Is there life left in the celeb memoir?

The truth is that a regularly produced hardback memoir increasingly seems an odd and outmoded by-product of celebrity, says David Sexton
Monkeying about: motorbike racer and TV presenter Guy Martin has an “inner chimp” as well as a dog
Robert Wilson
David Sexton5 November 2015

Just before Christmas last year Charlie Redmayne, the influential UK chief executive of HarperCollins, announced that the era of the celebrity memoir had peaked. It had turned into a peculiarly risky form of publishing because publishers frequently had to pay huge advances and many of the books proved unprofitable. Even if they sold some copies they had a painfully short shelf-life: “You’d have three weeks of sales and then it would be gone,” he said, rather distressingly to those of us who continue to hope that books might be more durable than yoghurt.

There are still exceptions, said Redmayne, citing Sir Alex Ferguson’s bestselling autobiography. But the truth is that a regularly produced hardback memoir increasingly seems an odd and outmoded by-product of celebrity, unable to keep up with the speed of events as fed to people by their phones, an inappropriate vehicle for the values it is purporting to convey, like using a horse and cart to supply a 24-hour convenience store. Or sitting down to a silver service three-course dinner when all you need is a snack on the run.

Both publishers and booksellers are increasingly being made aware that it is vloggers, not more general-purpose celebrities, who command their followers so closely that they can still sell them books rapidly in large numbers. Despite the embarrassment of admitting she had her bestselling debut novel Girl Online ghosted, Zoe Sugg, 25 (known as Zoella online), has once again shot to the top of the charts across the country with her follow-up, the adventurously titled Girl Online: On Tour (Penguin, £12.99) selling 77.107 copies in its first week.

And, as an aghast article in trade mag The Bookseller reveals, lots of other YouTubers are doing good books business too. Joe Sugg, Zoe’s 23-year-old younger bro, with 5.4 million subscribers to his own channel, has become the ninth best-selling graphic novelist ever, with Username: Evie (Hodder, £14.99), since it was published in September. And Zoe’s boyfriend, 22-year-old Alfie Deyes, whose PointlessBlog has more than four million subscribers, spent 11 weeks at the top of the paperback non-fiction bestseller list with his “activity” book, The Pointless Book (Blink, £8.99), smartly followed up by The Pointless Book 2 this spring and The Pointless Book Collection this autumn. Happy days, chez Sugg.

Enough! Enough I would guess to make Sir Bruce Forsyth, who this autumn published Strictly Bruce: Stories of My Life (Bantam, £20), as a follow-up to Bruce: The Autobiography of 2012, feel a bit tired, even though it is mostly pictures.

And it means that we can only admire old-fashioned celebrities, whether comedians, singers, sportsman, actors or general TV faces, who manage to sell an old-fashioned celeb memoir this Christmas against such an uphill slope. What have they got to offer?

Riding highest in non-fiction sales at the moment, sandwiched between Everyday Super Food and The Guinness Book of Records, is bloke racer and TV star Guy Martin. When You Dead, You Dead (Virgin, £20) — great title, by the way, borrowed from his Latvian grand-dad, one for the vloggers to study — is a follow-up to his 2014 bestseller My Autobiography, so this one’s only about the past 12 months. Not one to mince words, he says, “You might be thinking I’d struggle to fill this one… I thought the same for a while… In the end I had no bother filling another book because this has been the maddest year of my life.”

Paul O’Grady, pictured as Lily Savage, is now on his fourth memoir
Carlton Television

He gets a dog, a lovely lab called Nigel; a girlfriend, Sharon, little described; he races motorbikes all around the world; he smashes up his unpowered go-kart coming down Mont Ventoux at 90mph; he crashes his bike badly in Ulster, breaking his spine, his sternum and his hand; he turns down Chris Evans’s invitation to join Top Gear. “Top Gear might pay squillions of pounds but what do I want all that for? I can earn enough money for the life I want fixing trucks and doing a few other bits and pieces. If someone has loads of money they go down in my estimations [sic].”

So he has not been idle, he has things to describe: Henry James he is not. Ghosted? In the acknowledgements he thanks “Gray Inman for translating the untranslatable.” Sex? None. Instead he describes at length a particularly fine shit he took in France. “I’d rather have a good shit than a good shag, any day of the week. I told this to a mate and he said, ‘You’re obviously not shagging right’. And I told him, no, you’re not shitting right. It’s not about the actual shitting. It’s about everything around it. You’ve got to be in the right frame of mind. And propped there, on the side of Mont Ventoux, was the ultimate shit.” As I was saying, eat your heart out, Henry James. A Little Tour in France, fie!

