ENTERTAINMENT

OLD RAGE by Sheila Hancock

(Bloomsbury £18.99, 272 pp) IN 2016, Sheila Hancock, one of our best- loved and most hard-working actors, began writing her new book.

She hoped it would be a gentle record of a fulfilled old age, an inspirational journey through her later years, full of memories of her life in showbiz and her much-loved late husband, the actor John Thaw.

She had many friends, a devoted family, lovely homes in London and France, she could still remember lines.

But it didn’t work out quite like that. From Brexit to her daughter’s breast cancer, from scruffy Jeremy Corbyn to her own painful illness, from Trump to the blight of Covid lockdowns, the world seemed determined to knock her from every quarter.

Home alone, talking to pigeons and shouting at her TV, she takes a long, hard look at her life, her loves and her beliefs as she opens up about her ninth decade.

The result is this sparkling memoir, as funny and insightful as it is moving. Hancock is brilliant company as she looks back on her life as a daughter, mother, widow and still an excellent performer, while railing against much of the modern world. In the end, all that matters is love. A wonderful read.

IT’S NOT A PROPER JOB by Chris Tarrant

(Great Northern £17.99, 256 pp)

THE morning after the pilot episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? went out, Chris Tarrant was walking to his London hotel when a lorry driver wound down his window and shouted, ‘Phone a friend!’ That’s when the presenter sensed something very special might be happening. The show went on to be one of the biggest in the world.

This riotously entertaining memoir is not so much a book, more a collection of celebpacked stories, and very jolly they are too — as you would expect from someone who has been a TV fixture for decades.

There’s fishing with Eric Clapton, carol singing with Rod Stewart, larking around with Paul McCartney, fundraising with George Michael. And much more.

Great fun, and Tarrant emerges as a likeable and self-deprecating star.

THE GIFT OF A RADIO by Justin Webb

(Doubleday £16.99, 256 pp)

HE MAY have one of the bestknown voices in Britain as the longest-serving presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, but it turns out he is a wonderful writer, too.

This superb memoir stops just as Webb joins the BBC and is an immaculate portrait of a certain type of middle-class upbringing in the 1970s. He never knew his father (the celebrated broadcaster Peter Woods, who had a brief affair with his mother) and didn’t get on with his stepfather, who was clearly an undiagnosed manic depressive.

He was sent to a peculiar Quaker boarding school, where he discovered a love of rugby, familiar to all who listen to Today.

To those of us of, um, a certain age, one of the joys of this warm, generous book (significantly, dedicated to his stepfather as well as his mother) is the detail of life in that extraordinary decade — nipping off with a packet of Players No 6, cider at 70p a gallon, listening to Fire by Arthur Brown or watching Tomorrow’s World where ‘chaps in ill-fitting suits tried to explain new-fangled devices called computers’. A pleasure to read.