#oneaday Day 605: Bob Mortimer's Pocket Meat

I got a copy of Bob Mortimer's autobiography, And Away… for Christmas, and just finished reading it last night (having started it… maybe last week sometime, I think?) — it's a really good read, and Bob's voice shines through clearly for the duration. Which is interesting, because he spends a lot of the book talking about how for much of his life and career, he has been exceedingly self-conscious and shy, feeling like he has never really been able to show his actual "self" without the support of others like Jim "Vic Reeves" Moir.

That said, his conclusion — that, after a heart bypass and some independent projects he did without the crutch of Moir to rely on, he was able to properly "find his voice", such as it were — is fitting, and certainly seems in keeping with how much we've seen him by himself over the course of the last decade or so, rather than being "…And Mortimer".

Mortimer's decision to not construct the book as a simple "this is what happened in my life in roughly chronological order" was a solid one. With the initial chapters using a scare over his heart health — and the worry that his heart issues might bring a career he had grown to love to a screeching halt — as a framing device, we get a series of fun snapshots of Mortimer's life, both past and present, and really feel like we're being included in the varied scenes. Mortimer often addresses the reader and encourages them to go and explore certain things for themselves — there are several YouTube videos whose comments sections now largely consist of "Bob Mortimer sent me" now — and the whole thing feels like you're having a story told to you, rather than a "celebrity" on a throne talking down to you, the great unwashed public.

Many folks will likely be familiar with Mortimer's notoriously hilarious appearances on the beloved panel show Would I Lie To You? — and, indeed, many of the stories he tells (and the names featured therein) throughout And Away… will be familiar to those who have heard him spin a tangled tale on the show. Pocket meat, Steve Bytheway, Garry "The Sniper's Dream" Cheeseman, "we do beg your pardon, we are in your garden"… they're all here, and Mortimer admits in a couple of chapters that he's making some of this stuff up. But with the way he tells these stories, I could quite easily believe everything he's written in the book, because his tales are not only memorable for their surreal edge, but also for the fact that he has clearly taken something worthwhile and meaningful away from each and every one of them.

It's particularly heartwarming to hear his tales of how first seeing Vic Reeves' Big Night Out helped him to come out of his shell somewhat, gradually becoming part of the act and growing in confidence as he did so. His description of reaching a certain age and not really having the energy to maintain friendships — and being satisfied with that — also resonated somewhat, although not because I feel like I'm there myself. On the contrary, as I've mentioned on quite a few occasions in the relatively recent past, I've been going through a period where I really do feel exceedingly lonely at times, but I had also become exceedingly weary of feeling like I was the only one putting an effort in. So I guess maybe I was there, kind of. Ah well. Either way, reading Mortimer's reflections on it made me feel… a little better, maybe? I don't know.

Anyway, without getting too maudlin, I found the book very enjoyable. By turns hilarious and relatable, it is a pleasure to read, and confirms what I'm sure many of us have always suspected: that Bob Mortimer is simply a thoroughly nice, hilariously funny man — and one who, finally, is at peace with and comfortable with the person he's always been.

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2471: Memoirs of an Ordinary Person

I've been listening to some audiobooks while I've been working the past few days. I've just finished Dave Gorman's Too Much Information — a work that resonated all too well with me, given my growing frustration with the cacophonous "noise" of everyday life — and have since started on Sue Perkins' Spectacles, her memoir.

One thing I've often wondered over the years is whether or not there's any perceived value in the memoirs of "ordinary people" — in other words, memoirs written by people who aren't celebrities, or even those who haven't had anything seemingly noteworthy happen to them. And I'm inclined to think that there is — after all, the best celebrity memoirs are the ones that talk not about being a celebrity, but about their childhood, or formative experiences growing up, or things that they've experienced that helped make them the person they are today. Things that are relatable to the audience; things that are relatable to "normal" people.

There's value in having a celebrity name attached, of course: someone who enjoys Sue Perkins' TV and radio appearances is likely to pick up her memoir simply because they like her, for example. But this doesn't mean her life story is inherently more valuable than anyone else's. In fact, I'd wager a guess that there are lots of people out there who have had lives far more interesting than today's celebrities have.

In my experience, whether or not the person whose life you are reading about is famous or not is largely irrelevant; what does, on the other hand, matter is whether or not they have interesting stories to tell.

And, well, I don’t like to blow my own trumpet too much, but I do feel I have more than a few interesting stories to tell. My life has certainly been eventful, if nothing else. This blog has occasionally dipped into memoir-esque territory, but as an idle side project, I've started writing down some of the things I remember from my past.

I am a normal human being. Well, as normal as anyone is these days, which is to say I’m riddled with neuroses, suffer from depression, anxiety and social anxiety—two very different, but related things.

