Keith Allen with daughter Lily, who's discussed in his autobiography. Photograph: MJ Kim/Getty Images
Event 410 out of 411 and they are already putting away the deckchairs. A festival that started with hellish weather winds down with unreconstructed hellraiser Keith Allen plugging his funny, frank autobiography Grow Up, which, at 54, is what he resolutely refuses to do. On the cover he is sprawled out and sweaty on his own garden seat, legs apart in skimpy trunks a la Joe Orton.
Onstage Allen kept his clothes on while he held court and sipped lager and red wine (two separate glasses, of course). Over the years his Groucho Club-honed anecdotes have become beautiful, gleaming gems, begging to be recorded for posterity. He strutted up and down re-enacting the time he walked naked onto the stage at the Victoria Palace while Max Bygraves was performing. He explained how he decided he wanted to be an actor after hitching to Bristol dressed as a vicar on a whim.
How many comedian/actors can boast that they've been to boarding school, comprehensive school and borstal? Not even Stephen Fry can tick all those boxes. Add in his time living in a squat in Eaton Square with a lion called Clyde, nearly getting stabbed to death in a pub brawl, a fair bit of petty thieving, hanging out with Damien Hirst and writing not one but two hit football songs and you've got plenty of publishing USPs even before you add childhood pictures of chart-topping chip off the old block Lily.
Allen put a lot of his pranks down to situationism (but then haven't we all?), but many things seem simply like alcohol-fuelled fun. A better title than Grow Up might have been an offhand remark said onstage: "So I'd been for a few beers..." If a tenth of the yarns in his book are true he has certainly led a picaresque life. The tale closes with a story about making love to Janet Street-Porter and the earth moving, not because of his technique but because she slept on a hospital bed with wheels. You can make up your own minds about whether that is a gag or a confession too far.
Just one thing has puzzled me for years, but I finally got the answer. A typical Allen answer. Born in Llanelli and clearly proud to be Welsh, why didn't he write any soccer anthems for the Wales football team: "Because they are fucking useless." With that bon mot tucked under my arm, I was able to leave Hay a happy man.
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