‘My Shit Life So Far’ by Frankie Boyle (HarperCollins)

Ever since being brought up by The Beatles, Frankie Boyle has been a tremendous liar. Join him on his adventures with his chum Clangy The Brass Boy, and laugh as he doesn’t accidentally kill a student nurse when a party gets out of hand. Outspoken, outrageous, and brilliantly inappropriate, Frankie Boyle, the dark heart of Mock the Week, says the unsayable as only he can. From the TV programmes he would like to see made (“Celebrities On Acid On Ice: just like Celebrity Dancing On Ice, but with an opening sequence where Graham Norton hoses the celebrities down with liquid LSD”), to his native Scotland, and the Mayor of London (“voting for Boris Johnson wasn’t that different to voting for a Labrador wearing a Wonder Woman costume”), nothing and no one is safe from Frankie’s fearless, sharp-tongued assault. It is difficult to tell whether he hated writing this book or loved it – it is either an £80,000 suicide note or a plea to be taken seriously. Or not. Either way, it is the most ‘out there’ celeb book of the year. Worth buying just for the picture caption about Hugh Dennis, which I can’t reproduce here.

‘My Favourite People and Me, 1978-1988’ by Alan Davies (Michael Joseph)

I was hoping to find myself in this volume, as I spent a very happy four years studying Drama and Theatre Studies alongside Alan Davies at Kent University (1984-1988), but luckily my miscreant past was not deemed worthy of any mention in this brilliant volume. It is a slightly uncomfortable scrapbook of a format, with a series of chapters about different influences, but through the sometimes moving narrative, he paints a really compelling picture of his politicisation, and his real passion for football, family, and music. It is, as Alan says, “an attempt to remember who and what I liked as a boy/youth/idiot and to work out why. There are also some pictures”.

‘He Took My Kidney Then Broke My Heart/’ by Dave Spikey (O’Mara Books)

Everyone knows that their local newspaper has its own unique idea of what is newsworthy - and how these fascinating, and sometimes bizarre, happenings should be shared with the community. In ‘He Took My Kidney, Then Broke My Heart’, Dave Spikey lampoons a collection of the most outrageous, amusing, and downright farcical local news stories from the past few years. All the articles are 100% genuine, ranging from Fun with Ferrets at the YMCA (Halifax Courier) to the intriguingly titled Llama Drama Ding Dong (Lancashire Evening Post). Each news story is framed and analysed by Dave’s comic running commentary. From the man who stole a Grim Reaper costume from Morecambe Town Hall, to the Leicester student who opted for suicide bomber fancy dress (and then strolled through his city centre), no story is safe from Dave’s laugh-out-loud mockery, as he pokes fun at the articles and their protagonists with his trademark wit and humour. Brilliant, and a perfect addition to the smallest room in the house.

‘Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story’ by Ant and Dec (Michael Joseph)

If I told you, as the press release does, that “this is the book everyone has been waiting for”, and that it is written by two “national heroes”, you might get rather excited and start wondering whether this was the hitherto undiscovered correspondence between Churchill and FDR, or Boswell and Johnson. But no – it is the autobiography of Ant and Dec. Yup, that’s right, those national heroes Ant and Dec. On every level, this book should be terrible – the appalling Us And Our Celebrity Friends photos, the grimace-in-silence anecdotes about Z-listers, and the never-ending jokey matiness which wears thin before you have even finished chapter one. But after three chapters, I just relaxed and let it all brainwash over me. They are great light entertainers, they have an effortless charm, and I suspect they will be working long beyond the sell-by-date of most of their contemporaries. They are, in fact, the greatest people ever to walk on this planet, and I think they should be canonised and made joint President Of the World. With Vernon Kay as their deputy.

* including today

How To React To Your Impending Baldness

When you’re twenty-six and find you’re losing your hair, it’ll be wretched. You’ll wonder whether anyone will ever find you attractive again, and whether your girlfriend dumped you because of it (this was a couple of months ago, but she may have given you head rubs and noticed your hairline receding before you did. On the other hand, you’re sure to have noticed first – you’re quite vain and look in the mirror maybe a dozen times a day. This may have been why she left you). You might start thinking about dying, for the first time since you were seven. You’ll think about having children with the next woman who’s prepared to sleep with you, and about poking holes in condoms with pins like a jolly old papist. You’ll certainly start thinking about how you’ll look like a big bald chimp in a couple of years, and about how we’re all monkeys really. You’ll stop using a glass to drink milk, and become less selective about the places you masturbate.

