Frank talks about his boyhood, his cushy yet very uncomfortable
stint in the RAF, and his distinguished many-decade career in
comedy. Being the rabid My x! fan I am, I'd heard him tell
several of the anecdotes before on the air, but most of them were new,
and of course his life is not just a sequence of anecdotes; he just
can't resist throwing in a funny aside whenever he remembers one. Actually, the last chapter is just a sequence of Seinfeld-esque anecdotes, possibly the ones he couldn't think to put anywhere else. But that's fine!
My only disappointment was at the end; he ends the book with a mutated quote, as though
the book were a very long My Word! monologue, and I suppose this is
supposed to be touching, but I didn't find it so; nor was it funny. Oh
well. According to the afterward by his son Jamie, he wasn't doing
too well near the end of the book, and died shortly thereafter. :(
Anyway--the book is good booze, and I will lend it to people. It's
out of print, so you have to find it used or borrow it from me. Yes, those
are your only two options.
Sun Mar 31 2002 12:24:
I bought a used copy of A Kentish Lad online, and read it, and
it's great. What is it about, you ask? None other than Frank Muir, world-famous
comedian and raconteur (and 1/4, or 1/8, or something, of My x!). I like it for that
reason and also because the subtitle is "Frank Muir: His Autobiography"
but it's printed on the front cover as "FRANK MUIR HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY",
the strange syntax of which I really like because it reminds me of John Baptist Porta's recipe for sympathetic powder, quoted by me in
Degeneracy:
Take of the Moss growing on a dead man's skull, which has laid unburied,
two ounces. As much of the fat of a man. Half an ounce of Mummy, and
Frank Muir his autobiography.
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