Monday, July 16, 2007

Celebrity outhouse interviewing


I can't think of any novel in which sheds and shedlike atmospheres play such a big part as in Lynn Truss's comedy With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed. The (anti?) hero Osborne is a writer for a small gardening magazine and his main contribution is a column called Me And My Shed. Indeed, he's written so many that he's reached the point where they're all blurring into one. Some very funny moments when he's writing his column and interviewing shedowners (journalists will wince with recognition several times). Here's an excerpt from the first chapter:
"He produced his notebook, flipped a few pages and attempted to compose his thoughts. Now, Osborne, old buddy, who have you got for us this week? He typed the words me and my shed at the top of a sheet of paper, and added a colon.

ME AND MY SHED:

A name ought to follow, but for some reason it failed to come. Osborne frowned. Every week he interviewed a famous person about their shed—Me and My Shed: Melvyn Bragg; Me and My Shed: Stirling Moss. He had been doing it for years. In certain professional quarters people still raved about his Me and My Shed: David Essex; it was said that for anyone interested in the art of celebrity outhouse interviewing, it had represented the absolute ‘last word’."

You can read a little more on the author's own site here and the whole of the first chapter here.

2 comments:

  1. not read it but "Me And My Shed" is must be were i got the idea for readersheds from!!! or was that a dream?

    wish I could get hold of some celeb sheddies to interview!

    looks like a good read...

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  2. Aha! Glad to see this essential piece of Shed Literature getting a posting of its own. Are there other novels featuring sheds, I wonder? Maybe a subject crying out for a bit of research . . .

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