Educated at Highgate School and Worcester College, Oxford, he began his career as a freelance journalist, contributing to computer and gaming magazines. In the 1990s he had stints as television critic for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express and has written a monthly pop music column for The Spectator since 1987.

With his schoolfriend Harry Thompson, he scripted the BBC Radio comedy Lenin of the Rovers. He came to prominence with his 1995 book, Rain Men, which humorously chronicles the formation and adventures of his own cricket touring team, the Captain Scott Invitation XI, giving every average club cricketer something to identify with. Berkmann has continued to write newspaper and cricket magazine columns, such as the Last Man In column on the back page of Wisden Cricket Monthly, while producing a number of critically well-received humorous books. In Brain Men (1999), he applied his sardonic observations to the world of pub quizzes, and takes the same approach to Fatherhood (2005). Later in 2005, he released the book Zimmer Men, as a sort of sequel to Rain Men, describing his next team, and his transition into middle age with cricket.

He is also credited as one of the writing team of the BBC Three comedy show Monkey Dust, and has been associated with Private Eye magazine. In 2009 he set up the quiz company Brain Men with Stephen Arkell and Chris Pollikett.

Monographs

• The Complete Guide to Test Cricket in the Eighties (Partridge Press, 1990)
• Other People: Portraits From The 90s with D. J. Taylor (Bloomsbury, 1990)
• Rain Men: The Madness of Cricket (Little, Brown, 1995)
• Brain Men: A Passion to Compete (Little, Brown, 1999)
• Fatherhood: The Truth (Vermilion, 2005)
• Zimmer Men: The Trials and Tribulations of the Ageing Cricketer (Little, Brown, 2005)
• The Prince of Wales (Highgate) Quiz Book (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)
• Ashes to Ashes (Little, Brown, 2009)

Journalism

• "iPod dilemma" The Spectator 308/9397 (4 October 2008) : 53