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.

[3] 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.

He returned after graduation to direct the subsequent revue Fall From Grace, which included amongst its cast Mitchell, Webb, and Matthew Holness.

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.

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.

Their first show Gladiatrix was devised with director Cal McCrystal and performed at the Soho Theatre in London and subsequently at the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it achieved some success.

The show, called Zoom, was written by and starred Bachman and Evans, and co-starred David Soul and Carla Mendonça with Jon Glover as Melvyn Bragg.

Bachman has since appeared in regular and cameo roles in Saxondale, The Mighty Boosh, The IT Crowd, "Jonathan Creek", Hyperdrive, Miranda, Peep Show, Rev.

In 2013 he was cast in Michael Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction as Gill Wembley, head scientist to the character of Joshua Joyce played by Stanley Tucci.