I’ve just forced myself to finish “Still Whispering After All These Years”, Bob Harris’ autobiography, on my Kindle. My god he didn’t ‘arf go on. Before I read it, I considered him a vaguely OK bloke who’d had a surprisingly long career in radio and TV. Now having finished the book I find him a strangely dislikeable bloke. A shameless grinning git who’s made a bloody good living out of a calculated mix of sheer persistence and comforting blandness. The early chapters detailing his childhood and initial entry to “the scene” are reasonably interesting but a bit long-winded. The long-windedness continues throughout the book but it quickly becomes an extremely detailed and often repetitious catalogue of every single facet of his not-very-enthralling career and seemingly every single person he’s ever had any dealings of any kind with. I was horrified to realise, at one point, that the book had reached the mid-2000s, I was bored shitless and I was only 75% through the book. It came as a great relief to discover that most of the remainder was an over-extensive index where Mohammed Al-Fayed gets 4 mentions and Frank Zappa gets 3.

Do not buy this book.