Lovely JUBBLY!
ONLY FOOLS AND STORIES by David Jason (Century €17.99)
HAVING told us in his previous book how an electrician from North London ‘with his own van’ became a beloved television actor ‘with his own car’, David Jason now gives fascinating and engrossing behind-thescenes glimpses of his famous roles.
He was fifth choice for Del Boy — the producers really wanted Jim Broadbent. Despite the BBC’s misgivings, however, Only Fools And Horses, set during the Thatcher era(‘a mini boom-time for dodgy entrepreneurship’), went on to be adored by 24.3 million viewers.
Jason tells us how he decided upon the costume, make-up and voice, ‘increasing the Cockney content’ and creating a Derek Trotter who was ‘spry and nippy’, a human bantam. Buster Merryfield, incidentally, who was cast solely because he had a big white beard, was the retired manager of NatWest in Thames Ditton.
It’s a sign of Jason’s range as an actor that he was equally as convincing as the grey and slightly melancholy Inspector Frost in his raincoat and trilby. Then there was The Darling Buds Of May, which was ‘carefree, sunny and escapist, a vision of bucolic bliss’.
ALFIE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALFIE BYRNE by Trevor White
(Penguin €20) SEVERAL nights a week for the past seven years of my life I have encoutered Alfie Byrne — and yet I never knew who he was. Now, thanks to Trevor White’s marvellous biography, I do. You should too.
The Alfie Byrne I encounter at night is of course Alfie Byrne Road, the highway that connects the north side of Dublin’s docklands to Clontarf. And there’s a certain reflective poetry about that, because Alfie Byrne himself was a man who moved effortlessly between the worlds of poverty and wealth — not just comfortable in both but, it seemed, connecting them.
Certainly the most striking image for me in this wonderfully vivid account is of the young Alfie, a working class hero who fought his way to becoming MP for the utterly impoverished electorate of Dublin Harbour, attending the Westminster parliament all decked out in his top hat and tails. It appeared to create in young Alfie a taste for the trappings of office: White recalls how Alfie,on election as Mayor of Dublin, hired a slew of extra personal staff and also managed to have his salary increased from £1,600 to £2,500. At that time, he was the highest-paid politician in the land!
And yet as much as he enjoyed the material rewards of political success, Alfie Byrne also exhibited a dedication to the poor and dispossessed as great as perhaps anyone in this country’s history (proving along the way that, contrary to popular left-wing belief, the impecunious want to become well-off, not to enjoy a better standard of poverty).
He worked tirelessly to help Dubliners find housing and work: he rushed to the scene of disasters and (rightly) threw open the doors of the Mansion House to those affected by a flood.
He always had time for his constituents – and never forgot that it was they, not he, who had put him where he was.
This enormously enjoyable biography doesn’t seek to canonise Alfie, or to demonise him. It does what all good biographies should, which is simply to tell us the protagonist’s true story: and it does what all great biographies do, which is to make that story a delight to read.
A BIENTOT by Roger Moore
(Michael O’Mara €18.20) DEAD in his 90th year, Sir Roger Moore must be glad to be shot of the modern world, if this posthumously published rollicking rant is any indication.
‘Have courtesy and politeness gone out the window?’ he asks, before settling down to complain about badly dressed oiks eating takeaway snacks in the street, the absence of railway porters, complex instruction manuals accessible only online, self-service tills, computer codes, anti-social social media and so on. What is charming about the book are the flashbacks to happier days — a lost Dickensian world, which Roger remembers from his childhood. He recalls ‘washtubs bubbling away, mangles creaking’ and atmospheric pubs with ‘the smell of beer-soaked wood, polish and old shag tobacco’.
DEAD NOW OF COURSE by Phyllida Law
(Fourth Estate €18.20) WITH her kind eyes, crisp, warm Scottish voice, and her glowing halo of hair, Phyllida Law, clever, funny, lovely, and Emma Thompson’s mother, began work as an actress in the days of gas footlights, velvet curtains and the proscenium arch.
At the Bristol Old Vic 60 years ago, she met Peter O’Toole, who augmented his salary by selling yo-yos outside department stores. The actor playing Oberon seduced all the fairies. The eccentric director used a fried egg as a bookmark.
Phyllida toured the West Country, staying in terrible digs until she married a fellow actor called Eric Thompson, who was to find fame as the narrator of The Magic Roundabout. ‘We didn’t shout much. But we did throw things. He once asked what my interests were. I threw a meringue at him.’ Plus the plate I hope. This book is enchantment.
A LIFE IN THE DAY by Hunter Davies
(Simon & Schuster €19.20) IT’S Christmas, so here is our Ebenezer Scrooge. Hunter Davies delights in being a tightwad. ‘Something I never do, being mean,’ he says, is hail a taxi. He shared his wife’s bath water.
His Christmas tree last year cost £15. The previous year his wife had paid £50 ‘at a posh shop’. He stopped going to a regular literary lunch because when they split the bill, Kingsley Amis had unfairly inflated the booze component by drinking whisky. Hunter’s wife’s use of first-class stamps ‘made me scream at the expense’.
Meanwhile, Hunter has written more than a hundred books on everything from Lakeland walks to London parks, stamp collecting, football and Eddie Stobart. He has ghost-written the memoirs of Gazza, Wayne Rooney and John Prescott. He made so much money from a book about the Beatles in 1968 ($150,000 from America alone) he had to go abroad to avoid the taxman.
Hunter’s wife ‘much preferred being at home on her own . . . She hated meeting people’, and refused to go to parties, book launches, film premieres or literary festivals. Just about everything you can think of that was vaguely convivial, his wife condemned as ‘showing off’.
The thing is, Hunter’s wife was Margaret Forster, one of the greatest and most undervalued novelists and biographers of the last half-century. In my view she is far greater than Iris Murdoch or Doris Lessing. In 1975 Margaret fell ill with cancer. It recurred, each time more painfully, until her death in 2016.
Because of the grudging, facetious way he writes, the emotion that comes through when Davies describes the death of Margaret is hard-won and very moving.
NO WAY BUT THIS: IN SEARCH OF PAUL ROBESON by Jeff Sparrow
(Scribe €21) BACK in the Thirties the black actor and singer Paul Robeson, who was gifted with an inimical, rich and reverberating voice, was a Hollywood star. His rendition of Ol’ Man River, from the Broadway musical Showboat, had made him world famous.
It was ‘a song of defiance’, as the author of this fine biography explains, and moved the hearts of downtrodden white people as much as black people.
Robeson was the son of a slave, William, who was ‘kept in bondage on the tobacco farm’ in North Carolina. William escaped to New Jersey, determined that Paul, born in 1898, would be educated but the bigotry the star experienced throughout his life remained shocking.
Though he graduated from university as a lawyer, secretaries refused to take dictation from a black man, so he was never able to practise. Instead Robeson drifted into theatre. But only in London could he shake off prejudice. When appearing in Showboat at Drury Lane and playing Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona, he lived a nice life in Chelsea.
But he was dogged by ‘depressive paranoid psychosis’ and retired from view in Sixties. He died in 1976, largely forgotten.