Philosophy? Yes. Guy believes everyone has “an inner chimp”, knowledge he acquired from a book called The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme for Confidence, Success and Happiness by Dr Steve Peters. Guy’s inner chimp is called Brian. He has conversations with him all the time. “The best way to keep Brian happy and quiet is to ride my pushbike, go flat tracking or fix some trucks. Working on trucks is the equivalent of feeding him bananas…” But Brian hates press launches with a passion. What’s your inner chimp called? Mine’s Gavin.

Third volume: new Top Gear host Chris Evans
Channel 4/Ellis Parrinder

On Guy’s tail, perhaps not the best place to be, is Tom Jones, with his 500-page epic, Over the Top and Back: The Autobiography (Michael Joseph, £20). Ghosted? Yes, but by the brilliant journalist Giles Smith, who did such a good job with Rod Stewart a couple of years ago and leaves Jones sounding properly conversational, as he talks us through his career.

Sex? Apparently so, although only vaguely described. “Never underestimate the extent with which people want to have sex with people who are on television,” he advises. Or on stage. “I was going over as some kind of love-god and I was going over so strongly that occasionally I was even persuaded of it myself. The road will set temptations in front of you that are hard to resist.” Extra fries, I expect. This is the opposite of a kiss-and-tell, even though other biographers have suggested he may not have been totally inactive in this department. He mentions that his girlfriend Linda became pregnant when she was 15 and he was 16 and they promptly married in Pontypridd in 1957. They are still married but their 58-year-union is little mentioned until a curious closing tribute about her keeping her world small and letting him get on with it. Philosophy? “You never know (ever)”. So you never know. You certainly wouldn’t from this book.

Selling next best is My Story by Steven Gerrard “with Donald McRae”, a distinguished Guardian sports journalist (Michael Joseph, £20), a follow-up to 2006’s Gerrard, ghosted by Henry Winter. McRae makes Gerrard sound improbably learned and thoughtful as he takes us through the games and the career and the relationship with Liverpool.

Sex? Apparently not. Philosophy? Be honest to the media. Right. But, guess what, Gerrard also has an inner chimp, thanks to the same Steve Peters, whom he met while at an injury low. Steven’s chimp was causing him havoc, hijacking his life with his negativity.

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“I decided I’d get my fucking chimp in a headlock and I’d fucking muzzle him,” says Captain Gerrard. And for a while that worked. But in the end “my chimp made me cry in the car; and my chimp made me feel life was hardly worth living”. Sadly, Steven never tells us the name of his chimp. Gavin was so disappointed, I could hardly hold him back, I can tell you.

Sir Alex Ferguson, having scored so highly with his first autobiography, is back with Leading, co-authored with Michael Moritz (Hodder, £25) in which he gives no end of advice on discipline, control, teamwork, motivation and dealing with failure. Philosophy he has in spades but sex, not so much. Basil Fawlty once suggested that Sybil should go on Mastermind — special subject, the bleeding obvious — and Sir Alex is not averse to it either. “Teamwork” begins, “Balance is the key to every team.”

There is a problem faced by serial memorists. Few are more charming than Paul O’Grady, aka Lily Savage, who writes his own stuff, believe it or not, but Open the Cage, Murphy (Bantam, £20) is the fourth volume of his autobiography and this account of ceaseless touring and programme-making, in the company of his ever-canny partner Brendan Murphy, is more of the same innuendo. In Australia they are told to lick an ant’s arse to add lemon -flavour to their tea. “‘No way am I licking an ant’s arse,’ Murphy laughed. ‘Why not?’

I said, plucking an ant off a tree. ‘You’ve licked worse.’”

And then there is the third autobiography, Call the Midlife by Chris Evans (Weidenfeld, £20), about turning 50 and getting Top Gear, and it’s another dose of blokish yet overwritten advice on the commonest problems. “The overarching issue, for the vast majority of us, is that sex is an ever-diminishing factor in our lives the older, saggier, baggier, and generally LESS BOTHERED we become.”

Perhaps these books are themselves increasingly a symptom that celeb memoirs have reached the end of the road. Maybe it’s their final Christmas. So Gavin maintains, anyway.

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