I grew up in the UK and moved to the United States after college. Two decades on, it's disarming to be reminded of UK celebrities who were wildly successful there but never made it in America. Sometimes forced efforts are made to make UK stars "happen" in the US — Anne Robinson and Piers Morgan are good examples — and their suddenly-obvious mediocrity exposes much about the media environment they came from.
Sometimes an obituary or where-are-they-now profile might impose upon my hazy recollections a disturbing contemporary reality. Fellow ex-pat Britons who grew up in the 90s, for example, should read this recent interview with once-pervasive TV star Tony Slattery, who has become in person the cold misery of British dark comedy.
But most brit-celebs are forgotten, the neurons assigned to their memory free from the refreshment by Britain's shabby light-entertainment monoculture.
So it is with magnificent surge of nausea that I lurch awake today, bathed in sweat and haunted by the 90s, to the awareness that Danny Baker is still alive, has become physically and performatively indistinguishable from Alan Partridge, and was fired by the BBC for a racist tweet.
Danny Baker tweeted Thursday that he has been fired after posting an image of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee dressed in clothes and the caption: “Royal baby leaves hospital.”
The tweet was seen as a racist reference to baby Archie’s heritage. His grandmother Doria Ragland is African American.
Baker says the posting was an “enormous mistake.” It has since been deleted.
