I have a shelf of celebrity novels. Madonna, Sharon Osbourne, Carrie Fisher, Ethan Hawke…. They’ve all had a go – even Gyles Brandreth.
Yet though perhaps they think they are making things up, celebrities can be inadvertently much more confessional in their fictions than they are in their official autobiographies, which are usually ghosted rubbish, full of evasions and gaps and phoney niceness.
Leading the field here is Eric Morecambe’s Mr Lonely (1981), where a surprisingly harsh picture of showbusiness is presented. Sid Lewis, to all intents and purposes Eric himself, is motivated by a permanent anger. He can never shake off his early days, when he was ‘looked down upon’ and trudged, to scant applause, around working men’s clubs, summer seasons, fêtes and police stag nights.
