Authors Electric

Nobody’s ever accused me of being a philosopher, but I can boast that people have been pondering over my sense of humour all my life, give or take the years of non-verbal communication (gurgles, etc, you know the kind of thing). One school, led by people of a similar bent (the clever ones) find it very funny, and possibly even excellent. Others (sadly many of them women) find it generally unfunny, sometimes unfunny in the extreme, and occasionally, a damned disgrace. No names no packdrill; they know who they are. Carl Grose as Waggie In the day-to-day, of course, this makes very little odds (give or take the occasional bowl of spaghetti bolognaise emptied over my head – {only one occasion, to be strictly honest}), and even as a writer it’s probably done less harm than good. Only one (woman) reviewer hated Wagstaffe the Wind-Up Boy – on the amazing grounds that it was ‘mean-minded.’ I still wake up in the middle of the afternoon sometimes sweating over that. ...

In the light of the Rolf Harris conviction, and the horrifying (supposed) shenanigans among   the great and good who sit in judgement over us (and now, as from Sunday, the divine Maggie apparently up to her neck in it) it's fascinating to go back a few decades and see what people were writing as entertainment. I may have mentioned Jack Trevor Story before. For those of you who don't remember, or who are too young, he was a writer who appeared every Saturday in the Guardian, musing about his own weird life and those of the people he knew best. Man about town. He made pin money working for a model agency that specialised in ugly people Many people thought the word Story was descriptive of the pieces, and not his surname. It was not. He was, apparently, a sort of Gypsy from the eastern counties, whose father was killed in the First World War, whose stepfather was genuinely born a Gypsy, and whose life read remarkably like picaresque fiction. He was an errand boy....