Books to check out

‘A beautiful book.’ Zoë Ball  Be it as Nicky Hutchinson in \ Our Friends In The North\ , Maurice in \ The A Word\ , or his reinvention of \ Doctor Who\ , one man, in life and death, has accompanied Christopher Eccleston every step of the way – his father Ronnie. In \ I Love The Bones Of You\ , Eccleston unveils a vivid portrait of a relationship that has shaped his entire career trajectory, mirroring and defining his own highs and lows, from stage and screen triumph to breakdown, anorexia, self-doubt, and a deep belief in the basic principles of access and equality denied to generations. The actor reveals how his background in Salford, and vision of a person, like millions, denied their true potential, shaped his desire to make drama forever entwined with the marginalised, the oppressed, and the outsider.Movingly, and in scenes sadly familiar to increasing numbers, Eccleston also describes how the tightening grip of dementia on his father slowly blinded him to his son’s existence, forcing a new and final chapter in their connection, and how ‘Ronnie Ecc’ still walks alongside him today. Told with trademark honesty and openness, \ I Love The Bones Of You\ is a celebration of those on whom the spotlight so rarely shines, as told by a man who found his voice in its glare. A love letter to one man, and a paean to many. ‘My father was an “ordinary man”, which of course means he was extraordinary. I aim to capture him and his impact on my life and career.’  - Christopher Eccleston

The long-awaited first autobiography by national treasure Bob Mortimer.Bob Mortimer's life was trundling along happily until suddenly in 2015 he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required immediate surgery and forced him to cancel an upcoming tour. The episode unnerved him, but forced him to reflect on his life so far. This is the framework for his hilarious and moving memoir, And Away...Although his childhood in Middlesbrough was normal on the surface, it was tinged by the loss of his dad, and his own various misadventures (now infamous from his appearances on Would I Lie to You?), from burning down the family home to starting a short-lived punk band called Dog Dirt. As an adult, he trained as a solicitor and moved to London. Though he was doing pretty well (the South London Press once crowned him 'The Cockroach King' after a successful verdict), a chance encounter in a pub in the 1980s with a young comedian going by the name Vic Reeves set his life on a different track. And now, six years on, the heart condition that once threatened his career has instead led to new success on BBC2's Gone Fishing.Warm, profound, and irrepressibly funny, And Away... is Bob's full life story (with a few lies thrown in for good measure.)

In 1994 fledgling journalist Louis Theroux was given a one-off gig on Michael Moore's TV Nation, presenting a segment on apocalyptic religious sects. Gawky, socially awkward and totally unqualified, his first reaction to this exciting opportunity was panic. But he'd always been drawn to off-beat characters, so maybe his enthusiasm would carry the day. Or, you know, maybe it wouldn't...In Gotta Get Theroux This, Louis takes the reader on a joyous journey through his life and unexpectedly successful career. Nervously accepting the BBC's offer of his own series, he went on to create an award-winning documentary style that has seen him immersed in worlds as diverse as racist US militias and secretive pro-wrestlers, the violent gangs of Johannesburg and extreme drinkers in London.Arguably his biggest challenge was corralling celebrities in his When Louis Met series, with Jimmy Savile proving most elusive. Blindsided when the revelations about Savile came to light, Louis was to reflect again on the nature of evil he had spent decades uncovering.Filled with wry observation, larger-than-life characters, and self-deprecating humour, this is Louis at his insightful and honest best.

A hilarious autobiography from one of Britain's funniest and most successful comedians.Born Chris Collins in 1957, Frank Skinner he grew up in the West Midlands where he inherited his father's passion for football - and alcohol.Expelled from school at 16, Frank had been nurturing a serious drink problem from the age of 14, but managed to go teetotal in 1987.Along with personal revelations, it helped turn his life around. His first television appearance in 1988 was met with raucous laughter from the audience - and 131 complaints, including one from cabinet minister Edwina Currie.He met fellow comedian David Baddiel in 1990, and the two went on to share a flat throughout the early 90s and to create the hit TV series Fantasy Football League. Winner of the prestigious Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival, Skinner's comedy is a groundbreaking mix of laddish and philosophical humour, one which has helped shape the British comedy scene ever since.From The Frank Skinner Show to co-writing the football's-coming-home classic Three Lions, his career has never been boring. Here, for the first time, Frank candidly tells us of the highs and lows of his fascinating life.

