COPYRIGHT
HarperCollinsEntertainment
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This paperback edition 2006
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsEntertainment 2005
Copyright © Roger Law 2006
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN 9780007182503
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 9780008325497
Version: 2018-08-14
Collaborative writer on this book was Lewis Chester.
‘Between [Roger Law and Lewis Chester], they have garnished Law’s jolly life story with diverting details … Law sounds like he’s having far too much fun in the sun to risk a return to gloomy British satire. But his superb illustrations suggest that, should he ever tire of Bondi Beach, another brilliant career awaits back home in the periodicals that spawned his grotesque yet loveable effigies.’
Independent, William Cook
‘Many glorious illustrations … litter this book … [it] is worth buying just for the twin studies of kangaroos. Not that it isn’t a marvellous read. Still Spitting at Sixty is that rare thing, a ghost-written book that somehow distils its “writer’s” essential flavour … Hazlitt said we applaud satirists not out of love but fear. Impossible, though, to read this book and not love its author. Partly this is because it is so pungently amusing, partly because it is so unsickeningly life-affirming.’
Sunday Times, Christopher Bray
‘This is really a sublime autobiography … [it contains] some of the finest pieces of writing about Australia. Much more evocative than Bill Bryson. And the illustrations are wonderful.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘Highly engaging … a breeze, a pleasure to read, as it leaps from anecdote to anecdote with aplomb and much humour. Like all the best people, Law is a dedicated fan of P.G.Wodehouse, and there are some lovely jokes here, if not the awesomely polished prose of his hero. This is a much more distinctive piece of work than the usual run of showbiz memoirs. And yet there is clearly something going on underneath … great entertainment, and his paintings, which somehow manage to be both bold and delicate, are quite something.’
Daily Mail, Marcus Berkmann
‘Filled with all the lunacy and flair that one would expect from the co-producer and creator of Spitting Image.’
Guardian
‘This entertaining memoir takes the reader behind the scenes at Spitting Image and on to a series of hilarious adventures as a “teenage granddad” in the Outback of Australia.’
Sunday Express
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to Richard Bennett, who is as essential to this sorry tale as Jiminy Cricket is to Pinocchio. Why didn’t I listen?
EPIGRAPH
‘I can only see it going one way, that’s my way. How it’s actually going I have no idea.’
With apologies to Nick Wilshire (boxer)
CHAPTER ONE
THE LIZARD OF OZ
I put my money on a blue-tongued lizard called Eternal Youth, and lost a packet. To be fair, it had legged it bravely in the early stages of the race, but seemed to lose its way around the halfway stage before completely running out of puff. It eventually came in a distant, and dismal, fifth.
My instinctive first thought was that my lizard had been drugged or ‘nobbled’. Such practices were not unheard of in Eulo near Cunnamulla, Queensland, where the Lizard Race ranks as one of the highest events in the annual sporting calendar. But, on reflection, I think that Eternal Youth simply buckled under the weight of my expectations.
It was perhaps not eternal youth I was after (well, too late for that), but it was true that I had come to Australia in a quest for a new lease of life.