Quick Take
- Voice: A performer reading his own copy rather than an actor interpreting it, on a Penguin Audio release from November 2016.
- Big ideas: Fame examined like a medical procedure, self-deprecation as a trademark, turning forty in show business.
- Atmosphere: Warm and filthy by turns, closer to a long kitchen-table conversation than a routine.
- Worth it?: A better than average celebrity memoir if the voice is already familiar to you, and a puzzle if it is not.
A voice that could strip varnish. That is Alan Carr's own description of his own instrument, tucked inside a list of grievances he has against his body, in the publisher's description of an audiobook he then narrates himself. Penguin Audio put it out in November 2016, it runs eight hours and twenty minutes, and the comedy of that arrangement is the first thing worth noticing about it. A man who has built a career on a voice most people can identify in three words spends a chapter apologizing for it, and then reads you the apology.
A Body-Part Inventory for Turning Forty
This is a second memoir, following Look Who It Is!, and it arrives at a specific moment: Carr turning forty and taking stock of roughly ten years of showbiz life. The organizing conceit is anatomical. He works through his own body part by part, using the inventory of complaints he sets out in the description: balding, myopic, flaky with psoriasis, back fat hanging like a cape, an increasingly dodgy hip and even dodgier teeth. Everything he hates about himself has become, in his words, his trademark. Forty is a good age for a book like this, late enough to have accumulated material and early enough that none of it has hardened into legend.
Carr pushes the metaphor further than most comedians would dare. Fame, he writes, feels like an autopsy, picked at and probed with every inch of your body held up for analysis, except that you are still alive for it. So he offers to conduct the procedure himself: grab your scalpel, peel back the skin and have a good look around. It is a genuinely clever frame for a celebrity memoir, because it lets him control the dissection while pretending to hand you the knife.
His inventory of what a reader will find is the useful part of the description: guts, a fair bit of cheek, maybe a little gristle, and hopefully a whole lot of heart. That is a fair account of the register. The book is about a rise to fame told through joys, traumas, parties and disappointments, and a reader who wants only the jokes will get more feeling than they bargained for.
Two Listeners Confirm the Kitchen-Table Effect
Almost every argument for this recording comes down to the same thing: the material was written in a speaking voice and the man who owns it is the one delivering it. Look at how the publisher's description is built. Two lines of publisher copy and then several hundred words in Carr's own first person, addressing you directly, asking rhetorical questions and answering them. That is not a summary of the book. It is a sample of it, and it reads exactly like someone talking. Publishers rarely hand over that much of a description to an author's own voice, and the decision here looks entirely deliberate.
One responder confirms the effect and does so with unusual specificity. Imogen733 describes playing it in the car, laughing out loud in traffic, and concludes that having Carr read it himself made it "even more enjoyable listening to his story telling skills", adding that it would "put me in a bloody good mood everytime I listened". On a page this quiet, a listener who describes the actual experience of hearing it is worth more than any number of stars.
Irene Greenway supplies the other half of the appeal with an image the marketing department should have stolen: it is "like sitting in your kitchen with a cuppa tea and a sticky bun chatting to an old friend". That is precisely the register a chat show host has spent years perfecting, and it is why an extended stay in his company works where a straight comic set of the same length would not. Company is the product here, and the voice is how it gets delivered.
Eight Hours and Twenty Minutes of Breathing Room
Length is well judged for the genre too. Eight hours and twenty minutes gives a memoir room for the traumas as well as the parties, which is the difference between a book and an extended monologue. Comic memoirs that run to four hours tend to be joke collections; this one has space to let a story go somewhere unfunny before coming back. It also rewards a single long sitting less than fiction does, so those hours can be broken up without much loss.
One Rating Behind a 4.5 Average Display
Something is wrong with the rating on this page. A 4.5 average is displayed above a counter reading one rating, and a single rating can only be a whole number of stars, so 4.5 is not a value one person could have produced. Underneath it sit five written responses, every one of them at five stars. Whatever the counter is measuring, it is not the same population as the reviews, and a buyer should read the notices and ignore the number entirely.
Notices themselves need weighing too. One of the five says nothing about the book at all and reports only that a copy arrived in good condition, which leaves four responses of substance, three of them under thirty words. That is a very thin evidence base for a title from a major imprint, and it is thinner still when you notice that only one of the four describes listening rather than reading.
Context is the last problem, and it matters more for listeners outside Britain. The description presents Carr as the country's best-loved chatty man, names his show Chattyman, quotes the Daily Mirror calling the book "As laugh out loud as his TV shows", and addresses itself to the Great British Public. A listener who has never seen any of that will still follow the memoir, but a good proportion of the pleasure here is recognition, and recognition does not travel.
Best for Fans Who Dislike Reverent Memoirs
Fans who already enjoy Carr on television will find this an easy listen, and it works particularly well for people who like celebrity memoirs but bounce off the reverent ones, since the whole book is organized around a refusal to be flattering about himself. It also suits listeners who want comedy with an actual life underneath it rather than a set list.
Pass on it if British light entertainment is a closed book to you, or if a running commentary on psoriasis, back fat and dental work is not your idea of an evening. Worth every minute of it, to my mind, precisely because the man wrote it out loud and then had the sense to read it that way.