TWO COMEDY GREATS TALK LIFE, FRIENDSHIP AND THE JOYS OF FISHING...Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse have been friends for 30 years, but when life intervened, what was once a joyous and spontaneous friendship dwindled to the odd phone call or occasional catch up. Then, Glory Be! They were both diagnosed with heart disease and realised that time is short. They'd better spend it fishing...So they dusted off their kits, chucked on their waders and ventured into the achingly beautiful British countryside to fish, rediscover the joys of their friendship and ruminate on some of life's most profound questions, such as: How did we get so old? Where are all the fish? What are your favourite pocket meats? What should we do if we find a corpse?Following the success of the BBC's Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing series, this wonderful book by two lifelong friends is a love letter to the joys of angling, the thrill of the catch and the virtue of having a right daft laff with your mates. On the fish, the equipment, the food, and the locations, Gone Fishing is the perfect book for fans of Bob Mortimer, Paul Whitehouse and for anyone who wants to read a brilliantly written and endlessly funny joint memoir on life, friendship and joys of fishing.

Especially for a book I bought two years ago to find info that wasn't even in it, this was a lot of fun. The first couple of chapters I liked so much I thought I'd be giving it 5 stars. The nostalgia was perfectly pitched - childhood 70s cinema, 80s leftwing student politics and journalism. That was being a "proper student", because of course, being a kid at the time, that's when my idea of how students were was formed. First time I tried to read it all the way through, it was kind of overwhelming and I stopped after a few pages; this time it was just perfect. It was surprisingly wise about a number of things, not only film. And having not spent much time around film geeks for a while, his enthusiasm was almost as exciting as when, a few days after starting university, a boy said to a group of us in halls "Come up, I've got some great music I bet you've never heard of". Not in the arrogant-hipster way that sounds on paper, but with a naive soft-spoken charm, and the enthusiasm of a friend who really wants you to meet their pets. I was one of two who had heard of nearly all of it - and there was that new feeling of having *found people*. Odd to have it echoed by a mere book, and by someone who, in it, doesn't display much overlap with my taste - even if, via other media, he did help form it. It must have just been the right moment. Subsequent chapters have rather too much brass neck and ego and sheer stupidity (at nearly 30, not to realise that Russia in the early 90s would involve rough and ready conditions and travelling long distances, really?) - to be as charming as the first two, but Kermode evidently knows this, and I am in absolutely no position to criticise self-aware egotists. His opinions can be bulldozingly firm, yet he suspects they may also be rubbish, and at one point he describes his writing style as having evolved from 'NME teaboy' to 'pedantic dullard'. Which strikes a chord. Though I think he's considerably more entertaining than that. There are plenty of little things in here I identify with or which remind me of people I know, which made it a very cosy read. He is evidently one of those for whom sheer dumb luck had a substantial role in his becoming famous - though he's clearly also got some quality that made people overlook the initial fuck-ups he made in most of his early, brazenly blagged, jobs. Here he's funny and has an enviable knack of making long digressions work. Some GR reviewer has described him as making crap dad-jokes... but then it's already a while ago that I started to think some of Mojo looked genuinely interesting...Something that's largely off-screen is his marriage to film professor Linda Ruth Williams. They've been together since university and there's a sense of a great and idiosyncratic dynamic which has at times involved them living in different cities for work, whilst remaining a couple; together it seems they've both a lot in common and skill in living amicably with differences of opinion. Kermode is well-known for his love of gory horror cinema. (Whilst I enjoy campy horror, I hate gore, and if ambushed by it in something I'm watching, like to make a sweary and muscular response, such as "that can fuck right off", so as not to feel like too much of a wuss.) It turns out he's a vegetarian who refuses to watch anything with unsimulated animal cruelty. I've never quite been able to grok the phenomenon of peaceable, sometimes sweet and quiet, people who love horror, but I've met enough of them to know they are real and that horror fan doesn't usually equate with depraved. I have a somewhat similar fascination with less civilised periods of history, ancient natural disasters and the like, and - as well as being an off-grid hippie manquée - among the reasons are something about the tenor and sharpness of life which resonates, which might be similar to the attraction of gory horror for its fans. For me, Kermode has always been synonymous with the mid-90s Mark Radcliffe show on Radio 1 and I haven't heard a huge amount by him since - mostly written articles. However, to Kermode the Graveyard Shift was a relatively minor point and his greatest professional partnership is with Simon Mayo - it's from those shows and subsequent fame that many more people know him. I got this ebook because I hoped it contained a list of all the films he'd covered in the Cult Film Slot. It didn't, only alluding to a couple, and yet again I regretted throwing away the notebook(s) in which I'd listed most of the Cult Films and Cult Books from the shows I heard. I always thought someone else would have done the same and put the lists online, but if they haven't by now, they probably never will. It's Only a Movie shows Kermode having such a love of geeky uber-detail and recovering lost fragments that he seems like someone who'd be sympathetic to the question, even if he didn't keep the info, but it won't be me who asks, as I have an abiding dislike of the idea of anything resembling fanmail or bothering famous people. (The only fan letter I ever wrote was to Nicky Campbell when I was maybe 13 - his show was in the slot Radcliffe took over. I used lots of show-off vocab, including the phrase "bathos and pathos", because he had some sort of word-power type feature on his show. I haven't been able to watch or listen to Campbell since my late teens; even TV trailers induce intolerable cringing.)This book can sound a lot like Kermode's radio delivery, but often I was too caught up in the narrative to be conscious of it. I didn't come away with as long a watchlist as I expected, simply enthusiastic reminders to get round to stuff I already wanted to see, especially Slade in Flame and something by Werner Herzog, who here sounds as fascinatingly eccentric as anywhere. Dark Water, the production that led to his ordeal of a trip to Russia and Ukraine, also sounds intriguing.

