, Fantasy Football League was authentically of that moment: a casual, intelligent, irreverent take on football.

Baddiel and Skinner would sit on a set designed to look like their flat, and, between skits, invite on celebrity guests – each of whom managed a team in the show’s fantasy league. Across the three original series, celeb managers included Bob Mortimer, Danny Baker, Zoe Ball, Karren Brady, Eddie Large, Peter Cook, Sue Johnston, Roy Hattersley, Angus Deayton, Neil Morrissey, Delia Smith, and, erm, Basil Brush.

Sat behind the kitchen counter, decked out in his pyjamas, was Statto – AKA sports commentator and pundit Angus Loughran – whose job it was to round-up the week’s football action and fantasy league developments.

Jacobs discovered Loughran at a Tottenham Hotspur vs Leeds game.“I’m on the gantry and watching this bloke commentating for the Spurs club video,” he recalls. “I’ve never seen anything like it. His head’s moving all over the place, he’s like this strange creature. He became Statto.”

Then-commissioning editor Janet Street-Porter, who Jacobs praises as a major force behind getting Fantasy Football League onto television, wasn’t sold.

“F–––––– Statto’s terrible!” she said after seeing him. “He needs acting lessons!’

“No he doesn’t,” Jacobs protested, “he’s meant to be like that!”

Becoming a cult star in his own right – and hailed with football terrace-style chants of “STAT-TO! STAT-TO! STAT-TO!” – the joke was how hilariously awkward he was.

Regular segments included the “big hello” to someone (often tenuously) connected to football; Phoenix From The Flames, in which Baddiel and Skinner would recreate classic football moments with real players from years past; and Jeff Astle – West Bromwich Albion legend and Skinner’s real-life footballing hero – finishing each episode with a song.

In 2020, the bawdiness is jarring, but Fantasy Football League is still very funny – despite most football gags being 25 years out of date. An intimate knowledge of game isn’t necessary; even at the time, it was funny for both diehards and non-fans.

The sharpest material was the back-and-forth with guests and audience between skits: Frank Skinner at his off-the-cuff best (see him jabbing at Prince Naseem Hamed – a shrewd bit of escalating piss-takery); laughing at football personality lookalikes (especially Danny Baker lookalikes – “Oh, cue huge fat bloke,” Baker would say); and finding background details in the football action – the kind of thing that’s all over social media in seconds these days.

“Myself and my team would watch all the football over the weekend,” recalls Andy Jacobs. “We’d prepare a tape and go round to David and Frank on a Monday night, and by Wednesday they came back with a script… they were pretty clever.”

“It was not a chore, watching and talking about football,” says Baddiel about the writing process. “It’s what we did a lot anyway. Julian Barratt once said, ‘To properly take the piss out of something you have to love it.’ In his case, I think he was talking about rave culture. But for us that was football.”

Encapsulating a cultural moment of celebrated masculinity – laddism, Britpop, and, of course, football coming home – Fantasy Football was the forerunner to what we might now call "banter". In one recurring gag, Baddiel and Skinner mocked Nottingham Forest player Jason Lee mercilessly for his poor striking form and tied-up dreadlock hairstyle.

Baddiel would dress up as Lee, with his skin darkened and a pineapple on his head. In the skits, poor Lee couldn’t even punch a table in frustration without missing.

Lee would later say that Baddiel and Skinner’s torment affected both his life and career. It certainly dogged him on the pitch – crowds chanted “He’s got a pineapple on his head” at Lee. Nottingham Forest manager Frank Clark (portrayed, in one memorable sketch, by a Mr Potato Head) called Baddiel and Skinner “middle-class wide-boys.”

"Things are looking up, aren't they!" joked Skinner about being called middle-class.

In the modern woke age, as we scour almost every facet of popular culture for being historically problematic, the portrayal of Lee has been a regular criticism of Baddiel and Fantasy Football.

Jokes about Lee's playing though, were perhaps fair game.“As I’ve said before,” says Baddiel, “I regret, and apologise for, the make-up and costume, which however much it might have been in the show’s tradition of dressing up to look like footballers in a silly cartoon way, was also part of another very bad racist tradition. I don’t regret doing gags about him not scoring goals for Nottingham Forest, because that’s what the show was about, making fun of footballers.”

