Book review: The Invisible Girl by Peter Barham and Alan Hurndall (Harper Element)

In 1991, a new name appeared in the credits of Week Ending and the News Huddlines. I assumed the formal-sounding monicker belonged to some retired university professor.

A year later, ‘D. A. Barham’, a tall, attractive but very shy teenage girl, appeared in the Writers’ Room.

She had been a brilliantly clever but lonely, bullied child who spent years listening to radio comedies and building up a collection of 350 cassettes of them. She developed an ambition to write, believing that she could do better than much of what she heard!

Her first contributions were submitted under initials because she didn’t believe producers would take a female’s work seriously. If only she had known that the BBC were desperately trying to attract women into comedy writing!

Having ‘outed’ herself by turning up at Broadcasting House (a nerve-wracking experience, as she later admitted) she now hid behind another alias, that of an eighteen year-old. She was actually fifteen but because of her height, intelligence and remarkable knowledge of comedy and current affairs, she could probably have passed herself off as a mature twenty-something.

Her work demonstrated a stunning capacity for wordplay; she could spot potential puns instantly. She also had a filthy mind, often employing vulgar expressions which I hadn’t heard since my own schooldays! Furthermore, she was seldom asked for rewrites and could adapt her ideas to any market.

And then there was the sheer quantity of material she produced. Every week, hundreds of gags and dozens of sketches poured from her laptop (a novelty among writers then but she was always fascinated by computers).

Her progress at BBC Radio was rapid and she made the decision to forego a sixth form scholarship and university in favour of moving to London to write full-time. Her reputation grew and she began to attract national press attention.

It was no surprise when she won the Contract Writer’s Award, a bursary with a guaranteed income and the opportunity to develop new BBC radio projects. It was also seen as a passport to television. Her shyness disappeared and ‘D. A.’ was finally replaced in credits by ‘Debbie’.

We had been close but we parted in 1994. She went on to develop radio sitcoms and quizzes, then to TV where she wrote for Spitting Image, Rory Bremner, Clive Anderson and many other big names. She also wrote books and became a prolific journalist.

But even when she was a star columnist for the Sun, she never lost her love of radio. She continued contributing to the Huddlines and was part of the Sony Award-winning team behind the Sunday Format.

And while she preferred to write rather than perform, she made radio appearances, mainly reviewing the press.

Her name was everywhere and I assumed that her life was an exciting round of media events. So I was stunned to learn in April 2003 that Debbie Barham had died, aged 26. It transpired that she had suffered from anorexia since 1995, her weight at times being as low as four and a half stone, and she had lived as a virtual recluse. But her illness never affected the quality of her work.

At her memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, eulogies were delivered by personalities ranging from Ned Sherrin to John McVicar. Her final radio sitcom, About a Dog, was broadcast in 2004 with a script sympathetically completed by Graeme Garden.

She was highly secretive so when her father Peter decided to write her biography, he asked me for my memories, describing me as ‘perhaps the only person who was ever allowed to see the inner Debbie’. The resulting book is often harrowing and, to some reviewers, controversial in terms of whether Peter should have written it or not but it is packed with fascinating tales and hilarious examples of his daughter's radio genius.




(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 750, 24 August 2006)