David Mitchell’s 2014 bestseller Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse must really have made people think – because everything’s got worse.We’ve gone from UKIP surge to Brexit shambles, from horsemeat in lasagne to Donald Trump in the White House, from Woolworths going under to all the other shops going under. It’s probably socially irresponsible even to attempt to cheer up.But if you’re determined to give it a go, you might enjoy this eclectic collection (or eclection) of David Mitchell’s attempts to make light of all that darkness. Scampi, politics, the Olympics, terrorism, exercise, rude street names, inheritance tax, salad cream, proportional representation and farts are all touched upon by Mitchell’s unremitting laser of chit-chat, as he negotiates a path between the commercialisation of Christmas and the true spirit of Halloween. Read this book and slightly change your life!

The Silverback is considered the undisputed king, a creature whose authority is never challenged and who does not yield to compromise. He walks proudly, feeds greedily, grafts tirelessly, mates voraciously, swears constantly and is threatened all too easily. The Silverback is known to nestle in the misty peaks of central Africa but can also be found in Barking, Essex. Meet Dave Kane, the disappointed, steroid-ingesting, metal-wielding, bouncer father of slight, effete Gamma Male, Russell Kane.From one of Britain’s most popular and prolific comedians comes a hilarious and deeply moving memoir of life lived under the rule of a Silverback dad. This is a story about fathers and sons, class and education and how one scrawny, sensitive, fake-tan-applying 'ponce' stepped out of his father's shadow and became a man - whatever that means.

