Facetious or scandalous?

Very funny guy, John O’Farrell.

Very funny guy, John O’Farrell. His columns are a hoot and his excellent memoir, Things Can Only Get Better, turned me temporarily into an insomniac. His latest book, a facetious history of the last 60 years, lacks the cohesion of his memoir and the concentrated force of his columns. Because he feels obliged to cover the whole of the shoreline he finds himself writing about subjects, like Northern Ireland, that don’t engage his emotions, only his knack for mockery.

If you tried writing to Bobby Sands MP at the House of Commons about getting your parking ticket rescinded, while he was starving himself to death in a cell smeared with excrement, he never even got back to you.

That’s funny. It’s also quite distasteful. The comic technique — authoritative truth overturned by a silly somersault — becomes wearing. Only when comment and comedy are born simultaneously are the results top-notch. Explaining why the Western powers invaded Iraq to avenge themselves on al-Qa’eda, he says, ‘basically anyone who used the letter ‘q’ without a ‘u’ was fair game.’

O’Farrell is at his strongest when discussing the Left. In Attlee’s government Nye Bevan was responsible for housing as well as health. Labour supporters joked that the party ‘only had half a Nye on housing’. This is a book to dip into rather than read at a sitting. And I fear it may be one of those pass-the-parcel gifts whose recipient is merely a conduit between Waterstones and Oxfam.

Far more rewarding is Andrew Marr’s masterful history of Britain between 1901 and 1945. He traces our painful transformation from a tired, sprawling imperial power into a taut modern democracy. The pages teem with risqué stories.