And Away

By Megan Thomas

I had (shamefully) only discovered Mortimer when he appeared on Taskmaster, and I loved it. I know people who have been a fan since his double act with Vic Reeves, and they loved it. I’m not sure you even need to have heard of him to love it, so what are you waiting for?

Mortimer’s outlook on life is, as might be expected of a comedian, hilarious and not necessarily what someone would call serious. Even when a large portion of the memoir is spent talking about his father’s death, triple heart bypass surgery and a life spent fighting the demons of depression, there is still an air of whimsy throughout…. In a “don’t sweat the small stuff” kind of way, but without being unrelatable or patronising. This seems to be the case in his most recent creative endeavor, Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. He’s had a life that seems (and in some parts, was) like a compilation of stories from Would I Lie To You?

Mortimer has a gift for storytelling and for finding life’s joys, both small and large. And Away is a wholesome reminder that people have hard lives, if different, and that what we see on the surface is very seldom what’s going on beneath.

I’ll leave you with his number one rule for being a good person: “I’ve always thought that the two most unselfish things you can do in life are to turn up on time and to be quiet around a house when someone else is sleeping. They are not things you will ever be thanked for and that makes them all the more satisfying.”

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