Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

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The title of the song " Twisterella" is also the title of a song that Billy co-writes in the novel. And there is enough of a cliffhanger to keep you wanting to know: will Billy go to London (and leave his troubles and his two-and-a-half fiancees behind) or will he stay to face the music?

The Mirror had become Cap'n Bob's paper and he didn't mind what you put in, so long as it was about him," Waterhouse later recalled.By September 1961 Rank were reporting the film was "exceeding expectations" commercially. [11] The film was the 8th most popular film at the UK box office in 1961. Others popular at the time included Swiss Family Robinson, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Carry on Regardless, The Rebel and The Long and the Short and the Tall. [12] In the 1960s, after the appearance of Billy Liar, he was often classified as an "angry young man". This was not so. He had more in common with JB Priestley than John Braine. Like George Orwell, he had a deep love of England and the English, believing that our green and pleasant land was being traduced by a petty-minded army of bureaucrats. Politically, he was a romantic liberal. He was appointed CBE in 1991.

Not sure how objective I can be about a book I read and loved at just the right age to see a lot of myself in the protagonist. For example, anticipating some tragic news, Billy’s internal monologue is “I prayed: please, God, let me feel something.” But when the news is delivered, he continues internally, “I examined what I was feeling and it was nothing, nothing.” A funny and poignant look at a young dreamer in a provincial Yorkshire town at the beginning of the huge social upheaval that was the 1960s. I thought I was the only one who did this. The interior secondary monologue for my own amusement, since when I manage to say out loud what I think is great fun and such an amazing observation--it turns out I am as alone as the little prince on his lonely planet.

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The editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, said: "Keith was a genius, for whom the phrase 'Fleet Street legend' could have been invented. A consummate journalist, scintillating satirist and unrivalled chronicler of modern life and so much more. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Had he been asked to choose his own epitaph, I believe that he would have used the words of a writer he revered, Arnold Bennett. At the end of The Card, a character asks of the hero: "What great cause is he identified with? The reply was: "He's identified with the great cause of cheering us all up." Married twice, Waterhouse had recently suffered ill health and had been cared for by his second ex-wife, Stella Bingham.

Some have described Billy Liar as a coming-of-age novel. This is true in the sense that Billy certainly falls within the age group transitioning from teenage innocence to adult responsibility. However, it’s no Bildungsroman , which Wikipedia defines as “a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important.”Billy Liar is one of those great literary persons I would like to have as a pub friend . He is a shirker of grandiose ability. He lays in bed every morning and has enumerated his mother's traditional calls up the stairs--the one that usually gets him to finally move is "Your boiled egg will be stone cold!" He amuses himself by saying random irrelevant things to his family members all the while keeping a bizarre running interior dialogue of the things he would like to say in response, and occasionally does. Billy Liar marries the Angry Young Men agenda with a flippant, ironic, stiff-upper-lip aesthetic reminiscent of (a bitter) Wodehouse and Jerome - but at the same time manages to retain humanity and warmth. Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar was published in 1959, and captures brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town. It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying - especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by his boring job and working-class parents, Billy finds that his only happiness lies in grand plans for his future and fantastical day-dreams of the fictional country Ambrosia. Read more Details Waterhouse had something of a turbulent childhood and eventful youth himself. He was born and brought up in an impoverished neighbourhood in Leeds and being not so economically privileged meant that he also had to suffer some of the same mediocrity that Billy Fisher sees around him everyday. Unlike Waterhouse, though, who eventually worked his way up the ranks and became a strident and popular journalist in Fleet Street and then a respected writer too, Fisher's escape feels too remote to be ever a reality. He is raring to flee to London where he, as he hopes, will find his footing as a writer for a stand-up comic and yet that ambition is never realised because he is still caught up, not on his lies but also inexorably to his humdrum home town itself.

Later whilst scouring the film catalogue at film school I discovered the classic 1963 film directed by John Schlesinger and starring Tom Courtenay as Billy Fisher. A film which took the grim up north stereotypes that had become the norm in British New Wave cinema and turned them on their head with comedy and the careful use of surrealism.Waterhouse called the office a few days later, announcing airily that he had fulfilled his brief. "Where's the dog?" snarled the features editor. "Cardiff," answered Waterhouse. "That's no bloody good," came the reply. "The circulation drive is in the north-west. Find me a talking dog in Liverpool!"