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Andrew Collins is a writer and broadcaster, whose early career at the NME and Q led him to Radio 1, Radio 4 and 6 Music. He is Film Editor of Radio Times, the author of three memoirs, co-writer of BBC sitcoms Grass and Not Going Out, and the host of Saturday Night at the Movies on Classic FM.
Following the trend of relentlessly ordinary memoirs initiated by Sylvia Smith's Misadventures, this is the male coming-of-age version. Totally unmarked by traumas and hardships, the author states that he's been inspired to redress the balance by all those who have written miserable accounts of their terrible childhoods. In this book, Andrew Collins re-acquaints himself with the young Andy and is able to see himself more clearly than most. It's not everyone that gets to look back on a day-to-day record of their growth and development with a dispassionate and sympathetic eye. He owes a debt of gratitude to one of his grandfathers who kept every single card, letter and postcard he'd sent him, and to his parents, who have 'the complete artistic works of the young Andrew Collins stored in a suitcase in their attic'. More Adrian Mole than Alan Clarke, most of the early entries are of the 'we went, we saw, we played, we ate' variety. In the first diary, aged eight, the young Collins views his world almost exclusively through TV programmes such as Tom and Jerry, Jackanory and Play School. He is immune from childhood ailments and describes himself as hardy, full of energy and seemingly unbreakable. As the diaries progress, there is very little childish introspection. Andrew's parents are hazy figures and he doesn't appreciate his four grandparents as people until he is out of his teens. Even his home town is unremarkable. Of Northampton, he writes: 'There's no outward mythology to the place. Nothing to remember it by or plan a return visit for.' By his teen years, the author admits that the diaries exhibit an irritating smugness and blames The Goodies and Monty Python for this. Entries have become 'scribbly entries with lazy, rudimentary drawings, torn pages, dishonest tampering with the text', especially with his allegiances to different girls. Despite the plethora of girls' names he admits to not being much interested in them. He doesn't lose his virginity until 18 and true to the pledge of ordinariness this rite of passage is totally excised. The author concludes that his first 17 years on earth had seemed like one long 'good stroke of fortune'. One of the drawbacks to this of course came when he hit the world outside - 'I thought that this was what life was going to be like in the foreseeable future.' Extensively footnoted, this is an enjoyable wallow in the minutiae of daily life in the '70s. (Kirkus UK)
