I learned from this little lot that if one has read The Diary of a Nobody, then one can derive pleasure from even the most pedestrian life story, as there’s always an unintentional chuckle to be had. The former racing driver Nigel Mansell’s Staying on Track (Simon & Schuster, £20) delighted me with its Pooterish charms, from bullied boyhood :
One time I was due to race for England abroad. The school announced the exciting news in assembly one morning… that afternoon I was attacked viciously with a cricket bat in the playground. I thought the other children would be proud of me. How wrong can you be?
— to triumphant adulthood, bashing himself up for pleasure and profit:
Let me tell you about the time I told a priest to get lost. Yes, you’d think that’s not one of my finest moments, not least because I am not a fan of swearing and I have a lot of respect for the church. However, I do have an excuse, of sorts. I was nearly dead.
I have a crush on Alan Sugar and blush to admit that I bought Unscripted: My Ten Years in Telly (Macmillan, £20) the day before the review copy arrived. At a time when Sugar’s beloved Labour party is so hostile to the likes of him (Jewish, patriotic, go-getting, keen on employing tough women in top jobs), the tale of the boy from the Hackney council flat who made a fortune in computers and then built another career encouraging non-entrepreneurs to laugh at the pomposity and ineptitude of Keystone Kapitalists on The Apprentice — his entire fee going to Great Ormond Street Hospital — is poignant and somewhat nostalgic, as well as a laugh. Sugar’s is a more knowing Pooterism than Mansell’s; there’s a bit in Nobody when our hero sits up in bed thinking of something he said earlier and ‘laughed until the bed shook’ whereas Sugar muses: ‘I can be a little bit witty at times, and it went down well with the audience.’ A triumph. Every home should have two copies.
What makes a showbiz success is not that little something extra, as legend has it, but rather that little something missing. Both Paul O’Grady — a loner in leopardskin — and Steve Coogan — a grudge-holder in high dudgeon — exemplify this overwhelming desire to be looked at, and then, mission accomplished, to disappear and be seen only fleetingly and on their terms. In the case of Coogan this is as a pure scourge of the gutter press (i.e any hack who reveals him to be a rollicking roué — as if there was anything bad about being one) who seems willing, via the vilely self-serving Hacked Off group, to sacrifice hard-won collective freedom for nothing more honourable than personal privacy. Even if I didn’t have a hack-shaped axe to grind, I’d find Easily Distracted (Century, £20) an utter stinker. It’s startling that the super-talented creator of the ultimate manic humbug Alan Partridge has turned out to be an utter Everton mint himself. Like the Grossmith brothers went to work in an insurance office!
In the case of O’Grady — far more honourably — he is now mostly found howling over homeless hounds on prime-time TV; mind you, when you write as gorgeously as he does in the fourth volume of his memoirs, Open the Cage, Murphy (Bantam, £20), drag-cabaret’s loss is the lending library’s gain. No whiff of Pooter here, but definitely a hint of Victor Meldrew in marabou trim crossed with Alan Bennett in a feather boa.
While O’Grady puts his gayness slap-bang in the centre of the pound-shop window and garlands it shrieking with tinsel, there will forever be a whiff of our-little-secret about Paul Gambaccini’s sexuality. Maybe it’s that insinuating voice or those hooded eyes? In the introduction to Love, Paul Gambaccini: My Year Under the Yewtree (Biteback, £20) we learn that if Mr G had been born a girl, his parents would have called him Nancy and that even as a baby he was a fuss-bucket: ‘For the first two weeks of my life I could not keep food down; doctors feared I might have been born with an inverted stomach.’ Whether these two occurrences are connected is anyone’s guess.
And that’s not the only ambiguous organ our hero has: ‘During the 1970s my sex life was limited to women, but my identification was with gay men. It was not until the 1980s that I finally fully made love to a man.’ This is just asking for trouble; sex is, like it or not, the lingua franca of our age, and if an adult man does not assert his preference for either adult men or for adult women, it is likely that society will judge his sexual preference to be animal, vegetable or juvenile.
The police have rather less to do with this state of affairs than the Roman Catholic church of Gambaccini’s forebears and their centuries of hardly hidden child abuse; maybe he should take it up with them rather than the coppers. Gloriously pompous, he asks an arresting officer ‘Is this what you wanted to do when you grew up?’ without apparently seeing the humour in a near-pensionable ‘disc jockey’ telling a man responsible for enforcing the law of the land that his work is worthless. Nice to know that Pooterism is an international language and rolls off the tongue of an Italian-American to the manor born.
There is nothing of the Bard of Holloway about Howard Marks’s prose; it’s far too blunt and elegant for that. ‘It is no secret that a drug smuggler does not like hard work,’ he writes in Mr Smiley: My Last Pill and Testament (Macmillan, £18.99) of ‘the one thing that made me feel truly alive’. But the minutiae of all the endless waiting, tasting, chasing, praying and evading quickly becomes far drearier to read about than a law-abiding 19th-century clerk’s daily grind. Pooter is redeemed from banality by his childlike, vivifying love for his friends and family, whereas every single person apart from Marks himself is a shadow here; only the drug experiences are vivid. This may be discretion, or it may be a blind spot which reflects badly on a lifetime of getting blasted. Anyway, Marks redeems himself slightly at the end by waiting for his imminent death from cancer with a stoicism worthy of the ultimate law-abiding 19th-century clerk.
The current memoir market is nothing if not democratic: reality-show studs and starlets have their allegedly illiterate constituency flocking to buy their hardbacks, while the great and the good boasting huge hinterlands are remaindered within the month. Which just goes to prove — as if we needed telling — that everybody is somebody’s nobody.
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