MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
Latest editorial
Jeremy Hardy Speaks Volumes
Brilliant comic cuts from a true national treasure
FIERCE ON POLITICS: Jeremy Hardy
[Garry Knight/Creative Commons]
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
THERE is a great big gap in British comedy, especially on radio, where the late Jeremy Hardy used to be and this book of his writing and ad libs goes a little way towards filling it.
Its pages are joyful, caustic, daft and provocative — “I was born on a council estate but once I’d been called Jeremy we had to move” — and the material, edited by his widow Katie Barlow and long-time producer David Tyler, is the kind of tome you can dip into and devour.
Hardy, who died early last year at the age of 57, could be fierce on politics. “Racist journalists ask why we should help asylum-seekers ‘who have done nothing for this country,”' he commented on his long-running radio show Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation.
Similar stories
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
It’s tiring always being viewed as the ‘wrong sort of woman,’ writes JENNA, a woman who has exited the sex industry
With most of recorded history dominated by the voices of men, LYNNE WALSH encourages sisters to read the memoirs of women – and to write their own too
When Cassy’s father fails to connect with his daughter — and misses out on
an evening in the Bitter End — a stranger’s self-mocking charm brings seething resentment.