Audiobook review: This Much Is True, by Miriam Margolyes

The term “national treasure” is often bandied around a bit loosely these days. But make no mistake: at eighty, the actress Miriam’ Margolyes is undeniably worthy of the title. As this audiobook version of her autobiography confirms, she is a funny, sensitive and intelligent woman who has led a rich, eventful and rewarding life.

What is she actually most famous for? Well, as she herself admits, when the final curtain eventually falls, many tributes will begin by mentioning that she played Professor of Herbology, Pomora Sprout in two of the Harry Potter films. It is a small role in a star-studded saga which only came to Miriam as she entered her sixties, but such is the nature of the hugely successful franchise that virtually everyone who appeared in them, be they Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith or Robbie Coltrane, is automatically more famous for that than for anything else almost regardless of how busy or successful their career may otherwise have been. As she is not a fan of the series (she has not read any of the books nor seen any of the films, including either of the ones she is in herself) and does not like science fiction or fantasy, she admits this slightly grudgingly although she remains grateful as ever for the work and for being a small part of a story that means so much to so many people and will doubtless continue to be watched for many decades to come.

She has been astonishingly prolific though working consistently on stage, radio, TV and film since she left Cambridge University nearly sixty years’ ago. The Internet Movie Database credits her with 188 roles and while many of these were bit parts or voice only roles but this doesn’t even touch on the numerous radio, theatre and voiceover performances she has delivered and she discusses many of them here. This is a long book but even she cannot mention everything. In 2006, for example, she appeared as Mrs. Midge In one episode of the French and Saunders sitcom, Jam & Jerusalem and provided voices for the characters, Mrs Ashtrakhan and Rita’s Grandma in the high-profile animated films Happy Feet and Flushed Away. But I don’t think any of these roles are mentioned in this autobiography.

She had a run of 1990s Hollywood success. She was the nurse in Baz Luhmann’s Romeo + Juliet, probably the most successful Shakespeare film adaptation ever made. Oddly, one of her abiding memories of this is how smelly the young star, Leonardo DiCaprio was. She was the voice of Fly, the female sheepdog in both the Babe films. She won a BAFTA for her role as Mrs. Mingott in Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence.

We have all probably seen and heard her in far more things than we realise. She was one of the most high-profile voiceover actresses of the 1980s. She was the voice of the sexy cartoon bunny on the Cadbury’s Caramel adverts (“Take it easy with Cadbury’s Caramel”). She vividly recreates her sexually suggestive vocal performance on one 1970s tobacco advert. She dubbed most of the female voices for the cult 1970s series, Monkey. I personally remember her first from watching the brilliant Blackadder II in which she played Edmund’s puritanical aunt, Lady Whiteadder (a character who, Margolyes relates, seems to have a curious effect on a certain breed of middle-aged man). I also once saw her on stage in a production of She Stoops To Conquer alongside an unlikely combination of Sir Donald Sinden and David Essex.

But the book’s not all about her career. Margolyes talks seriously and honestly about many things. She talks about her parents, her childhood in Oxford, her university days, her being Jewish, her lesbianism, her pain and regret about her experience of ‘coming out’ to her parents and her lifelong unhappiness with her own appearance. As the name of the book suggests, she is always very honest. She acknowledges her successes (she is especially proud of her one-woman show, Dickens’ Women in which she played a huge number of roles) but admits to her failures both major (cheating on her partner of fifty years) and minor (overreacting to a parking ticket or embarrassing herself when meeting the Queen).

Readers should perhaps be warned about her numerous sexual exploits and perhaps still more surprisingly, her eagerness to discuss them. Although a lesbian, a remarkable number of her anecdotes end with the phrase “and then I sucked him off.” This will doubtless offend some readers or listeners and amuse many more.

In fact, you could actually get very drunk playing a Miriam Margoyles Drinking Game imbibing every time the phrase “sucked off” comes up. Although too her credit, you would get drunker still if you downed a shot every time she ends a description of someone she has met during her life with some variation on the phrase “we remain friends and are still in touch to this day” or “we remained friends until they died.” She values friendship highly and has made and remained friends with many people. She says she has nearly 12,000 names in her phone book and clearly relished getting in touch with many of them to help her remember many of the events detailed in this narrative.

