Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

Product Information

Today's crossword puzzle clue is a quick one: 1959 novel by Keith Waterhouse featuring the fictional country of Ambrosia. Other regular cast members included Pamela Vezey as Alice, Colin Jeavons as Shadrack, May Warden as Billy's grandmother, and Sally Watts as Barbara. Like a lazy postmen hiding mail in his shed because he can't be bothered to do his rounds, Billy has stashed them all under his bed and embezzled the postage money. They’re supposed to stir up concupiscence, so with one of his unenthusiastic girlfriends he’s continually slipping a pill or two into her tea then hopping about for the next 15 minutes waiting for them to take effect. When I first saw the film in 1961 I was also intrigued by the glimpse it offered of a strange new world - the North of England!

A film which took the grim up north stereotypes that had become the norm in British New Wave cinema and turned them on their head with comedy and the careful use of surrealism. Whenever Billy experiences something unpleasant, such as his parents scolding him or his boss harassing him, he imagines himself to be somewhere else. Married twice, Waterhouse had recently suffered ill health and had been cared for by his second ex-wife, Stella Bingham.But in the mean-time it will do nicely as one more escape hatch designed to diminish the dull dictates of his existence. Whistle Down the Wind is a 1961 British crime drama film directed by Bryan Forbes, adapted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall from the 1958 novel of the same name by Mary Hayley Bell. Billy’s family might as well be aliens living under the same roof, what with everyone speaking a different language - the old man in belligerent Yorkshire dialect, mother in pained martyr and gran in… I am not sure what gran speaks, but she does though, usually at something. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Keith Waterhouse claimed that God had blessed him with the gift of the delayed hangover. This edition marks the novel’s first publication in America in more than fifty years and includes a new introduction by Nick Bentley and a reproduction of the original jacket art by William Belcher.

We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. This may indeed be strange, because Stradhoughton, the fictional Yorkshire backwater where the novel is set could in reality have been close to where I was raised and indeed the city of my birth, Wakefield, is mentioned several times, where it might even be understood to be at some height of cosmopolitan sophistication. On Greece preparing for the Olympicss: "Watching the Greeks make even more of a dog's breakfast of it than we would comes as a tonic for the nation. Three Lancashire farm children discover a bearded fugitive (the Man/Arthur Blakey) hiding in their barn and mistake him for Jesus Christ. Together they wrote the screenplay of Billy Liar, filmed in 1963 with Tom Courtenay as Billy and making a star of Julie Christie.In 2020, Slant magazine considered Billy Liar heir to the innovative cinematography developed by Truffaut and its main character somewhat a precursor to A Clockwork Orange 's Alex DeLarge. I wished I’d written Keith Waterhouse’s first novel; and now, even more, I wish I’d written his second . His boss also asks him to post out some invoices, but he doesn’t do it so he still has them stashed under his bed months later.

When he stopped in May he said that at 80 years old he felt it was time to give up working to deadlines, even though his columns remained – as always – exactly written to length and never lost their edge. It’s 1959, and Billy’s lower-middleclass family wallows in the unchallenging comforts and conformity of dull, mediocre Stradhoughton. She urges him to accompany her to London that evening, and he goes home to pack his bags, only to find his grandmother has fallen ill and been taken to hospital.This distinguishes Billy Liar from another contemporary coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye. His life is divided between fantasy and anxiety (about his family, about his love life (including his multiple fiancées) and about his job (and whether or not his employers will find out about certain. He literally doesn't care either way, is an empty shell going through the motions of acting, a Liar to the core with no real potential.

Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar was published in 1959, and captures brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town. Keith Waterhouse's 1959 novel must have blown like a fresh and impertinent breeze through the staid conventions of British literature. And this dream is, supposedly, on the verge of being fulfilled - comedian Danny Boon has written to Billy offering him a job down in London.

But he was much more than that, he was a chronicler and brilliant observer of late 20th Century life, whose characters became part of our national psyche," he wrote. However, Billy tells everyone that Boon is very interested in his stories and that he will be moving to London very soon. However, Billy shows himself to be happier fantasizing about being a great success than actually taking a risk to make something of himself. Later, at the hotel, we encountered a group of senior police officers and the junior snooker champion of Wales and his manager. Although much of his work was comedy, like many professional humorists, Waterhouse hated people telling him jokes.