I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf wiggling its eyebrows at me telling me to read it already so last week I complied and have enjoyed it tremendously.

Groucho Marx was apparently born at an early age and was an undereducated boy having left school around his Bar Mitzvah to get a job, according to this book he had to talk his mother into it and so he got a job; he had to sit in the office, hand the boss the mail and answer the phone, occasionally his boss would ring in to ask if there had been any phone calls and with a negative answer so often Marx started to come in late and leave early which got him the sack. Marx went on to a multitude of varied jobs many of which he received the sack fairly early on and it wasn’t until he conceived the idea of going on the stage that he managed to stay the distance for any length of time.

Marx is one of a number of children and the number seems to change with each book. In the movies we saw Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo but there was also Gummo and I think I heard of a girl or two, Zeppo and the girls aren’t mentioned in this book. There are discrepancies between this book and another book by him (Memoirs of a Mangy Lover) written a few years later and also a book by his brother, Harpo, called Harpo Speaks! It makes it challenging to get at the facts.

All three books are well written and show the Marx wit and writing style. Groucho and Me is written very much in the style of Groucho Marx we’ve come to know and love; I do suspect some of the anecdotes have been exaggerated in some manner to make it more enjoyable reading. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty or innocent and so many of them have been changed to Delaney, one story got quite confusing as more than one person was called Delaney. I also wonder how much he had to suppress of himself in order to play Groucho Marx on screen and radio.

According to this book Chico was much more confident than the others so he pushed them to get off Vaudeville and to give Broadway a try, they never looked back and from Broadway they were given movie contracts leading to 13 brilliant and much loved movies. My favourite scene of all is the state room scene in A Night at the Opera, if you haven’t seen it then you most definitely should. The movies are full of brilliant wit, hilarious chase scenes and great music, they transcend all generations.

Marx details how he got involved in the stock market and how things went downhill very quickly during the crash of 1929. He also talks about prohibition. These help position the events in time and would be good reading for anyone looking at the history of those times.

I could write forever about the Marx brothers but this is already long enough. I loved the book despite the discrepancies and it made me love Groucho Marx all the more, definitely one to stay on my shelf.

This is the first book of Tony Martin’s memoirs, it precedes A Nest of Occasionals and there’s one more book to follow called Scarcely Relevant which I plan to buy in ebook next month after I get paid. I could say all the same things about Martin’s background but I won’t repeat myself.

I have a love/hate attitude to this book. The problems I have with it include the bullying that went on in the 1970s which still goes on today. Martin details it quite thoroughly with the name calling and the ‘funny’ jokes at other people’s expense, he goes through how he coped with it, it’s well written but I’m just not comfortable with bullying.

Martin had an ‘interesting’ childhood, I’ve lost track of how many times his parents were married, it might only have been twice each but I got confused somewhere along the way with the step-siblings and with who was living where and when. Step-families are rarely like The Brady Bunch where everyone manages to get along with everyone else most of the time and all the wrinkles are ironed out by the end of the episode, Martin shows us the other side to merged families and a good thing he does. He talks about how co-parenting from the child’s point of view and how sometimes one sibling will go and stay with the other parent, he talks about the fights between the parents of the merged family and how it can get rather supercharged, he even mentions how they would hide outside as far from ground zero as possible and then be careful not to walk through the loungeroom in bare feet for weeks afterwards for fear of getting shards of glass in their feet. There’s no Brady Bunch goodness here.

He also has an interesting, and apparently fairly common, medical problem – Haemochronmatosis. It’s apparently a problem with iron, not like mine where I have too little but the total opposite where he has too much and has to have some taken out regularly in order to keep healthy. The chapter where he’s diagnosed and has the first couple of years of bloodletting is incredibly funny and is almost exactly the way I deal with my health problems when I’m seeing a doctor i.e. make jokes about it. There is a follow up to this in A Nest of Occasionals where he talks about giving blood every two months, a little more often than you’re allowed.

On the whole I loved this book, it gives a generous and funny insight into his world. How he writes about his landladies and landlords is just hilarious. I would definitely recommend it but be careful as there is the odd swear word.

I’m fond of a good autobiography or three, I generally read about people who I’ve seen in the public and I feel some connection with or some interest in their story, there is the odd one I’ll read when the description on the back looks interesting. Semi-Detached is in the ‘I have some interest in their story’ category.

Griff Rhys Jones is a writer, actor, comedian of the Welsh persuasion. I first remember seeing him on TV on the Alas Smith and Jones series, a spoof on Alias Smith and Jones, and most recently in the Three Men in a Boat series; the first of which recreated the book by Jerome K. Jerome. He’s one of my favourite comedians and I have great regard for his work.

Upon reading this book it turns out he was at school with the late, great Douglas Adams and it was Adams who got him his first part on stage at College. Reading more about him online it appears he’s been President or Vice President of many different organisations but very little of this comes through in the book. Rhys Jones talks much more about his family, their holidays and how his father always got his own way on these holidays. He talks about travels to and from school and the friends he made, about the areas he lived in and how he fitted in…or not.

The holidays parts are interesting as you can see how he inherited his love of sailing, I’m wanting to watch the Three Men in a Boat series again so I can see more clearly how comfortable he is in a boat and how much like his father he is. Mr Rhys Jones was apparently very much in command when in a boat, his word was law and he constantly told people what to do despite them knowing very well what to do and this comes through in the series his travelling companions make jokes about it constantly.

Rhys Jones gives many anecdotes about being invited back to various places to make presentations, to open new buildings or to just give speeches and he doesn’t pull his punches about his nerves telling us just how focussed he is on getting to the point of getting up in front of people and when something comes in the way he’s taken aback.

This is nicely written, blending the old stories with the new and showing us how scenery and towns can change as well as memories when we travel back through them. I loved how patient he was with his mother driving back through places he’d grown up with her in the back of the car and not able to hear the discussion in the front seat so well.