This, of course, suggests she is pleasant and easy to work with. It also adds credibility to her testimony against those who she does dislike who she condemns vigorously. She was treated very badly by Glenda Jackson during a union dispute during a disastrous stage production in the 1970s, singles out the late Terry Scott as a truly awful person and is venomous about the blatant sexism displayed by many of the future Goodies and Monty Pythom team at Footlights during the 1960s.

Some people still don’t like her today, of course, for a variety of reasons namely because she is a woman who talks freely about her sexuality, because she is a lesbian, because she holds left-wing views, because she holds left-wing views but has criticized Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Brexit and failure to tackle anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, because she is Jewish and yet has condemned Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians, because she is Jewish full stop, because she is a woman who speaks her mind freely and honestly, because she is an old woman or simply because she is a woman.

This book is not for them. For the rest of us this is a golden opportunity to enjoy a well-told story, which is honest, moving and often very funny about a rich life lived to the full.

Audiobook review: Sláine: The Horned God

Pat Mills' Sláine, the 'Celtic Conan' has been wowing readers of UK sci-fi comic, 2000AD since 1983. The saga was never more vividly realised than when in the late 80s and early 90s when Mills and young artist, Simon Bisley produced the masterful epic, Sláine: The Horned God.
Sadly, as this is an audiobook, inevitably, Bisley's wonderful visuals - the gore of the battles, the beauty of the land of Tir Nan Nog, Sláine's ageing sidekick Ukko and the sight of Sláine going into warp spasm (don't ask) are lost.
This is nevertheless an excellent adaptation which does full justice to the classic comic story.

Audiobook review: The Ballad of Halo Jones Complete Edition

Few stories from the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, 2000AD, are remembered with such affection as Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s mid-80s classic, The Ballad of Halo Jones.

This new audiobook does an excellent job of retelling the adventures of Halo, an ordinary 50th century girl who escapes the restrictions of a depressing teenage existence in vast urban settlement, The Hoop to find work on a space cruiser, the Clara Pandy. As in the original classic comic story, she ultimately becomes embroiled in the affairs of the sinister General Luiz Cannibal and the horrors of the Tarantula Nebula War.

As with the first of the three books adapted here is less accessible than the others, largely because of the futuristic slang spoken by Halo and the other Hoop dwellers is slightly off-putting. There is also a bizarre error here in which one character, Lux Roth Chop, who is clearly supposed to be a child in the story is voiced by a grownup actor.

But, generally this is a first-class production which generally follows the original version very closely. Sheila Atim, in particular, does an excellent job of voicing Halo herself as she grows from being a naive teen into a cynical thirtysomething.

As with Halo herself, this is just out.

Audiobook review: Judge Dredd: America

For well over forty years now, 2000AD comic’s futuristic law enforcer, Judge Joe Dredd has fought a never-ending battle to impose a semblance and order onto the chaotic 22nd century American metropolis of Mega City One.
Yet there has always been a dark undercurrent to the story. The Judges – effectively futuristic policeman who also have the power to determine an arrestee’s guilt and to impose instant sentencing – clearly rule over what is effectively an undemocratic police state with an iron fist.

Rarely was this more obvious than in John Wagner and Colin MacNeil’s beautiful and heart-rending story, America, which first appeared in 2000AD spin-off, Judge Dredd The Megazine, in 1990. Judge Dredd takes only a villainous supporting role in the tale of the tragic life a young woman, America Jara, told from the point of view of her best friend Benny, who clearly loves her. America devotes her life to fighting a hopeless struggle for the values once embodied by her first name. Sadly, we soon learn that in Mega City One, these noble principles no longer apply, the American Dream is already dead.

This is a first-class audiobook dramatization of the comic story with high production values. Shakespeare in Love star, Joseph Fiennes is not an obvious choice for voicing Dredd but Paterson Joseph proves a strong narrator.
Where I do have strong reservations, however, is in the inclusion of several other democracy-related Dredd stories without any explanation or context. Although they are all good stories and are also adapted well here too, they are clearly not directly part of the America story and it was a mistake to lump them all in together here without any introduction or even any chapter headings.

This failing aside, this is a winning audio version of a classic Dredd tale, which has been given added poignancy by subsequent political events in the years since the stories included were first produced.

