Michael Bywater

Career

Michael Bywater, born in Nottingham on 11 May 1953, was a British writer, columnist, cultural critic, and broadcaster. He wrote for The Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Observer, and many other newspapers and magazines. His parents were Jean and Keith Bywater, though he later discovered his biological father was Bertold Wiesner. He attended Nottingham High School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, starting in medicine before switching to English, and later completed a postgraduate theatre performance studies course at Cardiff University.

For over a decade, Bywater worked as a staff editor and columnist at Punch, sometimes writing anonymously under the alias Bargepole, whose caustic column satirised pop culture and politics. His work also appeared in The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, and Woman's Journal, where he was a contributing editor. He served as a cultural critic for New Statesman and an early futurist for The Observer, and wrote about technology for The Daily Telegraph and tech magazines. In 1998, he appeared on BBC Radio 4's political satire Cartoons, Lampoons, and Buffoons, which ran for five episodes.

Bywater supervised Cambridge students on the Tragedy paper and was writer-in-residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 2006. He claimed to have inspired Douglas Adams's character Dirk Gently. Once labelled a young fogey, he famously criticised Burberry's trench coat quality, prompting the company to make him a 1915-style coat with camel hair lining. He was a harpsichordist, organist, and qualified pilot, with one daughter. He collaborated with Mike Stoller on a musical libretto about Oscar Wilde. Bywater co-wrote interactive fiction with Douglas Adams, including Bureaucracy and Starship Titanic, and with Anita Sinclair on Jinxter. His books include Lost Worlds (2004) and Big Babies (2006), and a collection of Bargepole columns. He died from Lewy body dementia on 24 August 2025, aged 72.

Games, books and 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 infantilization of Western culture, was published in November 2006. Bywater played the church organ with Gary Brooker for the "Within Our House" charity concert.