Michael Bywater

Michael Bywater (born 11 May 1953) is a British non-fiction writer, columnist, cultural critic, essayist, and broadcaster.^[1] He has written for The Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Observer, and numerous other newspapers and magazines.^[2]

Michael Bywater
Michael Bywater, British writer and broadcaster
Born	(1953-05-11) May 11, 1953 (age 72) London, England
Occupations	Writer Columnist Broadcaster
Children	1

Early life and education

Bywater was educated at Nottingham High School and later attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, initially reading medicine before switching to English. He also completed postgraduate studies in Theatre Performance Studies at Cardiff University.^[3]

Career

Journalism and broadcasting

Bywater spent over a decade as a staff editor and columnist for Punch, where he sometimes wrote anonymously, including the "Bargepole" column. He has contributed regularly to publications including The Independent on Sunday, The Observer, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, and Woman's Journal. He is also a cultural critic for New Statesman.^[2]

On radio, he has appeared in programmes such as Cartoons, Lampoons, and Buffoons (BBC Radio 4, 1998) and has contributed to a range of broadcasts on cultural and literary topics.^[2]

Books

Bywater's works include:

• Lost Worlds (2004) – essays on aspects of life and culture that have disappeared from modern society
• Big Babies (2006) – on the infantilisation of Western culture
• The Chronicles of Bargepole – a collection of his Punch columns^[4]

Interactive fiction

Bywater co-wrote interactive fiction games with Douglas Adams such as Bureaucracy, the unreleased Milliways, and Starship Titanic. He also collaborated with Anita Sinclair on Jinxter for Magnetic Scrolls.^[5]

Academic involvement

He has held teaching and residency posts at Magdalene College, Cambridge and King's College, Cambridge, and has supervised courses on tragedy for the Cambridge English Tripos.^[2]

Personal life

Bywater is a harpsichordist, organist, and qualified pilot. He has also worked on a musical libretto based on the life of Oscar Wilde with songwriter Mike Stoller.^[2]

Biography

Bywater received his education at the independent Nottingham High School and later studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was a long-running columnist for The Independent on Sunday and an early futurist for The Observer. Bywater spent ten years on the staff of Punch, where he wrote a regular computer column and the anonymous "Bargepole" column. Additionally, he wrote regularly for The Times and had been a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan and Woman's Journal. He also writes regularly on high-tech subjects for The Daily Telegraph and technology magazines. He is a cultural critic for the New Statesman. In 1998, he was part of BBC Radio 4's five-part political satire programme Cartoons, Lampoons, and Buffoons.^[6] He also supervised the tragedy paper for several Cambridge colleges and, in 2006, was the writer-in-residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Bywater has suggested that he inspired Douglas Adams's character Dirk Gently.^[7]

Bywater was previously identified as a young fogey. In The Young Fogey Handbook, author Suzanne Lowry writes: "Michael Bywater, 30-year-old Punch columnist and former trendy who once worked in films, made bold to criticise Burberrys for the inferior quality of their product - the trench coats are not what they were in the days of the trenches. Burberrys responded that they could indeed live up to their past and made Bywater a coat based on the 1915 design devised by Kitchener and Burberry... complete with camel hair lining to protect a gentleman officer's flesh on the field..."^[8]

Games, books, music

In the mid-1980s, Bywater co-designed and co-wrote several interactive fiction games. He collaborated with Douglas Adams on Bureaucracy and the never-completed Milliways: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe for Infocom. He also collaborated with Anita Sinclair on Jinxter for Magnetic Scrolls. In the late 1990s, he contributed to the writing team for Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic.

His book, Lost Worlds, which explores the human tendency for nostalgia, was released in 2004. His subsequent book, Big Babies, on the infantilisation of Western culture, was published in November 2006.

Bywater played the church organ with Gary Brooker for the "Within Our House" charity concert.^[9]