Audiobook review: Ramble Book: Musings on Childhood, Friendship, Family and 80s Pop Culture

Do you know Adam Buxton? If you don’t, you should.

Long time ‘Buckles’ fans such as myself will have first encountered him on the hugely inventive late night 1990s Channel 4 programme, The Adam and Joe Show, which he hosted with his old schoolfriend, the equally hilarious Joe Cornish, now a film director. In the 2000s, the duo retained their cult status with an excellent radio show on what was then BBC 6 Music while Adam made occasional appearances in films like Stardust and Hot Fuzz. In the second of these, he plays an amateurish West Country reporter who suffers a comically horrific Omen-style death outside a cathedral. In recent years, he has become known for his celebrated podcasts which he records, often in the company of his dog, Rosie, from his home in Norfolk. He has also done many more things in the first fifty years of his life, than my brief summary here suggests. Many of these are mentioned this book.

Due to the current global state of unpleasantness, the release of the actual book has been delayed until September. This is no great tragedy for anyone with the inclination and capacity to listen to this audio version of his autobiography, however, as it’s available now. The book reads very much like an extended version of one of Buxton’s podcasts and which, like that, is nicely broken up by amusing ingenious musical jingles and occasional comments on the text from the reader (who is, of course, Buxton himself).

Fans of The Adam and Joe Show will remember the BaaadDad sequences in which Adam’s father, would make a guest appearance to provide a unique upper middle-class seventy-something’s perspective on the popular music of the day. Typically expressing presumably perfectly genuine outrage at the likes of Firestarter by The Prodigy or Born Slippy by Underworld, these reviews were one of the most popular bits of the show.

In reality, Nigel Buxton, who died in 2015, aged 91, though certainly not an out and out ‘bad dad’ himself, nevertheless seems to have often been a difficult person. His presence looms large in the book. Despite the moderate degree of celebrity he achieved through his son’s show late in life, Buxton the Elder, a onetime writer for the Telegraph seems to have regarded Adam’s obsession with popular culture and pursuit of a comedy career with a degree of disdain, often bordering on contempt. A particular peculiarity of the older Buxton’s personality was his absolute obsession with keeping Adam in private education, very nearly bankrupting himself in the process. At one point, he was reduced to asking for a substantial loan from his friend, John Le Carré to pay for it (the famous author was not forthcoming). Adam – who initially suffered terrible homesickness after being sent away from home to boarding school at the age of nine – had no idea about the financial crisis his father had needlessly created for himself, until many years later.

If Nigel Buxton’s aim was to instil in his son the same sometimes dubious values which he possessed himself, he failed. Adam Buxton is never less than respectful to the memory of his father, throughout this memoir. But his obsession with the trivia and minutiae of popular culture, liberal outlook and a sense of humour, have ensured that he is about as different a man from his father as it’s possible to be.

A sad development since the book was completed has been the death of Adam’s mother which he has spoken movingly about on his podcast.

Perhaps we should be grateful to Adam’s father for his public school obsession. For it was at school that Adam formed his career-defining friendship with Joe Cornish (as well as Louis Theroux).

This is ultimately an often very funny and enjoyable account of Buxton’s formative years with particular focus on the 1980s: the decade which saw him move from childhood to adulthood.

Anyone who remembers the 1970s and 1980s will find much of resonance here: Adam’s discovery of Kraftwerk through surreptitious late night listening to Radio Caroline while at school, details of an explosive adolescent erotic dream about the actress June Whitfield, happy experiences seeing Ghostbusters and less happy experiences watching David Lynch’s Dune.

There are also occasional light hearted interruptions with details of a log of recent arguments Adam has had with his wife, anecdotes about socially awkward experiences Adam has experienced on trains and perhaps a little too much about his obsession with David Bowie.

As the title suggests, Buxton is inclined to ramble here, just as he does during his ‘Ramble Chats,’ when he interviews people on his podcast. But this is an enjoyable read. Adam Buxton is a thoroughly charming man and is always a delight to listen to.

Ramble Book: Musings on Childhood, Friendship, Family and 80s Pop Culture, by Adam Buxton. Audiobook available now. Hardback/Kindle version available: 3rd September 2020. Published by: Mudlark.