There can be few challenges more daunting for the assiduous reviewer than a pile of Christmas ‘gift’ books sitting on his desk exuding yuletide jollity. But this year’s aren’t bad at all. Some are serious works of quasi-academic research, others are tooth-pullingly funny and one or two are utterly bizarre.
For sheer magnificent pointlessness, you should look no further than Great British Pub Dogs by Abbie Lucas and Paul Fleckney (Robinson, £12.99). Lucas (a photographer) and Fleckney (a journalist) have, for no doubt pressing reasons of their own, roamed the nation to identify the ‘wonderful variety’ of Britain’s pub-
dwelling dogs. Oh, and one pig, Frances Bacon. One pub had three Jack Russells, another had four red setters, and a third had a bulldog that spun like a ballerina. Sadly, one or two of the dogs photographed have since died, and several pubs have closed, so this is, in its strange way, a moment captured in time. It certainly has an elegiac quality that may not have been entirely intentional.
Alexei Sayle once starred in a radio sitcom I wrote, and needless to say I was too shy to go up and engage him in conversation in the pub afterwards, where he sat looking every bit as scary as his stage persona. Chucked off the telly in the 1990s, he wrote two excellent books of short stories and three novels, but none of them sold that well — an appalling injustice. So he’s back on the stand-up, and Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar (Bloomsbury, £9.99) is essentially a version of his recent Radio 4 show. It’s only 80 pages long, but it’s wonderful stuff: discursive, daft, alternately angry and almost preter-naturally calm, this is comic riffing of the highest quality.
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