Who needs Alan Bennett if you’ve got Gogglebox?
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GOGGLEBOX Edited by Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris (Canongate, £18.99 £15.19)
I RESISTED Gogglebox at first. A programme about people watching programmes seemed about as far up its own bottom as television could possibly go.
But I have grown to love it — or at least to love the characters, particularly Leon (79) and June (77), the retired Liverpudlian teachers, who taught Wayne Rooney’s aunties and uncles.
Their comments couldn’t be bettered if Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood and Peter Kay collaborated on a script: ‘They’re all strange, people who do allotments’; ‘I used to like Bill Turnbull on Breakfast. Then I found out he was at public school, so he’s off the list.’
Steph and Dom, the glorious tipplers from Kent who fall over their own settee, are national treasures, as are the jolly lasses Sandy and Sandra from Brixton.
The book has lots of background on the ‘cast’, cartoons and photographs.
The series is obviously derived from Jim and Barbara commenting on telly banalities, in Caroline Ahern’s The Royle Family, and ordinary people’s pronouncements are equally as hysterical and often smartly perceptive. Brilliant.
WHAT IF? by Randall Munroe (John Murray, £14.99 £10.95)
HERE a collection of absurd hypothetical questions i s given serious scientific answers.
What would happen if the Earth stopped spinning?
What would happen if everyone on the planet jumped up and down simultaneously?
What’s immediately apparent is that the boffins adore sketching apocalyptic scenarios.
Most answers involve rapid freezing or boiling, devastation by the weather, blankets of fog, tidal waves and glaciations.
If the Earth stopped spinning, for example, there’d be a thousand-miles-per-hour hurricane and everything would be pulverised within moments, plus ‘ massive conflagrations that sustain themselves by creating their own wind systems’.
Scientists and small children are excited by such prospects, perhaps because neither group gets out much. Plastics such as shampoo bottles and shopping bags will survive us all, however.
So that’s a solace.
DOG TREATS by Christopher Matthew (Little Brown, £12.99 £10.39)
POEMS about pooches, ballads about bitches — Christopher Matthew puts the dog back in doggerel in this charming collection of verse about man’s best friend.
I agree with the author when he says: ‘I can’t think how anyone can live without a dog’, because they are so much nicer than people.
My own dogs down the years were called Clyde, Pogle, Tog, Milo and Miller.
I still shed a tear when I come across clumps of Miller’s fur behind the fridge.
When I retire I am going to disappear into the sunset with a dog named Moon.
The thing about dogs is that they reduce human behaviour to its essentials — walks, food, and fornication. They show us what old age will be like and they mock our aspirations ( ‘The family had great hopes for me; my rise was meteoric / At training school my parody of Lassie was historic’). You must get this slyly wise and witty book.
TIPS FOR MEANIES by Jane Thynne and Martin Honeysett (Square Peg, £6.99 £5.59)
THIS book is drawn from a popular column in The oldie, which I know for a fact is the greatest monthly magazine in England because I am i ts television critic.
I am perfectly qualified for this task as I seldom watch television, though don’t spread that around. The idea behind Jane and Martin’s work is that much fun may be had maximising one’s penny-pinching potential. Hence, freeze a candle before lighting it, as it makes them last longer and drip less.
Polish shoes with banana skins. Used tea bags make a good organic fertiliser. Carrot tops can be passed off as parsley . . . You get the picture. If World War II comes back, this book will be invaluable.
TERRIBLE ESTATE AGENT PHOTOS by Andy Donaldson (Square Peg, £8.99 £7.19)
I Know all about estate agent pictures. My house in Herefordshire has been on the market for three years. We’ve had professionals in, with tripods, lights, fi l ters — everything except Sophia Loren lolling full-length on a fur rug. We’ve had cowboys taking snaps with their mobile phones in five minutes flat — images of low-quality that nevertheless go up on the property websites. Here is a hilarious collection of ineptitude demonstrating a lack of any attention to detail that would no doubt get on the Turner Prize shortlist.
Britain’s homes are replete with damp, broken furniture, fungus, bullet holes, desolate gardens and unspeakable lavatories. The horrifying stains on people’s carpets are oddly mesmerising, as if ‘the estate agent had dragged the body outside before taking the photograph’.
This book begins as a laugh and ends as something terrifying — like most things in life.
COMIC, CURIOUS & QUIRKY: NEWS STORIES FROM CENTURIES PAST Edited by Rona Levin (The British Library, £10 £8)
THIS superb select i on of eclectic items from the British Library’s national newspaper Archive suggests that our ancestors had an obsession with freaks, disasters , violent misfortune and the macabre that makes today’s readers a load of easily offended shrinking violets.
Back in the 19th century, no one was deferential about royalty and everyone flocked to see ‘balloon-headed babies’ at the fair.
A Mrs Hussey, 85, from Bristol, became a national celebrity when, in 1851, a tape-worm eight yards long emerged from her bottom.
There is something lip-smacking about these reports. I must admit I sniggered when learning about the way a man in Scotland, swimming off a pier, was shot at and killed because ‘he was mistaken for a seal’.
on the whole, newspaper reports were much more colourfully and richly written a century ago than they are today.
Real writers like Thackeray, orwell, Hemingway, and of course Dickens, produced rollicking journalism. We don’t have such talents any more, political correctness has seen to that. This book made me profoundly nostalgic.