The Internet is back on now, after the best part of a week, and I have to say that despite all the inconvenience of not being able to work properly I have found it quite liberating being cut off from the Information Superhighway for a few days. I’ve popped to my dad’s house to check my emails and send any necessary replies but apart from that I have managed to leave pretty much alone. My daily blog has obviously taken a short break but I have been writing it up in Word and saving it in readiness for getting switched back on. Today I have brought my blog up to date with very little fuss, although I resisted the urge to tweet every link as I don’t like an untidy timeline (it annoys me that I am now over the 1000 tweet mark with nothing else to delete) and didn’t want to annoy people with a tweet blast. My only apology is towards those people that pay 99p a month for the blog to appear on their Kindle, I don’t know how it works behind the scenes but I imagine that Kindle users were treated to every blog coming through at once. Having to miss a week of The Sound of Nottingham UK was bad, but the station understands enough to simply play a repeat on the very few occasions when I haven’t been able to produce a show. Luckily it wasn’t a Sunday when The Sunday Alternative was due to come out, as that would have been annoying after such a good start.

With no choice than to not do any work, (apart from laying a few foundations that I didn’t need to be online for), I have been able to catch up with my unread book pile, and after finishing Driving Miss Smith I have spent the last few days reading The Bonus Of Laughter by Leslie Crowther and his wife Jean. I didn’t really know much about him beyond the fact that he came from Nottingham and presented The Price Is Right (at Central Television in Nottingham, back when ITV was regionalised) but very little else. I’d forgotten that he was the original host of Stars In Their Eyes until his car accident forced retirement on him and Matthew Kelly took over. His body of work is quite a traditional route for a comedian of his generation; theatre, radio, television, sitcom, summer season, panto, and at least one stab at serious acting. All of these memoirs tell the same story about how their working class struggle embedded within them a fear of unemployment and financial insolvency which pushed them to keep on working at the expense of family life.

There’s a sadness behind the laughter too, (isn’t there always with this generation of comedians), and the book deals with his alcoholism in honest detail, the opening two chapters were written by his wife in the aftermath of the car accident that nearly killed him. I imagine the book is out of print now, but it is worth seeking out if autobiographies of old school comedians is something you’d read. No? Just me then!

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