Michael Bywater

Michael Bywater (born 11 May 1953) is a British writer and broadcaster.

He was educated at Nottingham High School, an independent school and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was a long-running columnist for The Independent on Sunday, an early futurist for The Observer, spent ten years on the staff of Punch, where he wrote a regular computer column and the anonymous "Bargepole" column, as well as having written regularly for The Times, and been a contributing editor to Cosmopolitan and Woman's Journal. He also regularly writes about high-tech stuff for The Daily Telegraph and a wide variety of technology magazines. He is said to be cultural critic for New Statesman. In 1998 he was part of BBC Radio 4's 5-part political satire programme Cartoons, Lampoons, and Buffoons. He also supervises on the Tragedy paper for a number of Cambridge colleges and, in 2006, was Writer-in-Residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Bywater was the inspiration for his close friend Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently character.

He previously has been identified as a young fogey. In The Young Fogey Handbook (Poole, Dorset: Javelin Books, 1985), 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 riposted that indeed they could live up to their past, and made Bywater a coat to the 1915 design devised by Kitchener and Burberry - complete with camel hair lining to protect a gentleman officer's flesh on the field..."

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