Steve Coogan was born and raised in Manchester in the 1960s, the fourth of six children. From an early age he entertained his family with impressions and was often told he should 'be on the telly'. Failing to get into any of the London-based drama schools, he accepted a place at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre and before graduating had been given his first break as a voice artist on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image.The late eighties and early nineties saw Coogan developing characters he could perform on the comedy circuit, from Ernest Moss to Paul Calf, and in 1992 he won a Perrier award with John Thomson. It was around the same time, while working with Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber on On The Hour and The Day Today, that Alan Partridge emerged, almost fully formed.Coogan, once a tabloid fixture, is now a respected film actor, writer and producer. He runs his own production company, Baby Cow, has a raft of films to his name (from 24 Hour Party People to Alpha Papa, the critically-acclaimed Partridge film), six Baftas and seven Comedy Awards. He has found huge success in recent years with both The Trip and Philomena, the latter bringing him two Oscar nominations, for producing and co-writing.In Easily Distracted he lifts the lid on the real Steve Coogan, writing with distinctive humour and an unexpected candour about a noisy childhood surrounded by foster kids, his attention-seeking teenage years and his emergence as a household name with the birth of Alan Partridge.

In September 2006, Victoria Coren won a million dollars on the European Poker Tour. In her long-awaited memoir, she tells the story of that victory, but also of a 20-year obsession with the game. It is a journey which has taken Coren from a secret culture of illegal cash games to the high-stakes glamour of Las Vegas and Monte Carlo, and brought with it friendship, laughter, and money, but also loneliness, heartbreak, and defeat. With disarming honesty, Coren lays all of this bare. For Richer, For Poorer also tells the story of the poker revolution. How did this cult card game, populated by a small community of colorful and eccentric players, move from the back streets to the mainstream in a few short years? It is a fascinating story from a trusted insider.

For the first time, Andrew Ridgeley - one half of one of the most famous bands in the world - tells the inside story of Wham!, his life-long friendship with George Michael and the formation of a band that changed the shape of the music scene in the early eighties. In 1975 Andrew took a shy new boy at school under his wing. They instantly hit it off and their boyhood escapades at Bushey Meads School built a bond that was never broken. The duo found themselves riding an astonishing rollercoaster of success, taking them all over the world. They made and broke iconic records, they were treated like gods, but they stayed true to their friendship and ultimately to themselves. It was a party that seemed as if it would never end. And then it did, in front of tens of thousands of tearful fans at Wembley Stadium in 1986.Andrew's memoir covers in wonderful detail those years, up until that last iconic concert: the scrapes, the laughs, the relationships, the good and the bad. It's a unique and one-and-only time to remember that era, that band and those boys.

Vic Reeves' vivid, enchanting, and utterly hilarious childhood memoir is a comic masterpiece.Before there was Vic Reeves, there was a boy called James Moir who was much the same as any other lad.Obsessed with owning a pet crow, a master at writing his name and terrified of his father's immense moustache. Growing up in Yorkshire and then CountyDurham, the boy who would be Reeves somehow managed to escape the attentions of 'Randy Mandy' and get a crash course in pig castration, before having encounters with Jimi Hendrix and the Yorkshire Ripper.Peopled with weird and wonderful characters, Vic Reeves' memoir is authentic, witty and inventive, and as unique as you'd expect from one of Britain's most exceptional comedy talents.

In this extraordinary book, Alexander Masters has created a moving portrait of a troubled man, an unlikely friendship, and a desperate world few ever see. A gripping who-done-it journey back in time, it begins with Masters meeting a drunken Stuart lying on a sidewalk in Cambridge, England, and leads through layers of hell…back through crimes and misdemeanors, prison and homelessness, suicide attempts, violence, drugs, juvenile halls and special schools–to expose the smiling, gregarious thirteen-year-old boy who was Stuart before his long, sprawling, dangerous fall. Shocking, inspiring, and hilarious by turns, Stuart: A Life Backwards is a writer’s quest to give voice to a man who, beneath his forbidding exterior, has a message for us all: that every life–even the most chaotic and disreputable–is a story worthy of being told.From the Hardcover edition.

