Jo is depressed and wants a new life. Vanessa and Dick need a nanny for their children. The rest of the book is mostly about how wonderful Jo is, but I don’t actually like her very much.
Jo is supposed to be a very kind person, yet she spends a lot of time looking down on Vanessa and Dick and pitying them for having such a bad relationship. I actually think Vanessa and Dick are a wonderful couple who have a great relationship. It’s true that their relationship isn’t all that strong when Jo comes into their lives, but their scenes together still have a lot of warmth and humour, and I felt from the start that they would work out their problems with or without Jo’s help.
Jo is whiny and miserable, and a total hypocrite. Melissa Nathan clearly believes she’s a lovely girl who’s had a terrible life and deserves a bit of love and sympathy. And she probably does, but it’s very difficult to like a character when the author is trying to ram it down your throat how wonderful and special she is and how much everybody loves her. I kind of feel like I don’t want to waste my sympathy on her. She gets plenty from everyone else, and I was far more worried about Vanessa and Dick, who are having a much more difficult time than Jo, and their insecure but very intelligent daughter Cassandra, who is being bullied at school.
Jo isn’t even particularly good at her job. Okay, she is very depressed, which would account for some of it, but I still think she was very lucky not to get sacked. If Vanessa and Dick hadn’t had so much trouble finding a nanny; if every man Jo laid eyes on didn’t have a habit of falling in love with her on the spot (why?), she could have got herself into serious trouble. The main reason she doesn’t is because policemen Gerry and Nick are even worse at their job than she is at hers.
Jo does have a horrible shock towards the end, and you do feel for her – but there’s just one problem. Jo’s own behaviour is very similar to the behaviour of the person who hurt her. Maybe she hasn’t been behaving that way for as long, or in so serious a manner, but she is far from an innocent victim. The only other characters I don’t like are Josh, Dick’s son and one of Jo’s love interests, and her best friend Sheila. I can’t stand Jo, but the way Josh treats her at first is still really awful. The only time his treatment of Jo seemed reasonable was when he mentioned hearing her having sex with her boyfriend Shaun. Josh didn’t put it in the most tactful way, but I couldn’t get over the fact she’d do it in her employer’s house. And I don’t even remember her asking if he could stay the night. I think that’s really disrespectful.
The Nanny does have some great moments. Nathan has created some wonderful characters, and many of her scenes are original and funny. Without Jo, I’m sure I’d have loved the book. There is quite enough going on for Vanessa, Dick and their children without some snobby, incompetent Mary Poppins wannabe showing up. There are a lot of fart and poo jokes, which I really enjoyed (although I don’t know what real grown-ups would think), and all the characters except one (I think you know which one) are interesting and believable. I really enjoyed the all the subplots, particularly Cassandra’s and Vanessa‘s/Dick’s, and the way they all fitted together. It was good to read a book that focused on the whole family, not just the adults, and Nathan gave the children humour and intelligence, and made sure they weren’t nauseatingly cute.
Sunday 13 July 2008
Saturday 5 July 2008
Dead Famous (Ben Elton)*****
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Fourteen people enter a house so small that a family of four would probably be crowded. They are stirred up to the point where they have trouble controlling themselves, yet still they try to control those around them. Sooner or later, someone was going to get murdered.
Dead Famous opens with a detective at work, trawling through the hundreds of hours of footage of Peeping Tom, a fictional Big Brother. He watches the housemates and despises the housemates, and tries to work out who is the murderer.
As for the readers, we’re probably more concerned about who is the victim. You’re going to be a very long way into the book before you find out!
But this book isn’t slow. There’s so much going on, the murder can wait. Ben Elton has created a group of characters who could easily be interesting members of a real Big Brother household. It doesn’t have the a-laugh-a-paragraph quality of Elton’s X Factor satire, Chart Throb, but the much smaller cast of characters does allow Elton to go into a bit more depth with their personalities. The Big Brother phenomenon was fairly new when the book was published, but Elton has an instinctive understanding of what sort of people might be put into the house.
Dead Famous is a comedy, and a very good one, but the scenes with the detective are much more serious, and not unlike a detective in a more typical crime novel. As I love the comedy genre but am less keen on serious crime fiction, I was more interested in the Big Brother side than in the detective side, and that could be a problem for a lot of readers who are interested in the comedy side. And, while it is certainly an ingenious idea for a murder mystery, there is probably too much Big Brother-style inanity going on to keep a typical crime fan interested. But Elton nevertheless does an excellent job of merging the two genres – it would be difficult to imagine how it could be done better.
