Strictly sensational: In a year that saw Del Boy, Bond, Jeremy Vine and even Prue Leith tell all, ROGER LEWIS casts a beady eye over their memoirs

  • Roger Lewis revealed his selection of the best celebrity books this year
  • Food lovers will enjoy the background behind Prue Leith in 'My Life On A Plate'
  • Actor Paul Robeson resurfaces in 'No Way But This: In Search Of Paul Robeson' 
  • Phyllida Law shares fond memories in 'Dead Now Of Course'

ONLY FOOLS AND STORIES by David Jason (Century £20)

ONLY FOOLS AND STORIES by David Jason (Century £20)

CELEBRITY BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

ONLY FOOLS AND STORIES 

by David Jason (Century £20) 

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-the-scenes 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’.


 

RELISH: MY LIFE ON A PLATE by Prue Leith (Quercus £20)

RELISH: MY LIFE ON A PLATE by Prue Leith (Quercus £20)

RELISH: MY LIFE ON A PLATE

by Prue Leith (Quercus £20) 

Though Prue tells us ‘I resented my image as the hard-driving businesswoman’, that is very much the impression she makes on a reader of these pages. She isn’t only a cook; she is also on the board of Orient Express Hotels, British Transport Hotels, the Royal Fine Art Commission, the Royal Society of Arts, the Halifax Building Society and heaps of other institutions and public bodies besides. This all in addition to running her own restaurants and her famous cookery school, writing her books, newspaper columns and making television appearances.

Prue was born in Johannesburg. ‘We lived a privileged, white-South African life’, with a three-acre garden, tennis court and swimming pool. She headed to Paris and learned about food, good ingredients and careful preparation, then to London, where she began her own catering firm. ‘If the jobs were for business grandees or movie stars, I would be very well paid. If they were royals, the money would be lousy.’

She opened her own restaurant, Leith’s, in Notting Hill in 1969, followed by a cookery academy, Leith’s School of Food & Wine, in 1975, to train the chefs whose graduation dishes were awarded marks for appearance, flavour, texture and skill.

Prue tells us several times that ‘my indignant voice’ was ‘an early indication of a bossy nature’.

She met her match in Prince Philip, with whom she clashed, and who is ticked off here for his habitual rudeness. ‘Sorry is not in his vocabulary.’

When Rayne Kruger, Prue’s husband, died, her account of the hospitals he was rushed to made me think that if only Prue Leith ran the NHS, it would be sorted out within minutes.


 

A BIENTOT 

A BIENTOT by Roger Moore (Michael O’Mara £12.99)

A BIENTOT by Roger Moore (Michael O’Mara £12.99)

by Roger Moore (Michael O’Mara £12.99) 

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 £8.99) 

DEAD NOW OF COURSE by Phyllida Law (Fourth Estate £8.99)

DEAD NOW OF COURSE by Phyllida Law (Fourth Estate £8.99)

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.


 

NO WAY BUT THIS: IN SEARCH OF PAUL ROBESON by Jeff Sparrow (Scribe £14.99)

NO WAY BUT THIS: IN SEARCH OF PAUL ROBESON by Jeff Sparrow (Scribe £14.99)

NO WAY BUT THIS: IN SEARCH OF PAUL ROBESON

by Jeff Sparrow (Scribe £14.99) 

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 — and yet 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 in Chelsea, sang on the BBC, watched Test cricket, and was presented to royalty.

They loved him in South Wales, where Robeson sang with the male voice choirs. ‘Aren’t we all black down the pit?’ he was told.

Unfortunately, the stress of his political idealism and civil rights ambitions drove him mad. Suffering ‘depressive paranoid psychosis’, Robeson retired from view in the early Sixties. He died in 1976 largely forgotten.


 

WHAT I LEARNT 

WHAT I LEARNT by Jeremy Vine (Weidenfeld £18.99)

WHAT I LEARNT by Jeremy Vine (Weidenfeld £18.99)

by Jeremy Vine (Weidenfeld £18.99) 

Jeremy Vine is ubiquitous: he hosts radio shows and TV quizzes, waves his arms at virtual reality graphics during elections, and made a twerp of himself on Strictly Come Dancing (pictured). Jonathan Ross, watching a clip of Vine doing the tango, said to Darcey Bussell, ‘This is basically a man having a nervous breakdown live on television, isn’t it?’

Vine tells us that he has conducted 24,908 on-air conversations with the public for his radio show. Subjects have included a vicar who complained about the pornographic magazines available on battleships and how hand gel has had to be removed from GPs’ surgeries because alcoholics were drinking it. By Vine’s account, the BBC sounds exactly like the satirical show W1A — a manager earning £350,000 a year fired the make-up lady on Panorama ‘to save money’.


 

A LIFE IN THE DAY

A LIFE IN THE DAY by Hunter Davies (Simon & Schuster £16.99)

A LIFE IN THE DAY by Hunter Davies (Simon & Schuster £16.99)

by Hunter Davies (Simon & Schuster £16.99) 

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. 


 

The comments below have not been moderated.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

We are no longer accepting comments on this article.