Famous last words...
With four days to go, you’ve still time to pick up a celebrity memoir for the festive period, says Lucy Pavia
Army, scrotum, holiday, cameras, shampoo” — an assortment of words jotted down by comedian Billy Connolly before stepping on stage to perform.
“I’ll glance at the list on my wee table and see two or three things and then I’ll go on to talk about them,” he writes in his autobiography, Tall Tales And Wee Stories (John Murray,
£20).
The Glaswegian, famous for his exuberant, seat-of-pants approach to comedy, takes a similar approach to his life story, presenting a loosely chronological and highly tangential series of yarns, which range from a working-class upbringing in tenement housing (with schooldays at “Our Lady of Perpetual Pre-Menstrual Tension”) to an awkward Hollywood sex scene involving Liam Neeson.
Connolly’s writing is so much like his speech, you can hear him as you read.
“You would have loved my cousin John,” he writes. “He was lovely. He’s dead now. You wouldn’t like him now.”
A very different kind of storyteller is documentary-maker Louis Theroux. Since much of his back catalogue moved to Netflix, Gen Z-ers, who weren’t born when Weird Weekends first aired, now buy Etsy T-shirts with “I Gotta Get Theroux This” over a headshot of their cultural hero.
This pun is the title of his autobiography, Gotta Get Theroux This: My
Life And Strange Times In Television (Macmillan, £20), which examines a career spent asking controversial people awkward questions in kitchens — white supremacists, gun nuts, Neil and
Christine Hamilton. Precociously bright (he gets accepted to Oxford at 16), Theroux scores a break with a segment on apocalyptic religious sects for Michael Moore’s American series TV Nation, his “faux-naive” questions casting a “benign spell”.
His career-defining encounter with Jimmy Savile is perhaps most interesting and, after posthumous revelations about Savile’s terrible crimes emerge, Theroux is forced to evaluate his blind spots.
If you’re on Instagram, you’ve probably seen sketches by illustrator Charlie Mackesy on your feed. Following the travails of a boy and three animal companions, Mackesy finds simple, but pertinent, ways to address the big questions of life.
One particular sketch — “‘What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever said?’ asked the Boy. ‘Help,’ said the horse” — is now used in hospitals and institutions to encourage people to open up about mental health.
His bestselling book, simply entitled The Boy, The
Mole, The Fox
And The Horse (Penguin, £16.99), is a beautiful collection of his finest drawings.
“The truth is, I need pictures,” Mackesy writes.
“They are like islands, places to get to in a sea of words.”
There’s a good reason television screenplays aren’t often sold as mainstream books — “Man enters room, looks around” isn’t necessarily soul-capturing stuff — but it’s worth making an exception for Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag:
The Scriptures (Hodder, £20), naughtily bound to look like an old Bible.
The show confirmed her skills as a comic actress, but seeing the words in black and white crystallises her brilliance as a writer who can so expertly build the comedy of a scene to bursting point. It’s often very moving, too.
“I just think I want somebody to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong,” she cries to the priest in the famous “kneel” scene of season two.
At the close of the book, Waller-Bridge examines the creation of her award-winning character: “I was 27 and in a cynical spiral. Convinced my work and my brain carried less value than my desirability. I looked down into the abyss and at the bottom of it was Fleabag looking up at me, in lipstick.”