Spare a thought for our lit critter. While you were out photocopying your gluteus maximus at the office party and waking the neighbours with your annual 3AM rendition of Mistletoe and Whine, she was filing her pick of this year's celebrity autobiographies by payphone from Holloway's C wing.
"I thought she was out," we hear you cry. And so she was, but a combination of freak events (a botched arson attack on the newly-opened Piers Morgan Wing at the Bodleian Library and a food fight at the Booker Prize ceremony, since you ask) saw her back up before the beak within a fortnight, and sent down to see out the rest of her sentence for aggravated plagiarism a day later.
Let's face facts. There's no escaping it. Christmas shopping is a torment alleviated only by the certain knowledge that, as the fateful day approaches, things can only get worse.
Allow me to lighten your Yuletide burden a little and, who knows, save you a little time, by sharing with you my top autobiographies of 2006....
Jodie Marsh-Warbler -
Hang on! Don't Go! Something's Bound to Happen Soon! (Bloke Publishing).
Jodie tells the heart-warming tale of her rise from exotic
danseuse to star of
I'm a Celebrity, Get Me a Breezer and a Bag of Pork Scratchings as only Jodie can, in halting, monosyllabic estuary English. Other reviewers have been rather unkind about this book. One was moved to describe it as "a work of stupefying banality".
Frankly, they are missing the point. A cheque is a cheque, however badly written.
Kerry Kantona -
Too Much Egg Fu Yung (Random Violence)
We are told that Kerry's earliest memory is of her mother, distraught that her only child is a girl, insisting on calling her Erik and dressing her as a French onion seller. An adolescence of gender-confusion and joyriding ensues, relieved only by her weekly visits to the Madd Skillz! School of Soccer. It is here, under the expert tutelage of Frank Pratt, who famously kept a clean sheet in the 1978 Bejam Cup Final while undergoing an appendectomy, that she develops the death blow that will make her a household name. I defy anyone to stem the tears as she describes the night she decapitated an intrusive paparazzo with a flying kung fu kick in the Watford Hilton car park.
A book to move even the most stubborn bowels.
Richard Branflakes -
Executive Relief (Urging Books)
Branflakes' humble beginnings at top public school, Stowaway, were never going to impede his progress to the top of the greasy pole that is getting your face in the papers whatever the cost. Britain's zaniest entrepreneur (and my former boss at Mental! TV (Ed)) lays bare his life in the cut-throat world of balloons and fizzy pop.
Barry Coal-Merchant (with Steve Menace) -
Ignored to Death, Hustling, Moaning and the Farce that was Macedonia (Headcase Publishing)
Barry, the self-styled "best left back in Stepney" (best left back in the changing room (Ed)), was first catapulted to media stardom when a particularly bad case of the sniffles at a romantic dinner for 500 with pop star main squeeze, Sheryl Weedy, prompted journalists to dub him "the wizard of the dribble". Since that night he has never looked back. He has also never looked any good at football but that, as they say, is another story,
and another unrecouped £250,000 advance.One of life's victims, Barry has had to overcome many obstacles, notably a poverty-stricken two years at Woolwich Wanderers, when he found himself struggling to get by on a derisory
£25,000 a week. His subsequent transfer to Brompton Cemetery Racketeers; the clandestine meetings with club officials in a Leicester Square superloo, the breakneck 10-mile-an-hour car chase across Battersea Bridge, is also covered in mind-numbing detail.
This book, which is written entirely in East End street slang, is a breathless roller-coaster ride through the humdrum career of a dedicated and relentless self-publicist, a celebration of blandness and irrelevance.
Buy it today! (it says here)
Kenneth More -
More or Less (Coronet reissue)
Well honestly! You'd think a chap might have the decency actually to accomplish something in life before committing his memoirs to print. A long and successful career, perhaps, or a lionhearted but ultimately hopeless struggle with some wasting disease?
Shameless. A barefaced cash-in.
Jayne Austin-Allegro is innocent. It was a fit up.
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