The Sunnewspaper asked if Chris Morris's July 2001 Brass Eye Special on paedophilia was 'the sickest TV ever?' It was certainly the most controversial, though his uncompromising style of comedy meant he was rarely far from trouble. Morris first came to national prominence at the heart of a group of virtually unknown comedians brought together by Armando Iannucci. This book follows them from their 1991 news satire On the Hour, which transferred from radio to television where it was reinvented as the equally successful The Day Today. It became impossible to watch bulletins without thinking of Morris's Paxmanesque anchor character chastising a reporter -- 'Peter! You've lost the news!' -- or authoritatively delivering nonsense headlines: 'Sacked chimney worker pumps boss full of mayonnaise.' Meanwhile co-star Steve Coogan created a lasting anti-hero in Alan Partridge, imbued with a horrible life all of his own. But Morris himself was always the most compelling character of all. Drawing on exclusive new interviews and original research, this book creates a compelling portrait of Morris from his earliest radio days and of the comedians and writers who frequently took on the industry they worked in, polarising opinion to such a degree that government ministers threatened to ban them entirely. THIS IS THE NEEEWWWWS!

\ **THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR ANY COMEDY FAN**\ Straight Outta Crawley is the hilarious and irreverent autobiography from comedian Romesh Ranganathan.At the age of 9, Romesh Ranganathan delivered his first ever stand-up set at a Pontin's holiday camp talent competition, smashing the other competitor, a young girl playing the kazoo.The gig went so well that Romesh retired his comic genius for twenty-two years, hiding behind the guise of a maths teacher, before finally revealing himself again (no, not like that) at the tender age of 31. In 2010, Ranganathan staged his epic comeback gig to an almost silent room, and has since gone on to earn his place as the most in-demand overweight vegan Sri Lankan comedian in Britain.Now, for the first time, he tells the full story of how he got here. From the delights of Sri Lankan hospitality to his struggles as a child, teacher and now parent, to his adolescent flirtation with a rap career and his attempts to make it in comedy, Straight Outta Crawley is Ranganathan's hilarious and irreverent autobiography.

Peter Kay's unerring gift for observing the absurdities and eccentricities of family life has earned himself a widespread, everyman appeal. These vivid observations coupled with a kind of nostalgia that never fails to grab his audience's shared understanding, have earned him comparisons with Alan Bennett and Ronnie Barker.In his award winning TV series' he creates worlds populated by degenerate, bitter, useless, endearing and always recognisable characters which have attracted a huge and loyal following.In many ways he's an old fashioned kind of comedian and the scope and enormity of his fanbase reflects this. He doesn't tell jokes about politics or sex, but rather rejoices in the far funnier areas of life: elderly relatives and answering machines, dads dancing badly at weddings, garlic bread and cheesecake, your mum's HRT...His autobiography is full of this kind of humour and nostalgia, beginning with Kay's first ever driving lesson, taking him back through his Bolton childhood, the numerous jobs he held after school and leading up until the time he passed his driving test and found fame.

In 1975, a gangly black 16-year-old from Dudley, decked out in floppy bow tie and Frank Spencer beret, appeared on our TV screens for the first time. So began the transformation from apprentice factory worker to future national treasure of Sir Lenny Henry.In his long-awaited autobiography, Lenny tells the extraordinary story of his early years and sudden rise to fame. Born soon after his Jamaican parents had arrived in the Midlands, Lenny was raised as one of seven siblings in a boisterous, hilarious, complicated working household, and sent out into the world with his mum's mantra of 'H'integration! H'integration! H'integration!' echoing in his ears. A natural ability to make people laugh came in handy. At school it helped subdue the daily racist bullying. In the park, it led to lifelong friendships and occasional snogs. Soon, it would put him on stage at working men's clubs and Black Country discotheques. And then an invitation to audition for ITVs New Faces would change his life for ever.But those first years of show business, in a 1970s Britain of questionable variety shows, endless seaside summer seasons, casual chauvinism and blatant racism, were a bewildering experience for a lone black teenager. At every stage, he wondered: 'Am I good enough? Is this what they want? Who am I, again?'Riotous, warm-hearted and revealing, and told with Lenny's trademark energy - expect recipes, comic strips, and tips for aspiring comedians - Who Am I, Again? is the heart-breakingly honest and inspirational coming-of-age story of a man who holds a very special place in British hearts.