I digress; I am a relatively normal human being. I haven’t survived some sort of unimaginable tragedy, I haven’t had to cope with a life-threatening illness or the challenges of a physical disability and the nearest I’ve come to being involved with a famous person is working in an Apple Store at the time John Cleese came in with a black credit card, proclaiming that it could “sink a bloody battleship”. I didn’t serve him, I was just there; that’s how much of a relatively normal human being I am.

Nonetheless, Things have happened to me, much as they have doubtless happened to you, your friends and the rest of your family. These Things may not have seemed like a big deal at the time, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll have found that the strangest things stick in your memories for many years, and it seems like quite a shame to run the risk of them, at some point, being filtered out of your mind in favour of some new and ultimately useless piece of information you picked up from Wikipedia. We live in an age full of constant noise, after all, with every piece of media around us vying for our attention and threatening to fill our minds with useless dribble that might get you lots of Likes on Facebook, but which doesn’t really compare to the fond memories of your childhood.

My memories aren’t all fond. Some of them are downright painful or embarrassing, and some of them, to this day, still make me feel overwhelmingly negative emotions such as anger or grief. It’s healthy to share such memories, though; otherwise, they just get bottled up inside, and, over time, you run the risk of them overflowing and forcing you to, I don’t know, run naked through a shopping centre with a chainsaw in each hand singing Stairway to Heaven. Or, you know, something.

With all that in mind, then, writing them down in some form seems like a reasonable idea.

#oneaday Day 748: Life Story

Do you think your own life story would make for an interesting read? Playing Katawa Shoujo rather extensively today has made me give some consideration to the thought, since that game, despite its distinctive — perhaps even unique — premise ("This is a game about disabled girls") is in fact simply about human relationships and real life struggles. There's no "epicness" whatsoever; the world doesn't come to an end; there's no "save the princess" (except metaphorically speaking in a few instances) — it's just about normal people (albeit normal people with disabilities) living their lives.

When I think back on my own life, there are certainly plenty of interesting stories there for the telling, and given that we human beings are creatures of habit, often doomed to make the same mistakes over and over, it's fairly unlikely that there's nobody out there who could relate to some of them.

This makes the concept of autobiographies an interesting one. The shelves in ailing book retailers such as Smith's and Waterstone's are crammed with celebrity "autobiographies" (and I use the term loosely, since a large proportion of them are ghost-written), all called things like My Story, My Struggle or My Tits. (I made the last one up, but it's arguably what anything written by Katie Price should be called, given the thing that most people seem to know her for.)

The thing is, though, I almost feel like I'd rather read the autobiography of someone who hasn't led a remarkable life. Someone who hasn't shot to stardom, done something remarkable with their life. It works for fictional narratives, as anyone who has read Generation X by Douglas Coupland will attest — a narrative in which nothing happens (relatively speaking) means that you can focus more on the people and their reactions to everyday, relatable situations and then, crucially, compare your own experiences and prejudices to the same situations. This is something that you simply can't do with most celebrity works — they live in such a different world to the rest of us, almost like caricatures or fictional characters.

The "fiction" part of celebrities is arguably at least partly true. Their public perception is something which is carefully managed and controlled by their publicists. The truth behind their lives is often a lot more mundane, but by extension, more relatable. The trouble is, the only time we ever see that mundane everyday life is through the snooping lens of a paparazzi, or in some cringeworthy ITV documentary showing Peter Andre having a wank or something. The very nature of their celebrity makes them feel different, makes observing them doing "natural" things feel like an alien thing to do. Celebrity Big Brother proves this particularly aptly by being actually rather boring. In this case, it's because they're in an artificial situation where they're forced to be mundane, and this, once again, is merely a fictional representation of a real life.

Normal (i.e. non-celebrity) people, though, the non-player characters of society? Those are the ones I'd be interested in reading about. Whether it's the story of how they got into a fight with their supposed best friend at school over what one of them assumed was light-hearted teasing and the other one took to heart, or the tale of how they met their partner. Truth and real life is sometimes far stranger than fiction, and it's worth remembering that sometimes.

I'm not sure what my point is, to be honest. I don't think I'm planning on writing an autobiography (though certain fragments of this blog stray into that territory sometimes, admittedly) but I feel like doing so in one form or another might be an interesting experience. Perhaps writing fictionalised stories based on real-life experiences? It's something I've toyed with the idea of before, but have always shied away from for fear of people connecting the dots too much and making judgements about things I've been through.

That said, despite my shyness in a lot of social situations, I'm generally pretty up-front with talking about past struggles if given the opportunity to do so, so perhaps it might not be such a terrible idea to do, after all. The truest, most resonant creative works come from the creator tapping into their own personal well of past experiences and pain.

Anyone reading this tapped into the contents of their own soul and memory and come up with something great?