The Second Coming!

The second biography from Paul O'Grady is an excellent book as you will read in my latest post...

I have always been a fan of Paul O’Grady and even more so of Lily Savage, for some reason he never fails to entertain me so when I got bought this book as a present I was very excited to read it as I wanted to know just how many of his stories were true and how many were made up. Right from the start of this book I was hooked and I did have a hard time putting it down at times!

The opening to the book is great, he starts when he is aged 18 and has just watched the Exorcist film and has gotten that scared he has ended up in bed with his mother. He takes us through the next following years with a lot of detail and I loved every minute of it. The realisation that he was going to be a father was told is such a good way I did understand where he was coming g from as he admitted to all that he was gay and the prospect of having a dependant terrified him. I loved the relationship and the way he talked of this aspect of his life.

Paul tells us of his many moves to London and how things did not really work out for him and he always ended up coming home to his Mom. The fact he had a daughter to pay for meant he was always on the look out for a high paid job and some of the jobs he had were actually quite awful but he carried on with them for the sake of his daughter. I found some of the pubs he worked in seemed to be slightly over exaggerated but then when I think about the year that this book was set in they don’t seem too far fetched at all and I actually found the humour helped me to believe what he was telling me.

I loved the close circuit of friends Paul speaks about in the book and how they all have different names, his closest friend Vera featured a lot and there were times when he was talking about friend that I would picture Paul on stage as Lily telling us about his person and I felt I got a good connection between the characters from being able to do this. There was a good mix of characters and friends which we got to know and I loved the fact they were not just mentioned briefly and they did feature in Paul’s life a lot as I got to really know a lot about them and how they helped to influence and shape Paul’s life.

The one thing which let this book down in my eyes was the fact that it stopped before we got to see Lily Savage on stage in the way we have all come to know her. He stopped when he got to about 30 years of age and for me I would have liked the story to have just moved forward slightly to this part of his life. I know some may think that having this book only pan over a decade of his life may make it slightly boring but believe me there is so much and so many stories that this is not the case and it is very entertaining right from the start to the very end.

I did find it was very easy to get all of the information from the book, the one thing which did confuse me slightly when I started reading was the change of the names, he always used their stage names or what they had been known to each other and for me it was hard to follow at first. I did settle into the book and soon picked the names up easily and from then on I did not have any more problems with them. The fact that the majority of the men had female names was actually quite fun as it gave a different take on the way of life and how they lived. I could quite imagine a big beefy gay man with a feminine name living with Paul and I had great fun trying to visualise what these people looked like. The amount of details which we were given about people and places was very good and it did really help me to build up a good mental picture, I also find books easier to read when this is the case. We did not have long drawn out parts of the book when he was describing places but there was just enough to keep me interested.

As you can imagine with Paul being a comedian this book is very funny, I don’t think the humour is always laugh out loud stuff and we do have some serious sides of the story but for me there was a good balance between the both. The way it was written is just how he sits on the TV and talks about stories of his past and I enjoy the fact this was the case and he had not changed to writing style to something I would not have been able to picture him telling us.

The book which I have is the hard back one and the retail price on the back cover is £20.00. The book can be bought for a lot less now and it is available for under £10 and I do definitely think it is worth a tenner of anyone’s money. The book was published by Bantam Press and there are a total of 344 pages. There is a glossary at the end of the book which is quite handy if you need to reference something about his life and can’t quite remember where in the book it was. There is also a very amusing section in the middle of the book which is made up of photographs. They nearly all feature Paul and I loved seeing him in them. He looks funny and so true to the fashion of the time. They are well worth looking at even if you are not interested in the story.

I am more than happy to give this book the full 5 stars despite the few minor issues I have spoken about. The stories Paul tells us are very entertaining and I loved how we did get a serious side as well as the funny one. It is engaging and very easy to read, just be warned that you too may not be able to put this book down.