(This page has not been updated in years. Just so you know. To discover more about me, visit my page on my agent's website.)

I am James Bachman. Welcome here.

You may have ascertained from the top of the page that I am a comedy writer, actor and graphic designer.

I was born in Cuckfield, East Sussex, on the 24th of February, 1972, which makes Pisces my starsign, and Amethyst my birthstone. What the significance of these two facts are I am uncertain, but I do not much enjoy either swimming or the colour purple – the film in particular bores me, although the book comes highly recommended by a friend of mine.

My mother is English, and my father is American; I have a passport from both. What this means is that I can come over there and take your jobs and women pretty much irrespective of where you live.

I am also apparently one thirty-second Native American. How.

I was educated intensely and effectively, until attendance at one of this country's great universities introduced an element of self-governance into my studies, whereupon it all went to shit. As luck would have it almost simultaneous with this set of circumstances came the realisation that I no longer enjoyed Physics and Mathematics.

Don't get me wrong: In Search of Schrodinger's Cat still fascinates me, and I can whistle my way through Fermat's Last Theorem with the best of them. Just don't ever put them together in a degree level academic frame work if you want me to stay the least bit interested.

One thing that has always enlivened my life is comedy. Indoctrinated at a young age into the glorious lunacy of Monty Python by my father, I've always had an inclining to get up there and do it myself. At school I would shamelessly rip off other people's material to produce the occasional end of term revue (myself and a friend once attempted to justify our performing the entire Cheeseshop sketch verbatim because we had added a reference to the woman who ran the school shop at the beginning), and was disturbed by the amount of times people would come up to me and say, 'Apparently you're funny. Go on, then. Say something funny.' To which I would be forced to say something pointlessly surreal like 'fishcake'. Only occasionally did this work.

Undaunted by such pressure, when I arrived at Cambridge I launched into comedy with a vengeance. Myself and four other friends (Rory Ewins, James Pooley, Steve Field and Robert Terry) formed our very own sketch group called, for want of a better title, Three Men and a Penguin, and we staged our first show in a tiny theatre called The Playroom. The feeling I got when an audience made up almost entirely of complete strangers actually laughed on the first night is responsible for my choice of career. As with any new experience, the excitement will never be as great again, but like some deluded addict, I'm still searching for a repeat of that first high.

I went on to be heavily envolved with the Cambridge Footlights, appearing in most of the shows they put on during my time there, including the 1995 Footlights revue The Barracuda Jazz Option (directed by my current writing partner Mark Evans), and working with a load of up and coming comedians such as Matthew Holness and Mitchell and Webb, the last three of whom I returned to Cambridge to direct in the 1996 revue Fall from Grace.

I left university in 1995 having made the decision, much to my parents initial disappointment, that I was going to be a comedian. I spent the next year on income support in a grotty flat in North East London, writing material for the rarely missed Weekending on Radio 4 and planning my impending explosion on to the British comedy scene, which didn't really reassure them that I had made a good career choice. However, once they realised I was serious about it, they've supported me ever since.

In early 1997 Mark called me to ask if I'd be interested in helping him write something he'd been offered, and from then on he and I have worked together as a writing partnership. After a spell of occassional temping omedy writing is now my job, and if you pay attention at the end of funny programmes you like you should have a good chance of spotting my name in the credits. I also act and occasionally design the odd poster or website, but mainly for friends.

The one thing I do miss is writing comedy for myself to perform, after all there's only so much joy you can get out of writing a new, foolproof, mildly amusing way for Jamie Theakston to say 'and now please welcome Kylie Minogue!'.

This is going to change.

If you're still desperate to know more about 'the real me', here's some lists.

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