Author: unknown

Bob Slayer - Fix live nights compere, amongst other things - counts down the most degenerate countries in Scandinavia…

Slayer’s Scandinavia

Scandinavia is a beautiful part of the world that I like to visit as often as possible. However, it is also very expensive, and so I highly recommend that you get someone else to pay for the booze. My way of having booze on tap is to tour with rock bands, but you could take a rich friend along or you could become a bar slut and prostitute yourself that way. Either way, the question you will be asking is which country is top of the Scandinavian debauchery tree?

5th = Denmark

The entry point to Scandinavia is Denmark, a country that is a little like Germany, only with slightly less porn and more bacon. Spend any time in Denmark and you will soon be whispering, “I see lesbians everywhere”, as they enjoy the highest per capita ladies that love ladies of any country in the world. This may go some way to explaining why Sild is not only a type of fish, but is also the Danish word for “kiss”.

4th = SWEDEN

Next stop is Sweden, a country which could move up the rankings if it was not held back by the bible belt towns of Jonkoping, Linkoping, and Shopping, that run down the centre of the country. However, get up into the north and you can find the wild, free Sweden. After one night drinking Brännvin (a schnapps that literally means ‘Burn Wine’), I was invited to play the national drinking game of Kubb in the way the vikings intended: by seeing who can throw the bones of their victims around the best. 

3rd = ICELAND

You may have expected Iceland to have ranked higher, but in Scandinavia the debauchery competition is high. Many Icelanders are certainly not wired up right, but in 2007, Iceland was ranked as the most developed country in the world by the United Nations’ Human Development Index, and they could not have achieved that if everyone had been like Björk. That said, her and her wayward son - whose dreadful heavy metal band once supported a band I toured with - do certainly contribute to keeping their country above Sweden. Johanna Sigurdardottir is the world’s first openly gay head of government, which is nice.

2nd = FINLAND

Has got naked saunas, vodka, and Eurovision-winning monster rockers Lordi. But Finland also has my favourite island in the world: Aland is in the Baltic Sea, midway between Stockholm and Helsinki. For some strange reason, the island is duty free and is the only place in Scandinavia that booze is cheap! After one show, I got on the wrong side of a particular local nutter who picked up a shovel and vehemently declared, “Michael Jackson is the King of Pop!” while angrily trying to chase me via the means of a moonwalk.

1st = Norway 

Back in the middle ages, in an effort to stop public drunkenness, Norway was the first country in the world to impose taxes on booze, but this hasn’t deterred them: those crazy Norwegians are shit-faced 24/7. At the 2004 Quart Festival I was stood on the side of the main stage clutching a mug of Karsk (moonshine and coffee) when Norwegian band The Cumshots announced a young couple on to the stage in the middle of their gig with the words, “How far are you willing to go to save the planet?” The pair immediately stripped naked and proceeded to have sex on the stage. A large banner declared that they were “Fuck for Forests” - this eco-debauchery is part of what puts Norway top of the tree in my book. 

On the whole, I hate celebrity books - they smack of smug entitlement and are motivated by nothing more than money and professional jealousy. This Christmas, in a bizarre Room 101-type experiment, I got every celeb/gift book out there, locked myself in, and read them all until my eyes were bleeding real tears. I was pleasantly surprised – in fact, the whole process was a revelation and there are some total gems out there this year. Shop around, though – it should be impossible to find any of these books at full price in the mad scramble for post-Christmas turnover. Here’s a few of the best, with more to follow over the coming weeks…

‘Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980 to 1988: The Film Years’ by Michael Palin (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

This wondrous volume covers the 1980s, a decade in which the ties that bound the Pythons loosened as they forged their separate careers. After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, they made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael’s life, culminating in the smash hit A Fish Called Wanda, in which he played the hapless, stuttering Ken (for which he won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor), and the first of his seven celebrated television journeys for the BBC. He wrote much of the dialogue and acted in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, and acted in his next film, Brazil. He co-produced, wrote, and played the lead in The Missionary, opposite Dame Maggie Smith - who also appeared with him in A Private Function, written by Alan Bennett. And so it goes on. Quite simply, Palin is a comic genius, a national treasure, and everyone’s favourite uncle. Essential reading for everyone – it should be prescribed on the National Health.

‘A Fart In A Colander’ by Roy Hudd (O’Mara Books)

I am a sucker for anything to do with Roy Hudd. His career has spanned the last 60 years, and he has worked with everyone from Sir Cliff Richard to Simon Trewin and Morecambe and Wise. My own experience of him was when I worked on his joyous show, Just A Verse And A Chorus, at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley in the early 1980s – it was truly a month of non-stop fun. This book is not all a barrel of laughs, though – Roy had a turbulent early family life; his father left home and his mother committed suicide during the war, leaving his formidable, but adored, grandmother to raise him. But he brings a lightness of touch to even these challenges. He has a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, and his lust for keeping the flame of the old variety era alive lifts this prose off the page in a celebratory and life-enhancing way. Anyone who likes comedy should read this book – it is unputdownable and glorious. You can also find out why Roy Hudd gave June Whitfield a fart machine for Christmas.

