Once a morbid backwater of journalism, the art (which indeed it is) of obituary writing has been reclaimed by the normally staid Daily Telegraph to the extent that the paper itself now claims that "the obituary page is to our paper what Page 3 is to The Sun" - no mere hyperbole, as you'll discover once you've shaken yourself senseless with mirth throughout this extraordinarily funny book.
This is the third in the series of Daily Telegraph obituary collections; the first two, on "eccentric lives" and "heroes and adventurers", were surprising bestsellers on their release a few years back. This collection is loosely based on people who were involved in the business of "show" - from Hollywood sirens of the golden era to pantomime dames, from circus artistes to modern pop stars - and although they're all nominally collected together as "entertainers" there's more eccentricity and heroic adventures on display here than there were in the first two books.
From Liberace to Barbara Woodhouse to Carry On stars, the pages are populated by a cast of intriguing, hilarious and frequently quite mad characters. The Telegraph's writing style, deadpan and detached, is the perfect counterpoint to the excesses (some legal, some not) that are carried out between the pages.
It's not the famous names who provide the highlights; the real humorous action here is to be found among the obscure character actors and people like "Aunt Jennie" Wilson, a banjo player and story teller from Virginia, who carried a gun wherever she went, criticised the Beatles for bringing "drugs, men's earrings and miniskirts to America", and "had the details of every local murder of the past 100 years at her fingertips".
There's also Beatrice Lillie (otherwise known as Lady Peel) a self-styled "theatrical entertainer" whose decidedly idiosyncratic sense of humour led her to "order a live alligator from Harrods and send it to Noel Coward with the message `so what else is new?'. . ."; while performing on stage she used to bang her head repeatedly against the proscenium arch while moralising on a friend called Maud whom she accused of being "rotten to the core". In contemporary parlance, Beatrice Lillie was as mad as a lorry.
The skilful writing on display by the Telegraph writers allows them to treat even the most eccentric and self-willed with bemused indifference; they are also masters of understatement. They dig deeper than the average obit hack and come up with gems such as this, about Irene Handl: "Her other main interests were indicated by her quondam presidencies of the British Chihuahua Club and of the Lewisham Elvis Presley Club - `rock appeals to me because of the beat, I'm mad about the beat', she once said."
Writing about Baroness Maria von Trapp (the inspiration for The Sound of Music) they mention her fierce opposition to the Nazis - she once said of Hitler that "he's someone you would not want to have in your living room". Quite. Describing Douglas Byng, a character actor in the camp mould, they note how in his one-man show he made his entrance suspended on a trapeze bar, warbling as he descended on to the stage: "I'm Doris, the Goddess of Wind."
They excel themselves when writing about Nico, the ex-singer with The Velvet Underground who "obviously knew too much about men and took too many drugs". They also mention how towards the end of her life she had given up heroin for bicycling "which was to turn out the more dangerous amusement - she died when she fell off a bicycle while on holiday".
There's also the joy of discovering more dimensions to people - Les Dawson, aside from the end-of-pier mother-in-law jokes, was a serious (and published) writer of "literary merit", and there are a few wonderful one-liners along the way, such as Christine Jorgensen's (who had the first sex change operation) line about "men are wary of me, and I'm wary of the ones who aren't". There's also the description of Coral Browne's acting in the film The Killing of Sister George: "She twiddled with Susannah York's nipple as if trying to find Radio Three."
It's the character actors who steal the show, though, such as Hermione Gingold, who "had an endearing individual approach to life - in New York she was regularly seen rummaging through other people's dustbins. On one occasion she found a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica." Add in the other dozen or so of her ilk, each successively madder than the other, and you're looking at a joyously written, highly entertaining, perfect present. This is a hoot.
Brian Boyd is a freelance journalist and critic
