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I wanted to like Frank and feel sorry for his predicament but we were not allowed really to get inside his head. The one redeeming moment of the story was the love the couple had for each other when they got together, beating the odds of a family against the,. Giedroyc would like one more throw of the dice doing a standup show with Perkins, but has questions over whether they’d ever sit down and write it. She is writing a novel, adjacent to her first, with a couple of recurring characters, which she hopes to eventually turn into a Leatherhead trilogy. She enjoys not being a “bright young thing” any more, saying “it’s actually quite a relief when people aren’t that interested”. She mildly fears getting cancelled, but not in a Laurence Fox/GB News “you can’t say anything any more” way, more by her children. “I’m walking on eggshells, honestly.” (Hard relate. My kid called me racist the other day when I said I preferred boxers to spaniels.) She is as she started out, all drive and no plan, the way I think maybe comedians have to be, if they want to be funny.
Overall. It’s a fun, enjoyable well written read and a nice piece of escapism, so needed at this time. The Best Things relies on a very well-worn trope: a very wealthy woman finds herself rather bored and without purpose. She has little relationship with her husband or children who are all cocooned in their own comfortable worlds...until they lose everything and have to survive together and begin to learn Valuable Life Lessons. Mel Giedroyc’s first novel, The Best Things, is published on April Fools’ Day. It was her family that pointed this out. “I’m such a dolt, I hadn’t cottoned on,” she laughs – although, comedian that she is, she thinks the date well chosen. April has always been important to her: it is the month when filming used to start for the BBC’s The Great British Bake Off, which she co-presented with her chum Sue Perkins (“Perks”), along with their other greatest hits such as Mel & Sue and Light Lunch. While she has no regrets about the decision to leave Bake Off, she will admit to “a pang” every spring: “As soon as the daffodils are out, especially on cold mornings when you’re hit by a nice patch of sun, I think of Mary, the tent, the excitement of meeting a new batch of bakers…”
Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith
She lives in West Ealing “very near Slough”. And she has this theory: “When you grow up in the suburbs, you feel you have to work harder to prove yourself. I’ve never been one of the cool gang. It’s a good feeling.” Another good feeling is being the youngest of four: “I adore my siblings [ Miko, a musician, Kasia, a writer and teacher, Coky, a TV director]. They’ve looked after me and let me get away with stuff. It’s golden.” From the start, she has been obsessed with comedy. “I applied to Cambridge [she has a degree in modern languages from Trinity College] because of Footlights.” Much-loved actress, comedian and writer Mel Giedroyc heads to Dorset on a travel adventure with a twist. Inspired by her passion for books, Mel hooks up with her friend and Dorset local, Martin Clunes, to explore the spectacular scenery and iconic locations made famous by some of Britain's favourite books and films.
Often, somebody will spill something that we didn’t know they were going to spill,” she says. “But Joel … he does The Masked Singer, he’s really Mr ITV, Saturday night. He’s not Mr One-in-the-Morning.” That’s sort of Unforgivable’s USP: it takes nice, mainstream, even daytime TV people and turns them into Mr or Mrs-One-in-the-Morning. “When you have three people, they start to get competitive with each other,” she says, “and that’s when it gets really fun. Especially with comics. They don’t want to be outdone. Underneath this haze of self-deprecation, there is a through line of an absolutely solid determination to be up there on stage, showing off. When she was a kid, growing up in Leatherhead with a Polish father and English mother (her dad was an engineer and, for his second act, a Latvian medievalist), her pattern was that she’d try for the school play, not get a part, “and I’d say: ‘Maybe I could write a little prologue?’ And I’d write something really long, and end up with quite a big part. Such a showoff.” Main character Sally, a woman who gleefully rediscovers her can-do attitude when all the unnecessary peripherals start to fall away.
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown
Every woman who owns a cat will want this Dawn O’Porter book. Photograph: Dave M Benett/Getty Images The Best Things isn’t actively bad by any means; I may not be the target audience and others may enjoy this more than I did, but I can’t really recommend this. Sorry, Mel. Main character Technically, the Thursday Murder Club are an ensemble – Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim – but the leader is arguably Elizabeth, an ex-spy and primary carer for her husband, who has dementia. The story of the 1993 murder trial of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the two 10-year-old killers of toddler James Bulger. Using transcripts from the trial, first-hand testimony of those who were in the courtroom and reconstruction of key moments in court, this feature-length documentary reveals the prosecution’s strategy to prove that both boys were as guilty as each other. With contributions from the prosecution and defence teams, journalists and James Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus. Annika Described as “life affirming”, funny and charming, I was disappointed to find that it wasn’t. It’s okay, a slow first half and then a better second, it was hard to overly like any of the characters or be amused by the situations they find themselves in. There are some nice lines and mildly amusing situations, but not enough of them to carry the story.
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