Although the earlier series of Big Brother did not have a particular predilection for unusual names and nicknames (well, apart from Bubble), Elton has provided us with plenty – Woggle, Dervla, Moon and Hamish are among the inmates I think the only names that have also been used by a real-life Big Brother housemate are David, who made a very brief appearance during Big Brother 8, and Jason from Big Brother 5, although is the fictional Jason is known as Jazz. (He’s nothing like Jazz in How to Kill Your Husband. He is a much nicer person, although I suppose that’s not much of a compliment.) Then we have Gazzer the Geezer – could he be the inspiration for the real-life Sezer the Geezer? They both say some adorably stupid things, although in Gazzer’s case this is because he actually is stupid - Sezer’s got a faulty connection between his brain and his mouth, but his brain is in there somewhere.
One thing that really bothered me was the way the housemates are viewed by the public. Elton only acknowledges the housemates in the first two series of Big Brother, and series 1 and 2 were quite different from the more recent shows. So Elton can’t really be blamed for not knowing the current trends But, in order for the book to work, you do have to accept that it is possible for thick, tarty Kelly to be not the subject of ‘get her out’ chants but the second favourite to win. You have to believe that isolated older gay female Sally could escape nomination for several weeks in a house where everyone gets on well for the most part. Even if friendly Layla’s controlling streak was recognised as early as Week One (I thought she was lovely), you’d be more likely to go for the older and quieter people. Peeping Tom is technically not Big Brother, so there’s no reason why things shouldn’t be a little bit different, and the producers can probably turn the housemates into anything they want to with a bit of ingenuity in the editing. But it wasn’t always easy to put aside my expectations.
Dead Famous opens with a detective at work, trawling through the hundreds of hours of footage of Peeping Tom, a fictional Big Brother. He watches the housemates and despises the housemates, and tries to work out who is the murderer.
As for the readers, we’re probably more concerned about who is the victim. You’re going to be a very long way into the book before you find out!
But this book isn’t slow. There’s so much going on, the murder can wait. Ben Elton has created a group of characters who could easily be interesting members of a real Big Brother household. It doesn’t have the a-laugh-a-paragraph quality of Elton’s X Factor satire, Chart Throb, but the much smaller cast of characters does allow Elton to go into a bit more depth with their personalities. The Big Brother phenomenon was fairly new when the book was published, but Elton has an instinctive understanding of what sort of people might be put into the house.
Dead Famous is a comedy, and a very good one, but the scenes with the detective are much more serious, and not unlike a detective in a more typical crime novel. As I love the comedy genre but am less keen on serious crime fiction, I was more interested in the Big Brother side than in the detective side, and that could be a problem for a lot of readers who are interested in the comedy side. And, while it is certainly an ingenious idea for a murder mystery, there is probably too much Big Brother-style inanity going on to keep a typical crime fan interested. But Elton nevertheless does an excellent job of merging the two genres – it would be difficult to imagine how it could be done better.
Although the earlier series of Big Brother did not have a particular predilection for unusual names and nicknames (well, apart from Bubble), Elton has provided us with plenty – Woggle, Dervla, Moon and Hamish are among the inmates I think the only names that have also been used by a real-life Big Brother housemate are David, who made a very brief appearance during Big Brother 8, and Jason from Big Brother 5, although is the fictional Jason is known as Jazz. (He’s nothing like Jazz in How to Kill Your Husband. He is a much nicer person, although I suppose that’s not much of a compliment.) Then we have Gazzer the Geezer – could he be the inspiration for the real-life Sezer the Geezer? They both say some adorably stupid things, although in Gazzer’s case this is because he actually is stupid - Sezer’s got a faulty connection between his brain and his mouth, but his brain is in there somewhere.
One thing that really bothered me was the way the housemates are viewed by the public. Elton only acknowledges the housemates in the first two series of Big Brother, and series 1 and 2 were quite different from the more recent shows. So Elton can’t really be blamed for not knowing the current trends But, in order for the book to work, you do have to accept that it is possible for thick, tarty Kelly to be not the subject of ‘get her out’ chants but the second favourite to win. You have to believe that isolated older gay female Sally could escape nomination for several weeks in a house where everyone gets on well for the most part. Even if friendly Layla’s controlling streak was recognised as early as Week One (I thought she was lovely), you’d be more likely to go for the older and quieter people. Peeping Tom is technically not Big Brother, so there’s no reason why things shouldn’t be a little bit different, and the producers can probably turn the housemates into anything they want to with a bit of ingenuity in the editing. But it wasn’t always easy to put aside my expectations.
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