By Megan Thomas
Comedian Rob Beckett’s memoir (which, by the way, he wrote without a ghostwriter) is subtitled, “Life as a working-class man in a middle-class world”, which paints a pretty clear picture of what you can expect from it, leaving it to me to colour in with a bit more detail.
When it comes to ‘changing’ classes, which almost all working-class people who ‘make it big’ must experience, it’s a lot more complicated than the money in your bank account – especially, in my opinion, in the UK, where money and class are a lot less mutually exclusive than in other countries. As such, Rob Beckett identifies with neither class.
To his friends and family back home, he has left them in the dust. In his middle-class, creative media world, part of his charm and reputation is that of the funny, working-class geezer from South London. Not to mention, owing to his success, he’s able to give his children a very different life to that which he had (and much more aligned with their mother’s upbringing), meaning that even within his family, he is the outsider.
I never felt like Beckett’s story came across as moaning, or that he wasn’t grateful for his success, and I suspect that is in part due to the fact that I listened to this as an audiobook which he narrated, and his tone and authenticity was clear. As you might have expected, it’s also funny and filled with suitably outrageous anecdotes.
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