Indeed, Fantasy Football League was, in many ways, a celebration of football at its crappest. Even Phoenix from the Flames made football’s most triumphant moments look hilariously cheap – often shot in a footballer’s back garden or using DIY props cobbled together by Jacobs.

It played into what the show was often about: the sometimes-dismal reality of being a club supporter. It was the geeky side of football fandom (as personified by the bespectacled, socially awkward Statto), and the eternal disappointment that comes with supporting all but a handful of clubs each season (see Skinner’s self-deprecating gags about West Brom).

That was also at the heart of Three Lions, their number one single with The Lightning Seeds, released at the end of Fantasy Football League’s third series.

Baddiel is diplomatic about Three Lions’ contention as the greatest ever football song (“There are many – particularly music critics – who would still claim that that is World in Motion,” he says) but its stirring melancholy is undeniable, tapping into the tragic contradiction of being an England supporter: that secret, deep-down belief that every football-loving Englishman has at the beginning of a major tournament; and the inevitability of soul-crushing defeat.

Euro 96 – as ITV viewers will rediscover today – began as a painfully average tournament on home turf. But England turned it around and reached the semi-finals, seemingly powered by the sound of tens of thousands of fans singing Three Lions.

During one such moment at Wembley Stadium, as England hammered Holland 4-1 to a thousands-strong chorus of “Football’s coming home,” Baddiel remembers his manager saying: “Even if you win an Oscar, it won’t be better than this.”

Baddiel and Skinner hosted a series of specials during Euro 96 – now abandoning the fantasy league element entirely – and transferred to ITV for the 1998 World Cup. “It was still really funny in parts, but it was more event TV,” says Baddiel. “It became a bit The Word-y at times.”

But Fantasy World Cup was a feat of TV production – 18 live shows, broadcast after games, across three weeks.

“I don’t know if anyone else has done anything like that before or after,” says Jacobs.

It took a year of planning and faced particular challenges: going live after England had been knocked out – “Not a great time to do a comedy show!” says Jacobs – and notorious appearances from Brigitte Nielsen and Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon.

A guest on the first episode, Nielsen was either steaming drunk and just steaming bonkers (“She was f–––––– off her head!” says Jacobs). She stole Baddiel’s glasses, bear-hugged Skinner, and hijacked the show with rambling nonsense.

“Sit down Brigitte,” Skinner said. “You’re making a t––– of yourself!”

“I’ve blocked it out,” says Baddiel about the experience. “Although I have seen it since on YouTube. The bit when she starts speaking in tongues about a Danish pastry, before attacking me with it… that was strange.”

After a swift telling off from Jacobs during the ads, Nielsen was subdued for the second half. John Lydon, however, who appeared several episodes later, had to be ejected from the show – belligerent and difficult on air, Lydon then flicked a lit cigarette at the audience during the ads.

“I hated John Lydon,” says Andy Jacobs. “I thought he was w–––––. When I said, ‘Hello John, how you doing?’ he went, ‘F––– off.’ That was his greeting to me. I threw him out at half-time. I went down and said, ‘You’re ruining this programme, get out.’”

Fantasy Football returned for a final series during the 2004 Euros. Once again, Baddiel and Skinner had to write a comedy show on-the-fly as England suffered a humiliating defeat.

“I remember England v France in Euro 2004 and writing the show as the game went on,” says Baddiel, “and the whole show feeling like it was going to go with the upswing of England’s win, as they were 1-0 up at 90 minutes, and then France scored twice in extra-time. That meant we had to change everything. Plus, we knew the audience would be really pissed off. Which they were.”

By the end of Fantasy Football, bantering on a sofa had become an actual comedy format with Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. And the influence of Fantasy Football League continues elsewhere, most notably on Sky Sports’ Soccer AM.

“I see a lot of blokey shows that look like Fantasy Football on TV now,” says Baddiel. “Even shows that aren’t about football like Sunday Brunch. I think it created a more real way of talking about football on TV. Match of the Day was influenced – it’s much more banter-y now than it was.”

The result that proves, perhaps, how Fantasy Football League transcended football. It's much smarter than its laddish reputation.