The showbiz autobiography is a strange beast: it's publishing as parasite, feasting on the lifeblood of a quite different industry and involving a quite different set of relationships than that between book and readers. The primary relationship is that of the subject with their fans. Somehow, the autobiographer and/or their ghostwriter has to recreate that love affair - a process that's more prone to mawkishness than to strict biographical truth.
The usual response of literary editors is to dispatch them to the features desk on the basis that a good interview is likely to be more revealing than the book itself. I spend hours trawling through dozens of these sub-literary love-ins. And though I'm as much of a sucker as the next person for celebrity tittle-tattle, I very rarely find one that is worth sending out for review. This isn't simply a matter of snobbery - I found Sharon Osbourne's Extreme horribly gripping, despite having no previous interest in the Osbourne franchise.
Osbourne bagged the top spot in last year's Christmas biog bonanza. This year's contenders include Billie Piper, Ricky Gervais, Griff Rhys Jones and, for novelteenies, Chantelle ("As far as clothes are concerned: if you've seen me on TV, you'll know what I like: bright, bright, bright.").
One of the first to land was And It's Goodnight from Him (Michael Joseph), rather desperately subtitled The Autobiography of the Two Ronnies. Can't you just imagine the commissioning meeting? "Have you thought of writing your autobiography, Ronnie?" "Well, I was born in Edinburgh on 4 December 1930. The only unusual thing about this event was that they left a swab in my poor dear mother..." "No, not YOUR autobiography, Ronnie. YourS. With an S."
This is the woolly cardy school of showbizzery. There's a little gentle speculation as to whether Ronnie B really disliked playing drag as much as he said he did, considering how eagerly he dived into women's frocks; a bit about the "fence" between the two Rs and John Cleese, from their early days on the Frost Report, "Was this due to class? I don't actually think so. Class isn't very important in our profession, I think education was the significant factor." Also, these educated arrivistes "were just slightly annoying to Ron and me; we thought 'Hang on a minute. This is our livelihood, which we've been working at for 17 years'."
We learn that working with Joan Littlewood (Little R) and Peter Brook (big R) made them both miserable. "I have to say that they both seemed to think that the more painful the discovery, the more rewarding it was... Ronnie and I weren't right for this at all. We understood what our part entailed very quickly, we learnt it very quickly, we found we could do it without searching into the depths of our past and our motivation. I think Joan and Peter thought all this was very shallow... " Well yes, Ronnie.
It's like looking down the wrong end of a rather long telescope. I mean, can there ever have been a time when the press was so dozy that it could fail to detect the imminent demise of the country's most successful comedy duo until after they'd done their very last show, a Christmas special? Indeed there was: "We held the usual party, with the usual drinks and nibbles...And we went off to our usual Indian restaurant...Anne and me and Joy and Ronnie and had our usual curry...We left the restaurant, and went to our cars. Then it really was goodnight from us, and goodnight from them." There's a very small, very British tragedy in all those "usuals".
Michael Barrymore must at times have wished he was so lucky. Then again, he probably thanks his lucky stars he wasn't. His unghosted autobiography, Awight Now: Setting the Record Straight (Simon & Schuster) is candid about many forms of addiction - not least that of the entertainer to the spotlight. Here are grisly details of a life careering off rails which were never laid to last anyway. Most bizarre of all is his lengthy account of the legal proceedings arising from the death of a young man in his swimming pool, in which he appears to allege that severe anal injuries - which briefly led to suspicions of murder - were inflicted in hospital after the man involved was dead. Not exactly one for your granny, then.