‘It’s Not What You Think’ by Chris Evans (HarperCollins)

Chris said recently: “I see this book as an account of a boy who climbed a glorious mountain and then dug himself a huge black valley for no good reason other than he didn’t know what else to do”. From his early years on Manchester’s Piccadilly radio to Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, The Big Breakfast, and TFI Friday for Channel 4, Chris changed the TV landscape during the 1990s, and, on BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast show and as owner of Virgin Radio, ushered in the age of the celebrity DJ. As a listener, I well remember those Radio 1 breakfast show days when you never quite knew whether he was going to turn up or not and, to be honest, he actually came across as a bit of a knob. I expected to hate this self-indulgent memoir, but I was gripped – he is a genuinely likeable individual, and the story of how he managed to buy Virgin radio is as good as any John Grisham thriller – real edge-of-the-seat stuff and as page-turning as it comes. As with his life, I can’t wait for Vol. 2. Whatever he does next, he will throw himself into it with total passion. His agent, Michael Foster, is a terrific recurring character here too, and he makes Jerry Maguire look like John Major.

Shhhh!

Michael Hutchence, singer and extreme masturbator

Despite being easy to mock the manner in which Michael Hutchence died, it is overlooked what a truly amazing feat it is to die wanking. One of the easiest skills for a human or monkey to master, it is also impossibly hard to die fromp.

Found dead in a hotel with a belt round his neck, a lot is made of what a great lover Michael was; a fact that - for those of us who were unlucky enough not to have been bedded by the pockmarked lothario - is easy to believe. If he paid that level of attention to his own self-abuse, imagine how elaborate the experience would have been for another human being.

Celebrities through the ages are famous for having people on their payroll whose job it is to make sure that - if they should mistakenly die - any evidence of their seedy life is covered up: wiping the porn off their hard drive, paying off their underage lovers, hiding their illegitimate children. It is likely Hutchence employed one of these shadowy servants, but their once-only role would probably have involved wiping clean and tucking his likely-huge pecker away, and breaking his stiff fingers out of their claw-like grip. A job which they quite royally fucked up.

Comedy is always claimed to be the new rock and roll, and the two disciplines rarely merge so seamlessly. His death echoed hauntingly with masturbation metaphors. Bono kindly wrote Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of about him, which was played on MOTD and Big Brother best bits, so that we - and his mum - would always be reminded that he wanked himself to death. A film of his life, Slide Away, is in pre-production. Surprisingly, it currently has no major male star attached.

Michael Hutchence, 38, died on November 22, 1997.

He’s entertained kids for the last 60 years, but can he entertain the Fix? Harry Deansway went to meet the notoriously shy teddy bear.

Sweep is on holiday and Soo doesn’t live in London, Sooty’s PR tells me via e-mail - puppets that don’t exist have a better quality of life than me. Two years ago, Mathew Corbett (son of Harry Corbett, creator of Sooty) had to sell off the Sooty franchise when crippling arthritis left him unable to operate his beloved bear, a puppet that has been in the Corbett family for over 60 years. They sold the franchise to a young Leicester resident called Richard Cadell on the eve of their UK tour and appearance at the Leicester comedy festival. I went to check on Sooty’s welfare under new ownership.

“I’ve come to see Sooty”, I say to a voice over an intercom in London’s Oxford street. “Oh, you better come in.” As a child,I would go to see Sooty every year at the Mayfair theatre. I’d sit in awe as these simple glove puppets would bicker, cause mischief, and go on numerous adventures. It was simple but utterly hilarious. I always dreamt that I would be called up onstage to be squirted by Sooty’s legendary water pistol. This was 20 years ago - little did I know that, as opposed to a desperate child, the best way to achieve this was as a 26-year old man who runs his own comedy magazine.

Richard Cadell, current employee of Sooty, greets me in his office where the walls are adorned with Sooty memorabilia and posters of the pantomimes that he produces - Brian Blessed, Leticia Dean, and Bobby Davro look at me from the walls. In anticipation, I ask Richard where Sooty is. Richard makes out that I’m the mental one for pretending Sooty is real. “He’s in his box”, he replies. “Shall we get him out?” “You mean wake him up, right?” I say. “Yes, yes, wake him up.”

