James Hamilton Bachman (born 24 February 1972) is an English comedian, actor and writer. He has written for and acted in many British television and radio programmes, including That Mitchell and Webb Look, Saxondale, Bleak Expectations and Sorry, I've Got No Head. In 2014, he had a small role in the film Transformers: Age of Extinction.
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Early life
Bachman was born in Cuckfield, West Sussex to American father Thomas Edwin Bachman, of Meadow House, Battle, East Sussex, and English mother Carolyn, daughter of Major-General Godfrey John Hamilton, CBE, DSO, of The Old House, Hailsham, Sussex, and writer Mary Margaret Kaye, daughter of Lt-Col Sir Cecil Kaye, an officer in the British Indian Army and minister of Tonk State, India.
Bachman attended Radley College and studied Natural Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, focusing on Physics and Mathematics. He joined Footlights, having been a Monty Python and Fry and Laurie fan as a youngster. It was while in Footlights that he first met David Mitchell and Robert Webb, whom he would collaborate with for their shows, and also future writing partner Mark Evans. His other student comedy contemporaries included the writer and director Dan Mazer and the TV scriptwriter Robert Thorogood.
He became co-vice-president of Footlights in 1993 and appeared in and wrote for the 1994 Footlights revue The Barracuda Jazz Option. He returned after graduation to direct the subsequent revue Fall From Grace, which included amongst its cast Mitchell, Webb, and Matthew Holness. That same year he also directed a production of the Keith Waterhouse play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell 2, starring Mitchell as Jeffrey Bernard and Webb in multiple roles.
Career
Shortly after graduating, Bachman began a short-lived sketch double-act with fellow Cambridge comedian Matthew Holness. Bachman & Holness performed their first sketch show Rummage in the Pleasance Attic at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1996. Their second show Shoes debuted at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge the following year and is notable for including one of the first ever performances of Holness' character Garth Marenghi.
Bachman then went on to spend the early part of his career earning a living mainly as a comedy writer, starting as a solo writer for radio shows such as Week Ending, and then forming a writing partnership with Mark Evans. As a pair they contributed material to a huge number of sketch and entertainment shows for radio and television including The Very World of Milton Jones, The Jack Docherty Show, The 11 O'Clock Show, The Priory, The Richard Blackwood Show, Rhona, Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Popetown, Ed Stone Is Dead, That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and That Mitchell and Webb Look. As writers on That Mitchell and Webb Look, Bachman and Evans created several of their much-loved sketches including 'Numberwang', 'David's Chiropractor', 'Glucozade Port' and 'Bed & Booze'.
During this period he made a few appearances on TV in shows he was writing on as well as occasional roles in shows such as 15 Storeys High, The Robinsons and Comedy Nation.
Frustrated at the lack of outlets for sketch and character performers on the London comedy circuit, Bachman, along with Evans and Robert Thorogood, set up the sketch comedy club TBA-2 at the Latchmere Theatre (now Theatre503). (The name was a reference to London's 'first ever sketch comedy club' TBA set up by Henry Naylor and Andy Parsons in the mid-Nineties.) Regular performers included their university contemporaries Mitchell, Webb, Holness and Jonathan Dryden Taylor as well as The Four Horseman, The Trap, Stuart & Quigley, John Reed, Ben & Arn, Nick Doody, Andy Bodle, Spencer Brown and Georgie Morgan.
In early 2001 Bachman and Evans began a weekly live residency at the Etcetera Theatre in London, developing a free-form live sketch-sitcom under the title Work In Progress. Material from this residency became their first Edinburgh Fringe show Hmm... which ran at the Assembly Rooms. Bachman and Evans returned to Edinburgh in 2002 with their second show The Bachman and Evans Special Edition, which attempted to add DVD-style commentary and 'extra scenes' to their normal live-sitcom-adventure format. In 2001 and 2002 and 2002 Bachman also directed Edinburgh Fringe shows for Mitchell and Webb: The Mitchell and Webb Story and The Mitchell and Webb Clones.
