The world's worst websites

[Hoogstraten'sSmilingUlcer]

Purple Tentacle wrote:

Alas pike is right... those extracts from Bushell's book are a pisstake.

I am geniunely disappointed, especially now I've made plans to go into Waterstones tomorrow and buy it. Donning dunce cap now........

This is a real line from it, which is quite amusing in a 'how-could-a-professional-writer-write-this-and-not-be-utterly-ashamed-with-themselves' sort of way.

'His eyes were so blue they made the Med seem murky. Everything about him, the way he walked, the way he held himself, said this was a fella who could handle himself.'

[23 Daves]

What's interesting about Bushell, though, is he really does genuinely seem to believe that he's the authentic voice of the working class English bloke.  The joke is, I've only met two people in my entire life who claim to like him.  One was an art student who was almost certainly being ironic or otherwise trying to read more into his work than is actually there (they do that, you know), the other a spoilt forty year old wannabe stand up comic who worked as a manager in an office and lived at home with his Mum.   The former was a bit silly, and the latter once phoned up a friend of mine drunk late at night nearly crying down the phone "NOBODY UNDERSTANDS WHAT RONNIE BARKER HAS DONE FOR THIS COUNTRY!".  

Almost everyone in a pub in Essex where Bushell claims to frequent claims they hate the bastard, and if he 'ever walks in here, he'll know all about it'.  

You've got to wonder who his audience actually is.  Did the circulation figures of the Sun drop rapidly after he left?