Welcome to Litsy!

You will struggle to find a funnier book. Expertly lampoons the celebrity biography and rings so true to the character. As a big fan of all the Partridge TV shows, it didn't take much to win me over and it was great to get the backstory behind some of the incidents from his career. Highly recommended

My pick for #funnybooks has to be the "autobiography" of one of England's greatest fictional TV stars, Alan Partridge. I've read funny books before but this is the first book that actually had me laughing out loud, sometimes drawing strange looks on the train. The quality of the humour is right up there with the hilarity of the TV show. I'll be reading it again at some point. #riotgrams

If you're not familiar with Alan Partridge, he's the spoof DJ/chat show host created by Steve Coogan, and this is a brilliant send-up of the celebrity memoir. Belongs to the genre of "comedy of self-deception" -Alan is a perpetual loser who never ceases to view himself as a winner. Some references may be lost on non-Brits but I reckon it works even without that background. Almost every page had me laughing aloud.

You know that phrase, if you love someone set them free? I‘ve always liked the sound of that –even if its logic is plainly horseshit. It‘s the equivalent of saying, ‘If you like beefburgers, don‘t eat them‘ or ‘If you hate London, go and live there.‘ Instead, I‘ve adapted it slightly to read, ‘If you don‘t love someone and don‘t want to hang around with them any more, set them free‘. It just makes more sense.

I want to be fair to Carol. Yes, she‘s mind-blowingly selfish. Yes, she takes grumpiness to a staggering new level. Yes, she‘s manifestly not as clever as me. But she does have good points. On French holidays, she took to right-hand driving with real panache. She also makes relatively decent meatballs. That pretty much covers it.

For a time, I was fixated with butterflies –an interest that my father did much to encourage. We‘d go into the garden on a summer‘s evening and when we saw the gentle flitter-flutter of a butterfly, he‘d smash it to the ground with his tennis racket. ‘Fifteen love!‘ he‘d roar.

But I would have loved a little brother to play football with or bully. I‘d rush downstairs every Christmas morning and rip open my presents, hoping against hope that one of the boxes contained a human baby. It rarely did. In fact it never did.