I think that in order for this to work it would be best if we immerse ourselves in Sooty’s world rather than just getting him out of the box like a lifeless glove puppet. Richard agrees, but in practice this is harder for him to get his head round. Sooty emerges from his box, magic wand in tow, to shake my hand and slap me five. Richard looks into the beaming eyes of a bearded 26-year old man and stares into the middle distance, pontificating on the situation. “I’m buying into the whole experience of sitting in an office in the middle of Oxford street with you, Harry, and you, Sooty, and wondering quite how my career reached these dizzy heights.” Sooty looks worried for Richard’s well-being. I wonder who’s controlling who.

I have to admit that this is a weird situation, but fuck it. I got into journalism to experience unique situations like this, but just as I begin to make some headway into what lies beneath Sooty’s famously shy persona, my dictaphone runs out of batteries. Sooty whispers to Richard how unprofessional I am, and laughs a laugh that only an imaginary bear can laugh. Degraded by a puppet, I feel like I’ve let the readers down, Richard down, but - more importantly – I feel like I’ve let Sooty down. Luckily, Sooty has some spare batteries in his box and we are able to continue the interview.

“Sooty says he is quite surprised that you didn’t bring any batteries, and that this is the most unprofessional interview he has ever done”, gloats Richard. Not for the first time in the interview there is an awkward silence, as I ponder whether it’s really Sooty or Richard who thinks I’m unprofessional. As does Richard. Do I remember the magic spell? Of course I remember the magic spell. Sooty chastises me for being sad. I’m not the one who tours round provincial theatres with my hand up an orange teddy bear doing magic tricks for children, I think.

I say the spell: “Izzy wizzy, lets get busy”. Nothing happens. I say it again. Just as I begin to have a go at Sooty for his unprofessionalism, a puff of fire blasts out of Sooty’s box, which distracts temporarily from the awkwardness of two grown men pretending a puppet is real. Sooty squirts me in the face with a water pistol, rupturing my train of thought. This is how he controls his interviewers and stops them from prying into his personal life…stops them finding out who Sooty really is. Who is the real puppet, Richard or Sooty? It’s hard to tell. I look deep into Sooty’s eyes. Sooty looks back in mine.

“Sooty has got to do some paperwork for his upcoming tour”, Richard explains. “Do you mind?”

Do I mind that a puppet is making an excuse so we don’t have to continue the interview? “No”, I lie. Richard shuts the box. “That was weird. Me and Sooty were talking about Emu the other day, and about how he always pecked his interviewers and Sooty squirts his”. Yes, that is weird. As soon as you put Sooty away in a box, you are perfectly content to talk about him as a real person; you have conversations with him when nobody’s here.

“Would you like to meet Sweep?”

Sweep is Sooty’s partner in crime. They met at a bus stop 54 years ago, and have been friends ever since. As soon as his grey puppy face appears with his hangdog ears and high pitched squeak, the awkward tension from what went before disappears. Sweep is a charmer! Yapping away, I could talk to Sweep all day.It feels like we have a lot in common – our awkward relationship with Sooty for starters. Sweep admits that Sooty can be difficult - he is often distant and reserved, preferring to speak by whispering in Richard’s ear, but once you get to know the real Sooty, you have a friend for life.

I ask Sweep how it’s been working with Richard since he took over the Corbett dynasty. Sweep says that Richard has been great taking the franchise to a new level. I ask him how come all three puppets are single, and if there has ever been any inter-puppet relationships “ We’ve always tried to keep our relationship professional within the troupe, we are here to entertain the kids. That’s our job, and we wouldn’t want to let anything get in the way of that”, Sweep squeaks. What does he do to relax? “Chew a bone. Play with a ball in the garden.”

After an hour of talking to two puppets I used to idolise as child, I think it is probably best if we wind the interview up like a child. I’ve had a little too much excitement for one day. So what have I learned from chatting to Richard and the boys? Richard is doing a great job and is looking after the franchise well; Sweep is a great guy really - good company, a bon vivant. As I step out on to Oxford street, I think about Sooty. He’s a deeply troubled puppet, his chronic shyness masking deep-rooted insecurities. But that’s what I guess makes him so interesting, and perhaps that’s why he has been around so long: we like our stars complex and troubled. Maybe he should get help. Though if there’s one person in this story who needs psychiatric help after talking to two puppets for the last two hours, that’s me.

Sooty appears at the Leicester Comedy Festival in February: Sooty in Space plays The Little Theatre, Leicester on Saturday 14 February.

Sooty and friends will also be touring soon. See www.thesootyshow.com for details.